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Comment by tdees40 | Hacker News Reader

$65/week seems like a remarkable amount of money for this. I have a wife, and a kid, so that's $10K a year to go full Soylent. (I'm not really planning on this, of course, but that's the idea, right?)

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If you only "eat" Soylent, you're doing $9.29-ish a day. At 2.5 meals a day (breakfast is usually pretty cheap, so I count it at half), $3.71 a meal is not bad. If you do a lot of scratch cooking you may be spending less, depending on how fancy. It's about the same as other prepared foods (frozen dinners, etc.) If you eat out much, it's way less. Many people pay more than $65 for a single meal out.

I'd imagine it's similar to or cheaper than most people's food expenditures. If they actually can make it significantly cheaper, it could be a big deal.

I suppose sending it all to one place in big chunks makes it seem scarier, price-wise, which could be a problem for them. Food expenditures usually dribble out. They may want emulate that in their sales model, at least initially (weekly recurring transactions, or something.)

$65/week for 3 meals a day, 21 meals a week?

You're down to $3 a meal. Unless you're eating fast food or nothing but pasta... good luck finding another way to get to $3/meal.

[edit- Important clarification: I'm talking about a nutritionally complete, paleo-ish diet of healthy foods (which is what this is targeting to replace).

Of course you can eat for less than $3/meal, but you start to include less healthy things like chips, breads, pastas, etc. This is not the meal Soylent is intended to replace.]

www.budgetbytes.com

Everything under $2/meal.

While it is definitely possible to go below $3/meal (perhaps even $1/meal if you are willing to subsist on ramen and multivitamins), it is very likely that GP already spends much more than that - except he never did the math.

Morning meal: granola or oatmeal (cost: $0.25-0.50 per person).

Afternoon meal: sandwich, maybe bag of chips ($1.00-2.00 per person).

Evening meal: meat, vegetables, carb ($2.00-3.00 per person).

I guess if you compare it to eating out it's pretty cheap, but if you compare it to cooking (although there isn't much cooking in the mealplan above, really just dinner), it looks pretty pricey.

how are you making a sandwich for < $2.00? I must be doing something wrong.

Bread + protein (peanut butter, lunch meat, etc.) + (possibly some vegetables, i.e. lettuce, tomato) is pretty easy to get under $2.00.

$3.00 per person. That's $12.00 for a family of four. So let's compare. Last night I made for dinner: 1) 4-pack of boneless pork chops, about $5.00 2) 1 cup (2 cups cooked) yellow rice (rice with some seasonings) -- less that 50 cents 3) A couple potatoes sliced up. About 50 cents worth of potatoes (got the 10 lb bag for 5 bucks)

Browned the meat, put the rice in a skillet, cut up meat and put it on top, put potato slices on top of that, covered and baked for 45 minutes. Total prep time, 5 minutes, cost about 6 bucks. Feeds family of four, and had leftovers.

Some other recipes include things like a ham and noodles w/ cheese casserole (egg noodles, and a ham steak cut up on top), for around $6 to $7 or so; beef stew -- $4 to $6 for the stew meat, plus $1 - $2 for a bag of frozen mixed veggies and a couple potatoes; and variations on chicken fried rice, and even fajitas are all less than $10 a meal. Actually, the fajitas can go up to $15 if you get beef instead of chicken. And these all feed a family.

I wonder why nobody ever counts the cost of the electricity/gas they used when they talk about how cheap they were able to cook a meal.

For the same reason they don't count the cost of refrigeration of soylent

Soylent does not require refrigeration.

An earlier commenter mentioned that he/she found it unpalatable unless it was cold

If we are talking about refrigerating the left overs then that would be after the fact. Lots of meals that people cook will need to be refrigerated if there is left overs. I think that is a wash. The Soylent itself does not require refrigeration.

No one talks about it because the cost is negligible. Running a 1.5kW stovetop full blast for an hour costs 19 cents at the average electricity price in the US.

So costs get included when they reach a level somewhere greater than 19 cents but less that 50 cents. Got it. Thanks.

Given that he wouldn't have been running it for anywhere near an hour, nor at full blast, it's not 19 cents either.

Do you pay for shipping for Soylent? Because that's already going to cost more than cooking multiple meals.

You may have missed the part where he said after browning the meat he baked it for 40 minutes. That is pretty near an hour. But I can't say what level it was being run for that near hour. And shipping is included in my Soylent order.

I don't really understand the downvotes. The person that talked about the meal they cooked listed items that were "less than 50 cents" as being important enough to list the cost of. However it seems that 19 cents is not important enough to list the cost of. Am I missing something that makes my statement factually incorrect and worthy of a downvote? or do people just not like the facts?

This is interesting - are we sticking to $3 per meal, or $65 per week? Because bulk buying rice and grains and pulses, tins, stocks, spices, etc helps a lot. You then buy fruit and veg daily / weekly. You use meat that can be turned into several meals - buy a chicken and roast it. Use the left overs for sandwiches. Boil the carcass for soup.

($65 per week is £40 per week. That's doable.)

Only if Time, Gas, and Electricity are free.

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