(Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't worry so much about middlebrow dismissals floating to the top of HN threads. They probably do have some predictive value.)
I guess... that's not really all that much of an objection, from a business perspective. With all this hype, I'd say it has a reasonable chance of making money. It does seem to be marketed well, and it's timed right
But, I think most of the 'middlebrow dismissals' are more a response to the hype. I mean, meal-replacement shakes are an old product; certainly at first glance, if you dismiss the fantastic claims about soylent, like the idea that you can eat it and nothing else, it looks a lot like any other meal-replacement shake packaged for a particular market. The problem is that the group they are targeting, generally speaking, identifies as more skeptical than most, and they are using the traditional snake-oil style pitch that you normally use to get a product off the ground. On an emotional level, I (and I think many in their target demographic) find that pretty offensive[1]. I think that negative emotional response to obvious hype is the core of the resistance you see here.
[1]or rather, responding positively to something sold using overly-enthusiastic sales techniques would... conflict with my self-image.
*i'm not sure what you mean by support, but I'll take it as 'pay attention' or 'not dismiss.'
Frankly, if they were doing something other than food, it probably wouldn't be an issue either. They are playing with people's health and wellbeing.
The reason I hate Soylent is, as several other people mention in this thread, the over-blown claims made in their crowd-funding drive.
Before any work with nutritionists or dietitians the Soylent team were claiming:
> "You can finally join the easy, healthy, and affordable future of nutrition."
> "What if you never had to worry about food again?"
> "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you."
> "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health,"
> "By taking years to spoil"
> "there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet."
Some of these are just enthusiastic US marketing. I'm in the UK where we have stricter rules for advertising, so there's some cultural clash there.
But some of them are sleazy and not truthy.
That bad-feeling is retained by many people, even though the Soylent team are now working with real food scientists and being more careful with the claims.
As the word is used on The Colbert Report, "truthy" is somewhat sleazy. It means something that sounds like it's true, but which isn't necessarily based on facts.
>Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.
Not just easy and healthy. No. Perfectly optimized... Automatically puts you at an optimal weight They've toned down the language since saying this, but I think anyone has good reason to be upset over such claims.
Tim Ferriss gave a platform to Soylent on his blog recently, which is one of the best things you can have happen for your product: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2012/01/11/the-t... Rhinehart wasn't very grateful, simply because Ferriss showed some healthy skepticism. Here's the whole event:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2013/08/20/soylent/
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=874
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/9684046788/
One of the last things Ferriss says? I don't want you to fail and explicitly stated otherwise in my piece... That mimics the same attitude a lot of us here have.
Being skeptical of bogus claims isn't the same thing as dismissing something. Or calling it a toy. That accusation is a dismissal of reasonable skepticism.
I'm neither For/Against Soylent, but after reading that I have a fairly negative view on Rhinehart.
As an extra: His response to 1-size-fits-all is laughable, is he forgetting about the 1000s of eating issues people have (gluten, lactose, allergies, diabetes)... Sorry ranting now.
Nope, all fair points.
The worry with soylent or other food replacement is that it could outright harm you. Pfizer was developing Torcetrapib as a successor to multi-billion dollar Lipitor and it was on in Phase III that it was found to have adverse effect. It took 16 years of development, and close to $1B expense before the side-effects were discovered.
The soylent effort is great but if there are any health issues, they may come to the surface much later.
I'm fine with the idea of meal replacements, but:
1) I think they already exist. They just aren't marketed to trendy 20-somethings. (This is what Soylent does well and why, I assume, they're getting investment. The actual product can be completely reformulated until it comes reasonably close to being a good meal replacement: It's the brand that's become valuable.)
2) The Soylent team sounded like such snake-oil salesmen out of the gate that they simply don't have much credibility, as far as I'm concerned. With all of the made-up benefits they touted at the start, now they have to dig themselves out a deep pit of bullshit to actually demonstrate the value of their product.
It's important that we don't treat this kind of food product like a toy. Which is why it's important to be critical of unsupported claims. (And critical of supported claims, as well.) Especially those made by young people with no particular background in the field they're purporting to be experts in. Food is not a toy. It's not Tumblr. It's not Zynga. It's something we require to survive.
Remember supersize me, that guy started having liver problems from eating McDonalds... Yet nothing changes and McDonalds keeps selling crap.
Food is a toy, and Soylent are very far down the scale of "bad food products I can buy"
On the other hand... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Head
So does it concern you that in McDonalds ads there are always attractive slim people, when in fact at most stores you see average looking obese people?
Are we arguing truth in advertising? Or Danger in food products?
Where 'the hype' includes claims of total meal replacement over long periods of time.. yes.
I don't think many, if any, people are concerned that this stuff is literally toxic. The concern is what will happen if you use it as advertised: constantly, exclusively, for extended periods of time.
People eating McDonalds for every meal every day of the week is troubling, I don't think anybody actually suggests you do that. McDonalds certainly doesn't suggest that you do that, though I sometimes feel that many people wish they did suggest you do that so that McDonalds would be easier to flay alive. Being appalled by McDonalds is an international sport after all...
There really isn't that much of a problem with eating a greasy deep-fried cheeseburger once in a while, and there isn't a problem with skipping a meal or two and having a shake instead. That isn't what concerns me, that isn't what seems to concern DanBC ("I think that's the worrying thing about Soylent. I really wish they'd kept it experimental, or pushed it as suitable for daily use but not all meals, or some such."), and that isn't what I see concerning other people in this thread. The literal product, the substance Solyent, is almost certainly perfectly fine to consume. So are cheeseburgers.
I thought part of the problem was that McDonalds /did/ suggest you /could/ do that, without any ill-effects - that their meals were healthy and you could eat breakfast, lunch and dinner there without a problem.
On the other hand, soylent is making the claim that it's healthy to use soylent as a complete replacement for food. Thus, the standards are much higher in terms of truth in marketing.
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/food_quality/nutrition_c...
There's no mention of food from other places, and the final paragraph ("Variety keeps things interesting") certainly implies you could eat there daily without problem, to the exclusion of other food sources.
No, because I've already dismissed McDonald's menu as not having any relevance to anything I care about.
EDIT: OTOH, were people promoting McDonald's new menu items as the solution to real problems (both personal and global), I'd react with the same kind of skepticism as I do to Soylent's claims.
Mcdonalds on the other hand never market their food as a complete meal replacement solution. In fact, here in the uk, they're very careful to point out you still need a healthy balanced diet (admittedly due to regulations, but still... They do it, Soylent don't)
If this new menu item is intended to be eaten full-time to the exclusion of everything else: yes.
If Soylent's angle was "running late? don't have time? give Soylent a go!" I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. The claim that bothers people is that it obviates the need for any other food.
Not all food is super-healthy, and that's fine. I like tasty food that's not particularly good for me sometimes.
This is not what Soylent claims to be. It claims to be something you can replace almost all of your food intake with and remain healthy.
And prolonged exposure to anything. I mean anything will cause harm to your body. Its not just McDonalds.
Soylent is a bit like a drug company releasing a new drug.
Do you think it's possible people are taking food too seriously?
Empirically, Soylent has been on the market without causing any problems for a few months. What if it doesn't cause problems for a few years?
I'm interested to understand why people choose food to get so passionate about. When a new source control system comes out, people don't get so heated. Why for a food company?
- Food is a major component of identity. It conveys things about your values and belief systems. Thus, like other identity factors (race, religion, political position, sexual orientation, socio-economic class), when this is challenged, some people are particularly sensitive and respond very defensively.
- As food choices are widely accepted to be a major factor in overall health (and thus, susceptibility to serious illness, life-expectancy, etc), it's natural for there to be a significant amount of fear behind people's positions in the discussion. I.e., when someone says "this diet will give you a greater chance of positive health outcomes than the one you currently follow", that can be frightening to people who harbour fears - conscious or subconscious - about their health and their expected lifespan.
The science will come around in time. But the idea that this could eventually make nutrition available to people who wouldn't otherwise eat is amazing.
The idea is sound, even though it's nothing new, and I make use of something similar (Ensure) daily. The critics of Soylent mainly criticize the outrageous claims made based on an inconclusive experiment of N=1, which is an amateur way of proposing solutions to health related issues to being with.
Considering how they raised their money now, I won't touch it even if they get an FDA seal of approval.
Now, the FDA process may be inefficient or unnecessarily expensive, but long term clinical trials are not something that we should be eager to dispose of.
I love the idea of Soylent and meal replacements in general. The critique I had for it was that everywhere I looked for the recipe, I saw references to maltodextrin. I don't want to fill my diet with maltodextrin instead of whole weat bread/oats. I hope in the future there are varieties where I can have more control over the carb source I consume a lot of in my daily meals.
One of the problems of Soylent is the need for water. About one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. Problems with water cause very many infant deaths.
It's exciting seeing this get some awareness in tech culture. Maybe people can design and develop easier cheaper better methods of water purification or desalination; or cooking; or whatever.
You can imagine that the cost of the product from this huge NGO is going to have been driven down as far as possible.
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition
http://www.irinnews.org/report/83124/malawi-cheaper-recipe-f...
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...
Here's the WFP in a Syrian camp for refuges http://youtu.be/Ej0vAUsn_o8
About 1 in 8 people are chronically hungry https://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/world-food-day-wfp-say...
Here's some nice feel good photos of children getting school meals. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2013/j...
Why does Soylent need water? Could the same ingredients be prepared as a Soylent power bar?
That is a crowded product market, but Soylent might have an interesting pitch. A cashier at Trader Joe's told me that power bars were the store's best selling items.
Given that the cheapest DIY soylent appear to be primarily based traditional staples like rice, oats, peas, soy, and flax seeds, it doesn't seem very likely to be cheaper. The initial price for the official one is $9/day, while the cost of the cheapest DIY based on traditional foods is $2/day.
Who are these destitute people in such a hurry? WTF
It's practical to do certain stuff with Soylent that's a little more difficult with traditional food. With the appropriate containers, I can, for example, very easily "package" a week's worth of breakfast and lunch. The only operation involved is measuring dry powders and cleanup is very minimal in comparison to traditional cooking. I can do the same thing with ordinary cooked meals, containers, and a freezer, but that's quite a bit more involved.
Are HN users going to get a "brow height" indicator sometime?
However, in this case we're "playing" with human health, and the good/bad effects of Soylent can take years to be clear.
I have the feeling that Soylent, or this particular area of business, is going to be huge in the coming years. Not surprisingly, A16Z has invested in it :)