People that cannot produce a nutritous tasty meal for under 3 dollars within a few minutes need to take a cooking class, not get fed brown powder.
-shrug- Assuming the brown powder thing works out, why would I want to? It's not like I've ever got much pleasure from eating.
I've been to restaurants that are supposedly decent, and I don't think there's anything off about my cooking - others seem to find it palatable enough, (though whether they'd tell me or not if they didn't is questionable.) I've tried cooking with expensive ingredients and cheap ingredients - and there's a difference in texture but not really much in the taste.
It's not like I can't recognise tastes but the response is just, 'Meh. Oh, yeah it's food flavoured like [whatever]. That stuff you eat so you don't die.'
Take standard supermarket vegetables: nothing special there. Know someone who grows them themselves? Try them. Taste the difference? Suddenly vegetables are worth eating again.
Take a bad dessert: it's got all the right ingredients, but it tastes meh. You've just ingested half your daily calories eating meh. Now try a good dessert: omg how did they do this.
That's the difference.
A lot of them seem to be a few hundred k-calories a serving, and even if you had three a day that's still not going to push you up to anywhere near the 2000 or so you need. I'm not sure what the effects of taking multiples of your recommended vitamin intakes for them would be either, since a fair few of them claim to provide 100% of your RDA per serving.
Basically, I don't know enough yet. (Google is fairly unhelpful, throwing out shakes to lose weight rather than as realistic meal substitutes.) But it's an area I'm looking into.
Food spoilage can be an issue too. I can't imagine how how much food has been thrown into the garbage because it looked untasty.