How I Ate No Food for 30 Days | Hacker News Reader

How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

motherboard.vice.com

213 pointshoov287 comments

EDIT: Unbelievable. Both the title and the link to the article I commented on have been swapped from the PandoDaily article (http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/12/vice-investigates-soylent-f...) to the Vice article which PandoDaily referred to, but that tries to give it a positive spin.

This goes well beyond whatever policy pg was trying to defend recently. This is deeply manipulative.

---

It looks a scam, it sounds like a scam, it's marketed like a scam and now it apparently is being produced like any other scam.

So how long until we finally draw the obvious conclusion?

Just because some notable VC's gambled on it doesn't make it any more credible. In fact, there is pretty much zero evidence in the credible column.

It certainly isn't a scam. However, I went to an engineering school, and have met Food Engineers.

Food Engineering is a difficult branch of chemical engineering. You've got regulations, you've got people's lives at stake. The Soylent guys just went at it like a hacker: because thats what they are. They're taking the "startup culture" and trying to apply it to food.

And that is incredibly dangerous. Anyone who has any connection at all to the food industry knows that PEOPLE DIE IF YOU MESS THIS UP. This is NOT a "hackathon", and a SINGLE mistake can accidentally kill someone.

The food industry as a whole is one big hack, even with it's fancy regulations and bureaucracy. People are dying constantly due to the failures of the industry. It is nice to see fresh ideas.

The maritime industry as a whole is one big hack, even with it's fancy regulations and bureaucracy. People are dying constantly due to the failures of the industry. It is nice to see fresh ideas.

That's why I am pitching my new great idea: submarines made of scrap steel I found in my back yard! The best part? No more hassle with pesky waves! Glide beneath the surface with the grace of an aquatic mammal.

Sure, some people have built submarines before, and they say it is really difficult to get right, but my idea is fresh by virtue of it being created by me, a SV engineer!

(Ignore that puncture in the test unit, somebody mishandled the shipping!)

You forget that most people use cheap submarine or even avoid submarine at all (which is even worse for them) just to save time and money.

I have bad eating habits and I know multiple people who have eating habits even worse. I don't want to change that and I don't want to change my friend either, I'm fine how I live. This however is an amazing solution which is extremely easy to apply.

Can you tell me the issue with Soylent? It doesn't contains everything I need right? There a fraction that I wouldn't get from it. Does I plan to use it for every meal? Why would I? I enjoy eating, it's a great activity, I don't plan to stop that. Personally I consider Soylent as a good lunch replacement, nothing more.

Seriously the only issue is people who will actually believe that it's good to eat only that. I believe that it's the biggest marketing mistake Soylent made but I guess they needed that to show how they are superior to solutions like Ensure.

>People are dying constantly due to the failures of the industry.

Wait, what? Not even anywhere near true[1]. The CDC says 3,000 people in the US die every year from foodborne illnesses. That's .1%, one-tenth of a percent. I'd say that's a pretty good track record.

[1]http://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/

I think he probably means things like the diabetes or obesity epidemics, which in large part are caused by the failures of the industry, and their reliance on things like HFCS.

They are not. They are caused by unhealthy lifestyles maintained by people. It is convenient blaming everything on HFCS, but the truth is, if you eat cheeseburgers with cola daily and not expel extra calories with vigorous work, that's what is producing diabetes and obesity, not HFCS. Shifting responsibility from personal to "shady corporations made me fat" is bullshit.

And, btw, the reason food industry is using HFCS is not because they are evil, but because agrisector lobbied high tariffs on sugar imports, while at the same time subsidizing corn. Which makes using HFCS produced from cheap corn practical alternative to buying sugar with its artificially inflated prices. So even if you intend to place blame of HFCS, you chose wrong industry to blame.

EEk! Would you be content if 0.1% of US airline passengers died as a result of the airline industry each year?

After all it would only be 700 per year, every year.

( Note: 2012 global airline fatalities were 475 ).

Well, GP is off by a couple orders of magnitude..

3000 people out of a population of 310 million is 0.001%.

Equivalent of 7 airline fatalities. Not so bad.

3,000 people out of ~300MM in the US is not one tenth of a percent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

Learn history yo before making ignorant comments.

As a long-time beta user I can tell you that it works as described.

Have you also tried Sports Nutrition, they also have shakes and powders –some proteins, the ingredients can be similar. The whole article sounds like a fancy way to reinvent a bike. What’s new in this substitution food endeavor? One can live for 30 days on shakes and sports nutrition, or it can be used as a supplement to traditional food. One can even leave with No food at all if drinking a lot of water and juices for 30 days, some people do that. Why investing several millions in it? To create another hype?

Maybe because theses shakes are expensive and target sport or weight gain more than health?

Shush, they have plenty of testimonials from real customers saying it works.

Soylent is a true superfood unlike scams like acai berry juice.

Solves long standing dietary issues that have gone unsolved by modern medicine? Check.

Helps you lose weight? Check.

Saves time and money? Check.

Testimonials? Check.

Even people with sciency sounding backgrounds think it's good! Let me just get out my credit card and sign up for a subscription. Good bye difficult exercise and time spent preparing healthy meals, hello easy street.

OK, so I like cooking and eating food. I think soylent is a scam, or at the very least just another in a long line of unappetizing "diet replacement shakes".

But just allow me a moment to conduct a thought experiment, or at least play devil's advocate.

For years you've been walking to get where you are going and you've been plowing your fields with a couple of very high maintenance animals that are costly and risky. You've been walking out to their stalls and feeding, cleaning and otherwise dedicating lots of time and money to them. It's a lot of work. One day along comes a guy with a machine that replaces animals. Not only will it replace animals in your fields, the same machine will replace walking to get where you're going. A neighbor got it and he swears by it.

Saves time and money? Check.

Solves long standing issues that have gone unsolved by modern technology? Check.

Helps you produce more in your fields and make more money? Check.

Say goodbye to expensive and time consuming animals and sore feet, hello easy street.

You are not forced to do anything.

Did you mean this reply for me? Because I don't recall mentioning forcing someone to do something. I'm just saying that one could apply a similar thought process to tools that have changed the world in radical ways, like the internal combustion engine, steam power, precision machining, electricity, etc.

I understand that skepticism and in this case I share it, the number of inventions that have actually made radical changes to our world is infinitesimally small compared to the number that claim to, but the same reasoning could be applied to many past developments.

The breaking of bread is one of the most important social aspects of humanity. Soylent is perfect for the disconnected from humanity factory worker.

I fully appreciate that it's cheaper than food, and might be nutritionally healthy for you. Mental healthwise, it seems like a disaster.

Off topic but, I think that really gets to the core of our problems with food in western culture.

Sharing food is the only bodily function we share publically. We don't use the bathroom together. We generally sleep and procreate in private with select people. We don't give play by plays of our breathing or hygiene, even if they are technically public.

But food, food is such a powerful cultural symbol that we share it with our loved ones and even complete strangers. The power of food is so great that it's the centerpiece of many cultural touchstones (the harvest festival, the sacrifice, the fertility ritual). We talk about the food our grandparents made in tones so reverential it might as well be religion.

But when we get our lunch we get food in our cars and eat it alone. It was prepared by someone we didn't see and will never know. Not that long ago even convenience food was prepared by a person we knew. I realize that most of us don't do this every day or even most days, but certainly the rise of eating as an exercise of convenience and driven strictly by our taste buds has coincided with the rise of our fat society. I know that correlation does not equal causation, but in this case it seems likely to me that one has led to the other.

We've already started to disconnect from our food in dangerous ways. Why not add a new meal replacement if it's healthier? And it's not like the internal combustion engine made us a bunch healthier either.

Exactly, the food our grandparents made was religious or ritual in nature, think about it...

Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, etc, etc. Even the 4th of July is marked by BBQ.

As you said, last supper, last meal, sacrement. Culture is food.

How many meals in week do you eat alone? How many with other people? I think most people will simply use this product to replace the meals they'd eat alone, and still go out for food with friends.

As a bachelor who eats out almost every meal, including the lunches and dinners when I eat alone. This sounds perfect for saving money and thus leaving more money to spend when I go out with friends.

I eat 4 meals alone per week, mostly because I eat lunch at my desk and am not super tight with my new co-workers (mostly because except for fridays I don't eat with them, see how that works?) Breakfast is with my partner, and dinner is with my partner or friends and family.

Why are you eating alone... let alone eating alone as a bachelor?

Make food for friends, go out with friends, not eating alone will change your life for the better (IMHO).

(Another recent graduate speaking) Not everyone is having same social skills.

You tell me that, then I shall take my ass out and make friends in a foreign country. I agree with you, as am working on it and myself, but at the moment - zero friends.

As a result I very often eat alone too. On the other hand, I still am highly against replacing my eating rituals with some shaky shakes.

> The breaking of bread is one of the most important social aspects of humanity.

It's even in our languages: etymologically, a companion is literally a person with whom you share bread.

Breaks down and you have no idea how to fix it and have to hand over cash to the guy you bought it from, because your generations of accumulated animal husbandry knowledge is now useless? Does not magically replace itself with newer models like your farm animals did? Introduces new and unexpected dangers like a blade that accidentally cuts off your childs hand, because while you and your children are very familiar with the dangers of farm animals, machinery is totally unfamiliar? Check, check, check...

Yes, like I said, I was playing devil's advocate. But I would be willing to bet you own a car and it's a significant part of your lifestyle. And if you don't I'd still take that bet with every adult I talk to and come out ahead. I'm also willing to bet that your car has a negative impact on your health and the environment (from the atmosphere to the planning of your city).

My point is that world changing inventions do occur (rarely) and they are met with skepticism.

While I agree that you would normally win that bet, I am the one you'd lose it on - I have never owned a car and take the bus every day instead ;)

My point, I think, was that even if an idea is good and worth introducing, transitions are hard and shouldn't be handwaved away.

A scam? Hardly.

The only "scammy" thing was overreaching claims about how it's "optimized perfectly" and the like. And from what I've heard, they've toned that down.

We haven't cracked the human body, but there is science that supports Soylent.

>there is science that supports Soylent.

Since you made the claim, what specifically is the science that supports Soylent? I assume you can provide references to peer-reviewed stuff, given the nature of your claim, and I look forward to reading it.

IIRC, they've been working with nutritionalists and doctors to continually check on how Soylent is affecting its testers.

I'm too lazy to find the sources, so feel free to dismiss my claim.

I yield to no HN user in the extent and intensity of my distaste for the idea of Soylent, but the Pando article was, per Pando's charter, linkjacked clickbait that referred directly to the Vice article. It was totally reasonable --- desirable, even --- for the two articles to be switched. Would that we could simply do away with Pando altogether so that this kind of controversy might never recur.

Yup, same thing happened with the New York Times (1995) earlier today, it was originally a linkjacking blog post.

It seems like censorship or manipulation when no explanation is given. Even if it is on the up and up, it'd be nice if someone could comment as to why the changes occur.

I just tried to submit the investigation article, too, and the same happened to me. Worrisome.

Is YCombinator invested in Soylent?

The CEO, Rob Rhinehart, is a YC alum.

Well, that makes sense. Also someone upthread mentioned that YC Partners does indeed own a stake in Soylent [1].

[1] - http://blog.soylent.me/post/64789154918/soylent-funding-anno...

> This goes well beyond whatever policy pg was trying to defend recently. This is deeply manipulative.

YC has stake in Soylent (http://blog.soylent.me/post/64789154918/soylent-funding-anno...). I think people sometimes forget who's website this is they're commenting on.

Soylent might, technically, work. It might be safe and healthy, it definitely looks simple and allows you to forget anything related to grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up afterwards.

But thinking about the prospect of the future makes me sick to my stomach. Soylent paints a disgustingly frightening dystopia where humans are fed 100% "correct" food to allow them to continue being cogs in the business machine, not stop for lunch during the day in the office, and be able to pull those extra longs evenings and nights to get more work done. Not to mention the vanishing social and human aspects of eating, together with friends and family.

Rob Reinhardt's assertions that organic cultivation of vegetables, fruits and legumes does not scale are downright FALSE, and only serve the Soylent marketing machine.

Soylent is doing nothing more than accommodating to the needs of humanoids who continue the endless pursuit of some vague promise of capitalist fulfillment (work hard, be rich, be happy), ignoring the fact that the direct opposite of such a lifestyle leads to a much more healthier, happier life which remains in touch with our basic, primal human existence.

Or... it could put humanity in a position to provide a balanced nutrition as a fundamental human right, delivered right to your doorstep by USPS. If the economics worked out it could be provided everywhere worldwide, and then other food consumption could be purely for enjoyment.

There are always people who scream "dystopia!" every time a new technology arrives. That seems very pessimistic.

This is a very progressive idea, lets add housing to that, so that everyone will have a place to stay, something to eat and something to do.

I can see the large halls feeding the masses, I've even heard tale of a boy named Oliver who wants even more soylent it's so delicious.

>it could put humanity in a position to provide a balanced nutrition as a fundamental human right, delivered right to your doorstep by USPS. If the economics worked out it could be provided everywhere worldwide, and then other food consumption could be purely for enjoyment.

So... why not just do that with the food we've got? Drop a few packages of surplus food on the doorsteps of some African countries and call it good?

The thing is, there is enough food to feed the world. The Western world has way too much of it and lots of the rest of the world has too little of it. Hell, even within the western world there's too much and too little at the same time within the same square mile.

The issue is not balanced nutrition, it's making the economics work out, which they do not and never have.

What this may solve is a distribution problem. Some of the food problem in major US cities is lack of access to grocery stores that sell real food. Soylent could be stocked in the convenience stores those areas have access to.

> Some of the food problem in major US cities is lack of access to grocery stores that sell real food.

Assumed without evidence.

http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11060...

From the conclusion to the paper:

> In our longitudinal study, neighborhood supermarket availability was generally unrelated to both adherence to fruit and vegetable recommendations and overall diet quality (reflecting compliance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans).

They do claim that the paper supports zoning restrictions on fast food restaurants, because of their finding that among men, greater availability of fast food cooccurs with greater consumption of fast food. Among women, not even that.

The interchangeability of dystopias and utopias is sometimes a theme in SF. A lot of it is based on perception.

> Or... it could put humanity in a position to provide a balanced nutrition as a fundamental human right, delivered right to your doorstep by USPS.

The notion of using this glop as a permanent solution to fix hunger (someplace the USPS delivers!!!) - well, the fact that anyone would seriously entertain it - is so sad to me that it's hard to articulate. So, classic utopia/dystopia material, I guess.

Exactly, this will be a huge hit for quantified self people who want to reduce their existence down to a spreadsheet.

Going on a Soylent diet doesn't mean that you'll be a cog or that your vision of the future will come to pass.

Granted, I too am terrified of that future coming to pass, but it doesn't follow from increased Soylent consumpion.

Yes, the whole problem with the marketing hype is thinking about this product in terms of this all or nothing "disrupt the food industry" mentality. It might turn out to be a company producing a slightly more economical meal replacement shake that you can down a couple days in place of breakfast, but at the end of the day thats really all. There's nothing new to see here.

All I can think of when I see it is "Man, I thought the future was supposed to be awesome. Where is my engineered to be delicious lab grown steak? I get Soylent? This is not awesome."

Given, as long as I'm not being force fed the stuff as a government ration, I don't really see it as a problem, I just get sad when I see it marketed as 'future food'.

There are also those of us that derive no joy from eating. Eating is an inconvenience to me. I have zero sweet tooth, and I don't have many cravings for specific foods. I'd rather be doing any number of other things, like reading, working out, yard/car work, calling up family, etc. I work for myself (and work reasonable hours). Of course, all of this anecdotal, but the point is that this isn't a dystopia scenario for all of us.

Having an incredibly convenient/healthy option would be outstanding for me personally. I suspect that people like me may represent a much smaller percentage of the population. I want to be healthy, but I hate shopping for and preparing food to the point where I sometimes don't eat as well as I should.

With that said, I wouldn't wish my food indifference on other people. I could see how it'd be spooky to see this kind of living being forced on people. It's probably a bit premature to worry about this just yet, though. Soylent and other similar products are still so polarizing that it's hard to imagine them taking over in the near future.

I accept that fact that some people like yourself find a product such as Soylent to be convenient, and I am in no position to criticize such personal choices.

But there are lots of existing products on the market, that have been available for quite some time now, everything from nutrition shakes to complete food replacements for people with chronic diseases (Crohn's, IBS, etc...), and Soylent seems to be more of the same, sans the actual clinical testing and trials that guarantee the safety of such products (and with the added Silicon Valley hype, of course.)

I broke my jaw twice and had to subsist on this stuff for 2 months at a time. It just plain sucks, and after 2 months of not chewing your teeth feel soft, and everything hurts when you do (eventually) chew. Also lost weight really quickly, went from 183 to 127 in 2 months.

I recall reading that it's recommended that you chew gum if you are on Soylent, in order to offset the effects of not chewing.

But chewing is just one of the many phases of digesting food. What about swallowing, digesting stuff in the stomach, functioning of liver, pancreas, spleen. Small intestines, large intestines.

Surely you can't chew gum to keep these organs functioning.

Those other digestive functions are used/required by Soylent.

How?

Soylent is all liquid. Pretty much everything I eat is semi solid.

> Soylent is all liquid.

Wrong, it's a power mixed in liquid.

>>It just plain sucks, and after 2 months of not chewing your teeth feel soft

I'm wondering what other damage it can do. If you stop eating real food for long times, will your ability to digest(secrete digestive juices etc) real food go away.

If that is the case. I don't think soylent is worth anything on earth. That extra an hour that you wish to save by not cooking and eating, can cripple you for life.

So what do you eat? Do you blend everything into a homogeneous sludge?

My diet isn't anything out of the ordinary, I just don't get very excited about it.

With all due respect, deriving no joy from eating sounds like an eating disorder of some kind. It's like a basic part of you is not functioning.

No disrespect intended, but you are way off here. I eat, and eat more healthy than most, it's just not something I get excited about.

Have you ever looked into getting any testing done with regards to your sense of taste? It would be interesting to see if this is an issue for you.

I've suspected this is probably part of it, but wouldn't know where to begin proving/testing it. At this point, I'm not sure I even care.

There are some definite positives, though. I'm not tempted at all by junk food/soft drinks.

I get where you are coming from.

It's only in the last year that I've actually realized that I have no sense of smell. I didn't even know such a thing existed.

I've always noticed that something was off and smelling a flower, or coffee, etc. didn't hold any meaning to me.

Now I know that its due to my practically non-existent sense of smell. I don't know when this happened but I was either born with it or it occurred at an early age.

It's tough to feel you are missing something when you've never experienced it.

I do know its much much harder for people that have had some kind of nose issue and lose their sense of smell.

Curiously, I do tend to really enjoy food.

Its funny because we already live in this dystopia and you simply don't notice it because the plastic food we eat "looks real" and "tastes good". What is the difference between the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds and Soylent? The fact that its basically "molded" to look like the real food we used to eat?

The reality is that we long ago crossed the line into having a society that mostly eats absolutely garbage and artificial food. This is not some future prospect, it is today, and we regularly see (and ignore) the disastrous medical results. This is of course perpetuated by a government that pushes a purely political nutritional agenda (let's tell everyone carbohydrates are the most important staple to eat and let's put corn and sugar in everything for economic reasons and let's also hope no one notices that fiber has mysteriously disappeared from our diets).

At least Soylent is trying to harness this machine for good. A world where "the cogs" at least receive proper nutrition would be a step up from today's illusion of choice.

> the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds

Define 'completely artificial' here. It's meat, it's bread, it's vegetables and condiments.

you are very generous with what you call meat, bread, and vegetables.

Can you clarify the definitions of those terms that you'd prefer to use, which exclude the products on a McDonald's hamburger?

There's a difference between "meat", and grain-fed, antibiotic treated cow meat. And last time I made bread, it didn't magically develop high fructose corn syrup or ammonium chloride, and yet, somehow it appears in the "bread" of a McDonalds hamburger. It goes without saying that the condiments are more or less by definition artificial processed foods. And let's not even get into the amount of sodium in this thing. You'll also notice there's basically no fiber in this thing (that's why it lasts so long).

Define "completely artificial"? At least as artificial as Soylent.

I can't tell if this is just hyperbole or if you actually believe what you're saying.

Is anything that he said false? If so, please tell us.

Proposing counter arguments is considered to be an effective way of reconciling two differing beliefs, as opposed to simply questioning my sincerity. I would be more than happy to know the factual inaccuracies I have stated, and to change my position accordingly.

OK, I'll be less snarky with this reply...

>There's a difference between "meat", and grain-fed, antibiotic treated cow meat.

The meat used in McDonald's hamburgers is the same meat you would buy in the grocery store. Is it a super high quality cut? Of course not, it's likely made from cheap cuts of meat, but that's what you do when you're grinding it up for a burger.

>And last time I made bread, it didn't magically develop high fructose corn syrup or ammonium chloride, and yet, somehow it appears in the "bread" of a McDonalds hamburger.

Fine with the HFCS, but ammonium chloride is a common baking ingredient in baking. It's used as a nutrient for yeast and it's also used in medicine to acidify your urine.

>It goes without saying that the condiments are more or less by definition artificial processed foods. And let's not even get into the amount of sodium in this thing.

Tomato sauce is made from tomatoes, a vegetable. Sure it has a lot of salt and sometimes HFCS in it, but it's not "artificial". Do you consider homemade dill pickles to be "artificial" because of them amount of salt in them?

>You'll also notice there's basically no fiber in this thing (that's why it lasts so long).

The fiber content of something has nothing to do with why food lasts so long, it's the moisture content. Stuff that has no moisture will not support bacterial growth. If you take wheat and make hardtack with it, it won't rot at all, but that's natural isn't it?

> The meat used in McDonald's hamburgers is the same meat you would buy in the grocery store. Is it a super high quality cut? Of course not, it's likely made from cheap cuts of meat, but that's what you do when you're grinding it up for a burger.

I guess I don't understand this point. I completely agree that the meat you get at the store is sometimes as bad as McDonald's meat. McDonald's was just an example I threw out because lots of people eat it, I don't think they represent the evil center of all food or something. So I don't really hold "being available at the store" in very high regards. I personally go out of my way to purchase grass fed and grass finished meat (meat just labeled grass fed is usually grain finished, defeating the purpose). You probably disagree with me as to what constitutes real meat (I don't think antibiotic treated cows injected with hormones that don't eat their natural diet are real, but you may), but at the very least you can hopefully see that my position is consistent.

To bring it full circle, I am as suspicious about meat treated this way as I am of soylent. And when I look at the ingredients in a big mac and the ingredients of soylent, I see a ton of red flags in the former and not the latter. This does not mean I think soylent is amazing and McDonald's is terrible. It means I think neither is real food.

>Tomato sauce is made from tomatoes, a vegetable. Sure it has a lot of salt and sometimes HFCS in it, but it's not "artificial".

It seems the argument is increasingly just "nothing is artificial as long as it can trace part of its makeup to something real". "Meat is real meat as long as it comes from a cow, it doesn't matter what went into the cow". "Ketchup is real because a primary ingredient is tomato". Are strawberries dipped in chocolate with whip cream real food since its still "basically strawberries with some HFCS"?

...Sure I guess, but at that point my counter argument simply becomes "well many of the ingredients of soylent also trace their ingredients to such things, thus I guess it still holds true that they are equally fake/real." Maybe here we simply have to agree to disagree, or at least accept that this has become a largely semantic argument between us. I don't think taking a tomato, adding a ton of salt and HFCS, can be called "real" food with a straight face. Perhaps that is below your "reality" threshold however, which is fine.

> Do you consider homemade dill pickles to be "artificial" because of them amount of salt in them?

Well I certainly don't think someone who eats home made cheesecake is eating real food. In other words, artificiality has nothing to do with whether its home-made or not. Where does a dill pickle fall? I don't know, somewhere in the middle probably.

To sum up, if my doctor said "eat more real food", I would not think I would be following his advice by going to McDonald's.

Ah yes...the "McDonald's is bad, so let's feed people glop instead" argument.

How about this: let's help people get access to, appreciate, and learn how to prepare "real" food, instead of jumping to the lowest common denominator. That's what I'd call "disruption".

Except the "glop", as you put it, is nutritionally healthy and McDonalds is not.

I will agree with this once I see a study showing consuming nothing but soylent has no effect on a person's happiness or mental well-being.

Dehumanization is worse than diabetes.

The reports so far are that it definitely has an impact on happiness and mental well-being: a positive one.

The reports are mostly involved parties and early adopter types. Not only is there a lot of potential bias involved, but a proper study has all sorts of important elements - double-blindness, valid controls, ethics boards, etc.

It may have a positive impact on people who eat McDonalds every day, but what about people who eat real food?

I don't think it's possible to do a double-blind study on Soylent.

I guess you could blend up normal food and water it down to the same consistency but it would still taste like food so I don't think it would fool anyone.

It should be possible to test against something like Ensure, I'd imagine.

The only thing we have indicating that this glop is healthy or nutritious is the word of the guy selling it.

Ever heard of caveat emptor?

My main point was simply that I find it strange that people criticize Soylent for a problem that in my mind already exists in a worse form. I myself am a "real food" advocate -- I just think its silly to think that Soylent will bring about the "food dystopia", and if it does, it will be no worse than our current food dystopia.

I don't know about "food dystopia", and I don't generally concern myself with other people's poor choices, unless it directly impacts my life. I really, truly don't care what Soylent does. I'm not the target market, and I'll never consume it.

That said, Soylent falls in the sort of nerd lifestyle myopia that I find frustrating, and I admit to being genuinely puzzled by the buzz around the thing (I suspect that's where most of the hype comes from, actually -- not genuine interest, so much as curiosity). But when I hear the creator talking about replacing all food or providing cheap nutrition to the poor, I just get depressed: our aim should be higher than this. Disruption that intends to replace our food with flavorless goo is a disruption not worth having.

The disruption is the prep work and cleanup. I dream of a kitchen in a way that cleanup takes less than three minutes and my veg is uniformly chopped for me while I'm on my way home. (I'm quite capable of doing each, but I'm slow, and getting my mise en place takes far too long.)

That leads to me only cooking on weekends when I don't have anything going on. I'm a good cook, but by the time the brussel sprouts are roasted or the vegetable soup is coming together, we've eaten and I've cleaned up, I only have 2 hours before I have to sleep.

Disruption would be fixing that problem, not teaching people they should cook for themselves. (And it's similar for working class poor people, but compounded by the realities of working two jobs and raising children on a limited budged.)

"I dream of a kitchen in a way that cleanup takes less than three minutes and my veg is uniformly chopped for me while I'm on my way home."

Um. You can buy most vegetables pre-chopped. They cost less than Soylent. They sell them at Walgreen's!

I was thinking more of the machine that creates the dice for the sake of freshness, for one. Further,I can keep an onion for weeks, but a chopped onion has a shorter shelf life.

For that matter, there are food processors that do a terrible but passable job at the prep, but again, the cleaning is suboptimal.

You said that, and its silly. Nobody's 'feeding people glop', Soylent is a choice. Strident complaints are out of place.

Go ahead and learn to prepare 'real' food, that's your choice.

"Soylent is a choice"

So is airlines offering tickets that aren't bound by the lowest denominator of price. Those airlines went out of business.

If there's a good chance that Soylent becomes popular and a good percentage of the population uses it on a day to day basis, it's not a "choice" in the same way as avoiding all technology and being Amish is a "choice". Setting good practices like not having mold in your food, and following regulations, would be good before it gets to that point.

Pure straw-man hyperbole. Currently its a cool idea being tried; some folks find it helpful.

> let's tell everyone carbohydrates are the most important staple to eat and let's put corn and sugar in everything

Seems to be conflating two parties here. The USDA guidelines are written by government nutritionists and there are sound scientific reasons for recommending the base of any diet be grains. Though being a free country, whether or not the private sector decides to put corn syrup in everything is their own prerogative and unrelated to government guidelines.

> At least Soylent is trying to harness this machine for good.

Soylent is a private company, not an aid organization. Barring them irresponsibly marketing their product as a "total food replacement" I wouldn't call what they are doing good or bad.

Humans have only eaten grains for the last 10,000 years or so. For the millions of years before that, we evolved on a diet that didn't include grain. Of courses those assertions don't prove anything but they do make me question the wisdom of basing the human diet on grain.

Yes, and I dare say this whole civilization thing is working out pretty well as a result of our switch to grains.

Note that civilization can work out pretty well for itself even if its highly non-optimal for the individuals inside it. I'm certain that two people living two sickly lives and dying at 40 of diabetes is vastly economically superior in terms of revenue over one dude living a healthy 80 years.

Grains not good for anything except acting as an "energy drink" to fatten up livestock animals. Grains are good food for our good food, at most.

Since all the science points toward grains being bad for humans, present me with any scientific evidence our bodies evolved to eat grains. We don't chew our cud like cows, we have a carnivorous physique and body type...

There is an evolutionary aspect to it that nothing fattens up then kills americans like grain consumption; you guys go right on gulping that stuff down; eventually you'll go extinct because of it, then the rest of us won't have to listen to sick people claiming a grain based diet is healthy.

> Grains not good for anything except acting as an "energy drink" to fatten up livestock animals. Grains are good food for our good food, at most.

This is so absurd, I'm not even sure how to respond. Most of the global human population gets their daily calories from staple cereals. A diet based on energy and time efficient calories from cereals is what allowed civilization to flourish.

>"We don't chew our cud like cows"

And we don't need to in order to fully digest cereal grains.

>"we have a carnivorous physique and body type"

Humans, like all omnivorous apes, are an odd mix of carnivore and herbivore. We have the abbreviated lumen, but lack the aggressive gastric chemistry of a carnivore. Our dentition is distinctly herbivorous in shape, but the mass of our teeth is insufficient to chew cellulosic material, and we lack the gut to digest it anyway.

The rational conclusion is that we have evolved to eat carefully prepared high-energy easily digestible foods. Which describes domesticated cereal grains very well.

>"There is an evolutionary aspect to it that nothing fattens up then kills americans like grain consumption"

The obesity epidemic certainly owes its spread to the glycemic profligacy of overly-processed grain. It's a bit of a stretch to sum it up by simply saying "grain kills".

I think your assertion that havesting grain led to civilization is the most likely hypothesis but, I'm not convinced we started harvesting grain for food. We've discovered cups with trace amounts of beer that pedate plates with trace amounts of bread by 3,000 years. Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but the theory that we brewed beer before we baked bread is well supported. But, just because we may have invented civilization around beer does not make it the cornerstone of a healthy diet.

> they do make me question the wisdom of basing the human diet on grain

I question the wisdom of folks who seem to think prehistoric humans should be providing nutrition advice.

The USDA has two conflicting missions: (1) promote US agricultural products, and (2) advise the public about healthy food choices.

This dual mandate results in significant food industry influence on the advice the USDA gives the public.

Unsurprisingly, guidance about what foods are unhealthy has been softened or eliminated. Changing guidance on proteins and grains are heavily influenced by the economic interests of entrenched agricultural corporations.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8375951

I would not trust the government's nutritional guidelines. Scroll down to "Monsanto Hijacks Regulators".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/fda-promotes-uns...

As has already been stated by other commentors, the USDA has frequently been shown to have many conflicts of interests (ranging from their own stated goals to the appointment of many industry insiders -- much like the military industrial complex revolving doors).

> Though being a free country, whether or not the private sector decides to put corn syrup in everything is their own prerogative and unrelated to government guidelines.

Through subsidization of crops (namely corn), the government has created an economic environment where it is not always feasible to create a competitive product that doesn't use certain ingredients. Through the government's vilification of fat, they have created a marketing environment where it is hard to sell high-fat low-sugar foods. If HFCS is significantly cheaper than other ingredients, and if you are pressured to provide foods with low fat, then by using alternative ingredients you could price yourself out of the mainstream. Note: this does not mean you can't make the product, it just means that it will be more expensive and you have to explain to your customer WHY its more expensive. We of course see this in the more expensive "niche" health products. The sad result of this is often the more affluent members of society who can afford such niche products get healthier alternatives, while the poor of society get the unhealthy foods, through a combination of lack of education and lack of funds.

Corn subsidies + sugar tariffs (US sugar price is double of the world market).

> What is the difference between the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds and Soylent?

No one tells you that you can live on McDonald's alone.

Exactly. Not even McDonald's would suggest that. They are far more risk-adverse than the Soylent people are.

Sure you can.

Dan Gorske has lived on almost nothing but Big Macs since 1972. At age 59, he is apparently still in good health.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Gorske

I'm not following. In what way is a McDonalds hamburger artificial? It's bread. It's meat.

Even if there are mechanically separated parts of the meat, they're still meat.

Even if it's as artificial as you say, isn't food that "looks real" and "tastes good" better than food that "looks like deplorable shit" and "tastes like deplorable shit" and is unapologetically named after something horrible from a 1970s dystopian sci fi movie?

McDonalds only recently (last year) stopped using 'pink slime' in their burgers: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mcdonald-confirms-no-lo...

"Pink slime" is meat. If it had been invented by a molecular gastronomist, we'd be heralding it as an exciting, innovative gourmet food.

But the media-invented pejorative nickname "sounds gross", therefore that is scientific proof that it's not "real food" and will kill you.

When people think of 'hamburger', they think of ground beef. Just ground beef. And maybe some spices.

They don't think of the chemical process involved in factory processing the normally inedible bits of a cow into a slimy pink goop (see where the name came from?) and then mixing that in with their ground beef at a specific percentage to avoid getting into trouble.

Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Nation-Dark-All-American/dp/... and tell me if you want to eat at McDonald's again.

I've read Fast Food Nation (and have seen the Richard Linklater adaptation) and it didn't give me pause at all.

Well, whatever is called "bread" in most of the US, especially things served in fast food, etc. have very distant relationship with real bread. Anybody who tried the real thing would never agree that the real thing and the spongy rubbery tasteless thing served in fast food should be even named with the same word.

You go ahead and eat your fake food.

I'll continue working very hard but still have time for my family, and I also eat real food.

Heck, I can cook a whole pizza from scratch in 30 minutes, dough included. Now that's a hack that's centuries old I'm guessing. No, I'm not putting it on Kickstarter :-)

As I stated in another comment, I am also a "real food" advocate. Nowhere have I stated that I think we should replace everyones meals with soylent. I simply made the assertion (which I continue to believe is correct), that doing so would probably be a net positive for many people in this country. In other words, the main thing I'm wanting to argue is that if you are "afraid" of soylent's potential effects, then you should already be equally afraid given this country's current average diet.

Probably not, considering when quick rise yeast came on the market and the necessity of electric stoves for that kind of speed. In most places, you would have a central stove and going to and from would take ten minutes at the least. ;)

Why would I eat a rubber meat on rubber bread in McD if I can get real meat with real veggies next door? Yes, I'd probably have to spend whole whopping $10 or so on such a meal. But given that it takes only 75 minutes of work even on minimum wage to earn such meal, I don't think it's inaccessible.

humanoids who continue the endless pursuit of some vague promise of capitalist fulfillment (work hard, be rich, be happy), ignoring the fact that the direct opposite of such a lifestyle leads to a much more healthier, happier life which remains in touch with our basic, primal human existence.

You'd enjoy the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/zen-motorcycle.pd...

I enjoyed it much :)

The Soylent guy keep mentioning that current food system will not scale, but gives no evidence that his system will. It appears to be very wasteful to grow or synthesize each components in their original form, separate them and then finally mix them, compared to naturally occurring food.

Current agricultural practices are highly unsustainable. We are mere decades to depleting all groundwater aquifers in North America. Fertilizer pollutes most waterways. Pesticides are seeping into most groundwater in the central US. And you think we should scale our processes larger? Insanity.

Does Soylent not contribute to those same problems?

Not to worry, the last two paragraphs explain why it won't take over the world:

"I was euphoric. I felt the endorphins rushing through my body, the gob of chicken skin wandering down my esophagus, the juices staining my chin. Rob, who'd joined us, led a conversation about the food technology; the chicken was sublime. Before long, I might as well have been stoned. For a half an hour, I sat there, overwhelmed, unaware of any foodless world outside my brain."

"For a few minutes, the future didn’t matter; the taste, the the swirling talk took over. The food anchored me to the glorious present, and eating was all."

This is how food is supposed to make you feel. It's as basic and primal as sex. Soylent is like a culinary celibacy, apparently without any sort of spiritual edification.

It's a false assertion that Soylent prescribes this dystopian future. It's about replacing TRANSACTIONAL eating. Not ALL eating.

Fairly simple you'd think, yet this is the main point that all the detractors seem to have... and it's not something that Soylent is pushing at all.

>Soylent is doing nothing more than accommodating to the needs of humanoids who continue the endless pursuit of some vague promise of capitalist fulfillment

Or, I'm just really lazy and would prefer something remotely healthy and cheap compared to, say, ordering a pizza.

It isn't meant to replace all your food intake, but, it seems like a good thing for when-you-just-don't-feel-like-cooking or don't have time because you have other things you'd rather do, then spend time cooking and eating (don't get me wrong though, I very much enjoy eating)..

As a student, this seems like a super product for someone like me...

Basic, primal existence means no dental care and death of the first sufficiently strong infection. As somebody who would be dead at least 4 times already without modern medicine (nothing special, a bunch of inflammatory diseases, appendectomy, etc.), I'm not buying the joys of primal existence. That doesn't mean I'm ready to give up my juicy steak for a glass of beige sludge, but I still love my civilization.

And yes, "organic" as currently practiced is definitely not scalable, as it is mainly consists of removing scaling improvements, like using chemicals to defeat pests. You can allow pests to eat 30% of your crop if you sell it at 50% higher price point. But if you need to produce more and cheaper, it no longer works. As niche market, it is fine, as main food producer - I believe it when I see it.

I suppose you could spin it "Look how healthy our rats are and there is nothing in this warehouse but Soylent! Testing on rats, check!"

But this made me a bit sad.

I think Soylent is great, it is disruptive, it is more palatable than nutraloaf it could be a great alternative for folks who just need food to live, and it could provide a fascinating 'control' group for various Microbiome projects. But clearly these folks aren't exactly "experienced" as Jimi Hendrix might say.

Here is the challenge, there is a crap ton of knowledge about how to do things that isn't taught in school or on the web or in books. You learn that by 'apprenticing' at a company or organization which is already doing something like what you want to do, and getting the history of all the things they had to overcome and avoid "in the old days." It isn't nostalgia, it is education through experience. That is what experience is. And the only way to get it, is to experience it. It was sad for me when I realized this, I could be smarter than my manager at the time and yet he could be a better manager because he had experienced more issues and overcome them (or at least seen the solution to them) to have a much better sense of what would be an important problem and what would be a minor problem. I could put any situation I wanted in front of him and he had an answer to the "big problem" / "small problem" classification, but he could not express that as an algorithm I could learn from.

So when people come out of college and start companies the next day I tend to cringe a bit as there is a lot of stuff they are going to learn the hard way. That is doubly true when you're doing multiple disciplines (food prep + nutrition + distribution + marketing + regulation + Etc.) and having run a business of type A won't prime you to run one of type B, other than to help you recognize where you need subject matter experts.

One wonders why the first hire at Soylent wasn't someone who had 5 years or more setting up and running a food production line. I don't know but I have heard folks in similar situations say "How hard could it be?"

What you do, is then you hire a 10-year veteran of the food preparation business.

What you DON'T do, is pickup a few textbooks on body chemistry and assume you can figure it all out by yourself.

Why not? The human body is a machine, and we can examine and alter that machine. We've been doing that throughout history.

I don't like the early claims of Soylent being "perfectly optimized" and the like.

When a lawnmower breaks, you hit it really hard with a hefty wrench until it starts working again. Maybe even take it apart, clean it, and put it back together again. Worse case, you buy a new one and find yourself out a few thousand dollars.

Percussive maintenance doesn't work on humans. When humans break, they die.

That's a poor analogy. 1) We're starting from a functional state, 2) Changing diet is nowhere near as violent as hitting something with a wrench.

Humans are very adaptable wrt. food, generally speaking. Look at the different diets all around the world, or even in one person's lifetime.

The only issue I take with Soylent is their claim that it's perfect. I think we need MUCH more time to gather data.

You have failed to understand the analogy. Hitting things with a wrench is how I fix things. Hitting things with a wrench is not analogous to eating Soylent, hitting things with a wrench is analogous to the medical care required when you break yourself.

The fear is that Soylent, used as hyped, has the potential to break a human.

Breaking yourself, or much worse, others, is a far more serious than breaking a machine. That sort of relaxed attitude towards health is exactly why I would not trust a product like this from people like this.

Soylent really should not be banking on "it is difficult to kill a human", and neither should you.

Ah. That wasn't very clear in your comment.

Yes, breaking humans is bad. Is there any indication that Soylent is going to break people though?

As far as I can tell, it's unknown what the long term effects will be, but we have some evidence that it should be just fine.

Do you have any evidence that points to Soylent being harmful?

Stronger: more harmful than many irresponsible diets e.g. McJunk, fat, sugar?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720683

This is exactly the relaxed attitude I am talking about. Soylent, used as hyped, should not need to be proved hazardous. Soylent, used as hyped, should be shown to be safe.

Going back to lawnmowers, it would be like not wrapping the handle with leather for comfort because we can't prove that it's safe for the lawnmower. We think it's safe, we're pretty sure from our understanding that it's safe, but we can't prove it.

I say give it a try. Let's wrap the handle, observe in operation, and then react when we have more data.

Back to your hyper-relaxed "the human body is no more complicated or serious than a machine" thing?

I can't believe I have not made myself clear on this already, but I'll give it one more go: You can fuck around with lawn mowers because breaking one typically doesn't fucking kill somebody.

If you break your fucking lawnmower, you buy a new one. You don't get to buy another human.

Such a lazy attitude towards human safety is positively chilling. Have you learned absolutely nothing from the horrors seen over past centuries of people treating human lives like any other test subject?

It's only a problem if it harms a human suddenly and irreversibly. I'm guessing that anyone who was suffering problems from a dietary change would have time to correct.

Show me some evidence or even some indication that Soylent will result in an irreversible and sudden decline in health.

I'm guessing that you won't, or can't.

Your argument is "We don't know, so let's not risk it". The risk here is minimal. If it fails to live up to the hype, it's reversible.

> Show me some evidence or even some indication that Soylent will result in an irreversible and sudden decline in health.

> If it fails to live up to the hype, it's reversible.

Once again, demanding evidence that something is unsafe instead of providing evidence that it is not, then in the same breath taking that it is not for granted.

Is that all you are wired to do? It's like what I'm saying is going in one ear and coming out the other.

That's the thing, absent any negative information a dietary change shouldn't need rigourous proof. Unless there's any indication that Soylent will do irreparable damage from day 1, I see no good reason for an individual not to try it and monitor their progress. If it doesn't work for them, then they can stop using it. How hard is that? How is that breaking anyone?

I don't treat human life lightly. You're just treating a dietary change too heavily.

> It's like what I'm saying is going in one ear and coming out the other.

I was just about to say the same of you. I'm done here.

> Unless there's any indication that Soylent will do irreparable damage from day 1, I see no good reason for an individual not to try it and monitor their progress.

You are demonstrating a very basic failure to analyze risk, understand the variety of medical risks that can be posed by experimental diets, and indeed understand the concerns that other people are raising (the concern is not that you will die after drinking it three times in a row.....).

Mono-nutrition is known to have negative health effects.

And there is clear evidence of trial-and-error that has resulted in short-term health effects due to initial versions of Soylent. Longer term effects would not have been identified and so remain a very high risk.

From wikipedia: Modifications to the ingredient list have occurred in response to results incurred in testing, for example: the first version of the formula omitted iron, which caused Rhineheart to report his heart had begun to race.[8] In other early experiments, intentionally induced overdoses of potassium and magnesium gave Rhinehart cardiac arrhythmia and burning sensations.[8] After the early recipe had stabilized, Rhinehart found himself suffering from joint pain due to a sulfur deficiency. Methylsulfonylmethane was added to address this problem

the human body can adapt to bad nutrition for a long time. Everything will be fine until its not.

What if Soylent increases the risk of some form of cancer or some long term damage to the liver of other organs ? You wont know until its too late.

You want people to prove that Soylent is bad, but instead the Soylent team needs to proof that Soylent is good! And a couple of dozen reviews from people using it for a month does not prove anything.

To be fair, it is "startup hackathon culture" to think like this.

If you build software that doesn't work, people get pissed off and yell at you on web-forums... but in the great scheme of things that's not a big deal.

The main downside is that once you leave software, startup culture becomes incredibly dangerous. If you build an airplane that "doesn't work", people die. If you build a train that "doesn't work", the train crashes into a building and people die. If you build a bridge that doesn't work... people die.

And of course, when it comes to Soylent... if you build a food process that can be infested with diseases, or leave out important dietary nutrition in a particular diet... people can die.

We have all this discussion talking about the diet side of things, but little discussion on the practicality of storage, or whether or not it needs to be refrigerated.

Absolutely agree, it definitely is "startup hackathon culture".

Well, that combined with typical SV engineer hubris. Being bright in your field and well paid does not mean that you can be the master of any field. Some engineering disciplines require tighter tolerances. Some fields, particularly those that use human subjects, have much tighter ethical and safety requirements.

It seems as though being immersed in SV startup culture for too long can render somebody literally unable to comprehend the notion of more stringent requirements and regulations existing.

> The risk here is minimal.

How do you know that?

Maybe not as violent, but a bad diet can quickly lead to disease. We never see it in the affluent West but micronutrient disease was and still is a pretty big problem -- you are getting enough food energy, so while you're not starving, you're still dying from your diet.

We've only begun to start understanding some of these diseases (like Pellagra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#Epidemiology), and we don't really have it all nailed down yet.

Yeah, I agree that there's a lot that we don't know about the human body, and I disliked any claims by Soylent that overreached in this way.

But we do know about nutrients and have a good idea of the proportion of them for the avg human.

I think my main problem with the backlash is with the argument that boils down to "We don't know, so let's not risk it". I don't see why we can't try it, and then monitor and react. If I started using Soylent and then 30 days down the road I was feeling ill, I'd probably stop using it first thing while exploring other causes.

"But we do know about nutrients and have a good idea of the proportion of them for the avg human."

We really, really don't. You could be excused for thinking we've got it all figured out if you listened only to news reporting on nutrition studies, but there's so much contradictory information out there that it's difficult to know which end is up.

For example: Soylent, according to the story, is partially fish oil. Did you know that there's a study out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that strongly suggests that fish oil supplementation increases the incidence of aggressive, fatal prostate cancers? What was once a nutrient panacea is likely now contraindicated in men.

Does this mean that Soylent shouldn't be using fish oil? Hard to say. I doubt that even the creators have any idea.

The backlash is "We don't know, and you dumbass without a degree are trying to figure this out without any formal training".

I welcome doctors, researchers, and people who know what they are doing to experiment with the human body. But when a computer science major armed with nothing but a few textbooks in body chemistry claims that he has "figured the body out", I am going to assume otherwise.

Does he have any cooking experience? What is his medical background?

Its not so much that "we don't know", but "the creator of Soylent clearly doesn't know", and yet he wants us to believe that he does.

The human body isn't a machine. It is a more complex thing that includes many machines. There are so many features of the human body that we can not examine and that we don't even know where to look...

The real question is "Soylent is perfectly optimized... for what?" Soylent may be optimized for "meeting the models of nutrition that we have." Yet, those models may be like using an FAQ to run a nuclear reactor. I'm not trying to fear-monger. I think Soylent is a great experiment. I wish I had to guts to carry out the reporter's month-long experiment.

Yup, agreed. I never meant to imply that it was a simple machine.

I too see Soylent as an experiment, and a possible way to push our models of nutrition forward.

"like using an FAQ to run a nuclear reactor."

That sounds like a winning long term strategy if the opposition makes decisions solely to maximize short term profit. Don't overestimate the opposition. Bad money pushes out good.

A laymen thinking they have a sufficient understanding of biochemistry to "hack" the human body isn't only naive, it's unethical. There's a reason we license people to become dieticians.

There are some fairly stringent regulations that ensure food products are made in a GMP environment.[1] Flaunting those rules is extremely dangerous, both from a health perspective and from a legal one. There are numerous instances where those in charge of food operations have gone to prison for failing to maintain hygienic standards.[2]

Soylent better get their shit together. Food safety is nothing to play around with, literally life-and-death decisions being made.

1. http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/CGMP/ucm110877.ht...

2. Listeria killed 33 people, owners of company to prison: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24292036

Aren't supplements/non-medical powders/various other juju immune from FDA issues?

FDA regulates both finished dietary supplement products and dietary ingredients. FDA regulates dietary supplements under a different set of regulations than those covering "conventional" foods and drug products. Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA):
- The manufacturer of a dietary supplement or dietary ingredient is responsible for ensuring that the product is safe before it is marketed.

- FDA is responsible for taking action against any unsafe dietary supplement product after it reaches the market.

http://www.fda.gov/food/dietarysupplements/

Ah, got it. So it's just self policing until you kill someone, then the regulators step in.

There are a few dietary supplements that voluntarily submit to FDA inspection of their facilities. Most don't. The protein powder I use is one of them:

http://www.1stphorm.com/products/men/level-1

I wouldn't really consider using anything that isn't, but lots of people do every day, probably mostly from ignorance.

From the QA link: They can also be in other forms, such as a bar, but if they are, information on their label must not represent the product as a conventional food or a sole item of a meal or diet.

So, Soylent is probably considered a food since it is a sole item of a meal.

They don't need to be approved in the typical FDA sense, but the ingredients do need to be considered GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe).[1]

GRAS just tells people what they're allowed to sell, but most food products have been around long enough they are grandfathered in. The bigger issue that the FDA still mandates, is that the products are prepared under cGMP standards. The standards are open, available, and not at all onerous if you intend to be an honest business.[2]

Essentially, you need to have trained staff, clean buildings, batch records, clean equipment, known ingredients (no allergens accidentally introduced), etc. Really basic stuff. Unfortunately, it's mostly self-policed until an 'incident' at which case the FDA can do an audit and raise hell.

[1] - http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/GRAS/

[2] - http://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinf...

Soylent doesn't manufacture their own product. They use a co-packer, RFI.

Just a nitpick: flout, not flaunt.

Thanks for the correction. (It's hard to type that without sounding sarcastic, but I really do appreciate it)

No worries.

It really seems like the authors are trying to excuse the unsanitary conditions when really it's not excusable to have them at any stage. Both the journalism and the topic at hand were disappointing. They have more than enough capital to keep the place clean, and you'd think it'd be at the top of their list given the huge (vocal) concern over personal health regarding their product.

As someone who drinks Soylent regularly, the most pertinent part of this article was the blood tests after the author went on a 30 day Soylent-only diet. "Doctors tested Merchant’s blood at the end of it, and the only nutrient he was deficient in was Vitamin D -- i.e. sunlight", which he says made sense because having Soylent handy meant he "wouldn’t have to leave the office". That's certainly good news.

If the mold was the result of shoddy shipping causing the bag to be punctured, it's hard not to take that with a grain of salt.

And as for the rat (singular -- not "rats" plural as the title says), certainly that has the "eww" factor, but so long as the mix itself was not exposed to any animals, I certainly don't care.

[edit: the article this post was linking to has changed, so my comment is a little dated]

> "And as for the rat (singular -- not "rats" plural as the title says)"

As someone who has (unfortunately) had to deal with rats before, there is no such thing as a singular rat. A singular rat you see represents many you do not in the vicinity.

By the time you can see a single rat on a simple walk-through of the facility, you have an infestation on your hands.

I wouldn't consider the 30 day test to be remotely significant. Maybe when we're talking about years Soylent can be considered safe...

You must be the dude still holding out on cell phones because of the microwaves?

Considering the earliest signs of scurvy start at the one month mark, I don't consider suspicion of a 30 day trial to be overly cautious.

What are the early signs of scurvy? I didn't see mention of that in the Vice article.

A feeling of general crumminess, tired all the time. Then comes the breathing problems and bone aches.

Per usual, there's a very informative wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#Symptoms

What about all of the foods in the grocery store than can kill you over years if eaten as a primary source of a diet? Are those considered "safe"?

* Not trying to advocate Soylent. Just trying to point out that there are a lot of foods in the grocery store that can kill over time (and many are marketed as full meals intended to be eaten regularly).

That seems like a pretty circular argument. Do you mean the ones that aren't supposed to be eaten as a primary source of a diet? Or do you mean the ones that are, indeed, harmful if they make up too much of your diet?

Either way, I'm not sure how that argument is supposed to build confidence in Soylent.

Eaten that way? Obviously no, they are not safe. That is why you should never suggest that they are eaten that way.... Don't eat only pears; It would be a stupid and dangerous thing to do.

You know why Soylent is receiving more criticism than pears? Because unlike pear vendors, they are suggesting that you eat their product that way.

There is an entire category of foods meant to be eaten as 'meal replacements', sold in grocery stores etc. Google it. Soylent is perhaps the best of the lot; its tailorable to your activity level etc. And yes you can eat Soylent for an extended time and feel better than if you ate McD's all the time, which millions of people do and yes, they live to tell about it.

The criticism is overheated and silly. Eat what you like, everybody else does. Lets cut out the unsolicited advice and scare tactics, it sounds silly and timid.

> What about all of the foods in the grocery store than can kill you over years if eaten as a primary source of a diet? Are those considered "safe"

This is very disengenous. The makers of Soylent have come out and said Soylent is the only thing you need to eat to have a full and balanced diet.

I can't think of a single other food at a grocery store that has made a similar promise as I dont' believe any food can do this.

I'm not seeing that quote in the link, but I have to say I think it's pretty sad if the only reason somebody goes outside is to get food.

I'm not a real fan of chewing food, but having done a similar diet before I prefer it. Turns out that even though me and food don't always get along, after 3 weeks on a liquid diet the cravings for real food for me come back. There are plenty of weightlifters who have done similar full-liquid diets for years before soylent, this data exists but has been largely ignored since it's from a different kind of community. Anyways - 30 days isn't enough, many items take longer to produce issues. Vitamin C comes to mind, it's destroyed by sunlight, copper (copper is good for destroying a few biological agents it seems, birth-control and Vitamin C, oh it's uses - but we need it as well so it'll be there in soylent in trace amounts), and age, but so little is needed to avoid scurvy, and it takes about 3 months from your last consumption of it to produce adverse results, that it wouldn't be an issue... in the short run.

To address your comment about animals: I saw animals that are littered with disease standing above the product. Standing, breathing without masks, talking without masks(which means trace amounts of spit), in standard clothes that've probably been exposed to much. The rat was far less disturbing than seeing the people who were handling the product.

Contrary to the blood-work, there is a issue that presented itself after 30 days. Not a nutrient deficiency, but a chewing one: he mentioned he started chewing gum due to his jaw aching. As far as I know chewing is supposed to help keep the jaw healthy (an expert/dentist has been sorely lacking from these soylent discussions, I imagine they'd have much to say about chewing, jaw, and tooth issues that crop up), and as someone who hasn't done a great job of that in life... I certainly wouldn't want to mess with jaw health anymore.

Yeah, I was pretty appalled to see one of the founders/employees measuring ingredients out of a box on the floor while wearing dirty espadrilles (canvas shoes). I suspect that if you look at the skepticism/support in this thread you'd see a strong correlation between people who have worked in food service at some time in their lives and those who haven't.

> There are plenty of weightlifters who have done similar full-liquid diets for years before soylent

Name one competitive weightlifter, powerlifter or bodybuilder that lived primarily on a shake made from powder for years.

As in people doing these diets years before soylent, not years on said diet. My grammar might not've been clear enough.

EDIT: Specifically I'm thinking of the hundreds (if not thousands by now) of people on T-Nation/Testosterone Nation who've done the 1-month Velocity diet, which is (or was, I haven't been there in years, but that particular diet has been around for at least 5 years+), a protein shake diet with very little solid food. There are years of people doing it for a month and relating their experiences, highlights and downfalls, and I'm sure there are several more experiences in that world that would provide better data points. However, it has the issue of being mostly anecdotal evidence.

As a long time beta user I have a bunch of problems with this piece:

- the Oakland space was a temporary location while they were iterating on the beta. Soylent is not manufactured there.

- all the journalists writing about Soylent seem to attribute to Rob stuff that he doesn't actually say: namely that you should only consume Soylent all the time. The point of Soylent is that it replaces transactional eating and makes me healthier. It's not about replacing the eating I do for fun.

- Soylent is a technology company. It's not just positioning. They are iterating towards finding an exponentially better way to do transactional eating using technology. That's the definition of a tech company.

Soylent is a technology company. It's not just positioning. They are iterating towards finding an exponentially better way to do transactional eating using technology. That's the definition of a tech company.

Well, any product is technology in that sense. But this particular technology, meal-replacement shakes, is already reasonably well established. What seems new to me is that Soylent is pitching itself to people who either don't know about or have failed to become interested in the existing products, which seems like a marketing innovation more than a tech innovation. They don't seem to be differentiating on technical quality or iteration. If you read their campaign, for example, it is entirely positioned against regular food, as if they have just invented the full-meal-replacement shake, and does not mention anything about technical innovation over existing competitors: https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

It's possible they also have technical innovation over any existing meal-replacement shake, but they are being very quiet about it if so.

The existing products have really terrible marketing. They sell them in pharmacies and generally broadcast a message of "for supplementation or diseased/senile people only".

Kudos to Soylent for trying to normalize liquid diets.

That's it. I had to read this far before I realized that's exactly what their core is: "trying to normalize liquid diets" (as in make them normal, acceptable, approachable, I think?). There's nothing natural (as in biologically normal, desirable or standard) about a liquid diet, so that's going to be an uphill battle.

I have some kind of psychological problem where I chew 5x more than normal people. This causes me to fill up on very small quantities of food and it's very difficult to hit 2000 calories a day without eating a lot of small meals or taking liquid supplements. So, at least for me, a liquid diet would be highly desirable.

As for biologically normal, it all turns into a liquid sludge in your stomach, doesn't it? Past that point I don't see how your digestive system can tell the difference as long as the composition of the sludge is similar enough.

A lot of the issues people have with Soylent seem to revolve around making it the only thing in your diet for extended periods. You're right that this is not how they are pushing it. I would never want to replace food with this entirely. If I were planning to have Soylent for dinner but some friends called up and asked if I wanted to grab a meal with them, I wouldn't hesitate for a second.

Because of this I don't worry if it's healthy enough to be the only thing I eat for a month, or if I would miss food, or be less social. This will never, and isn't designed to, replace all food.

iterating on the beta, transactional eating, exponentially better way, etc.

Give me a break.

How about linking to the original and not this blogspam? http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/soylent-no-food-for-30-days

I'm no fan of Soylent (mainly because it's all marketing hype, meal replacements have been around for decades) but this title is BS. He had a moldy shipment caused by damaged packaging and saw rats at a bar. BFD.

I watched the video. the rat is separated from the food preparation area by a sheet of plastic. This doesn't increase my confidence one iota.

He saw a rat in the food preparation factory. He also saw rats at a bar.

The preparation area shown in the video is hilariously disgusting. Fucking horrific.

I still expect them to come out as a huge troll. If so, 10/10, did rage, would rage again.

> “You’re not going to feed a booming population with organic farms,” Rob says.

This is a popular misconception. While organic farming requires far more labour than conventional farming and the yields are lower for the same land, it's not actually that much lower. We're talking about a 5-30% drop in yield. Not great, but not "OMG mass worldwide starvation" change. And that's while being vastly more efficient with fresh water.

Think about your average 3rd-world country and ask yourself what's in short supply - land, manpower, or fresh water?

Organic growing techniques use "vastly" less water? How so?

I'm guessing that there's a correlation between farmers who choose to grow organic and those who try to conserve water, but I can't see how one is "vastly" different.

There's pretty solid evidence that biointesive techniques use less water because they make better use of the same space. If I grow two tomato plants in the space I used to grow one, I waste less water.

But yes, you're right, I don't know if "vastly" is the word I would use.

Does biointensive === organic?

Organic is a loaded term nowadays, so maybe it's just semantics.

No. Really, singling out "biointensive" was unfair as any intensive agriculture would have the same benefit.

>Organic is a loaded term nowadays, so maybe it's just semantics.

So loaded as to be basically meaningless.

... yeah, I might've overstated that, which is particularly hypocritical given the thrust of my post.

Anyhow, I can't find the original article, but the idea is that organic farming techniques produce soil that's far better at retaining water and preventing wasteful evaporation.

Also, there's the secondary matter of fertilizer runoff contaminating local ground-water.

Honestly, I just don't get Soylent. What is the purpose?

As a health measure? The market for weight-loss shakes and other dietary solutions is saturated, and most of it appears to be complete shit. Dietary shakes are easy to come by, and are almost universally reviled because they don't work as advertised and taste disgusting.

Is Soylent a supposed to be a remedy for malnutrition? Why is drinking a bunch of vitamins a better option than taking a dietary supplement? How does Soylent account for the fact that nutrient absorption is less efficient in artificial supplements? Why not just eat quality, healthy human food?

But, far and away the worst and most appalling argument is that soylent is "convenient," and that it's beneficial to people who "don't have time to eat." I'm sorry, but if you can't find time to eat human food, the issue is your schedule, not the food. Correct me if I'm wrong, but eating is pretty fucking important. If you are in a position where feeding yourself actual sustenance is inconvenient, then there is a probably a severe deficiency with your schedule and a problem with your priorities.

> I'm sorry, but if you can't find time to eat human food, the issue is your schedule, not the food. Correct me if I'm wrong, but eating is pretty fucking important. If you are in a position where feeding yourself actual sustenance is inconvenient, then there is a probably a severe deficiency with your schedule and a problem with your priorities.

You don't sound very sorry. You sound incredibly judgmental of anyone who has different priorities than you.

Personally, I love food, I just hate preparing it. Spend 30 minutes to cook a meal that I will eat in 5? No thanks. So I eat out all the time, which is really fucking expensive.

You've heard of the PM triangle right? Same basic idea here. Food can be cheap, tasty, quick, and healthy, but not all at once. McDonalds is cheap, tasty, and quick but not healthy. That steak dinner you just cooked yourself is cheap, tasty, and healthy but not quick. I personally always pick the quick option, but the other items can vary. Thus I'm usually eating quick, tasty, and healthy items. I have trouble finding things that are quick, healthy, and cheap. This seems to fill that niche nicely.

It doesn't mean I'm going to suddenly stop eating out, but it will mean I spend less money in the long run, without having to spend extra time. For all of the comments on Hacker News about how time=money, even when you're not on the clock, you'd think this concept would make sense more immediately.

Is there a reason that OP linked to crummy PandoDaily fluff and not to original Vice video? If anyone wants to go straight to source.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/soylent-no-food-for-30-days

This is a pretty sensationalist headline, given that they're in a new factory, new offices, and the general findings of the experiment are so positive that the subject is considering going back on Soylent in the future.

The "mold" part of the title feels especially disingenuous.

There was literally mold on a month-old product. How is it disingenuous to say there are rats and mold?

You forget that this is a SV product. That wasn't mold, that was "eco-synergy".

Because the mold occurred when the packaging was compromised -- this is not related to the conditions of the manufacturing.

It might be related to the rat.

You might be a literate orangutan.

Figured I'd join in on the speculation while it's fresh.

Ook?

Eeeeek, ook.

His speculation seems more than fair, since we know they at least had a rat problem.

Packaging is part of the manufacturing process.

Soylent represents everything I hate about the valley.

Eating is broken. It's time to disrupt the digestive system!

How do you have >10avg comment karma? Snarky one-liners?

There seem to be a lot of "bros" involved in startup culture these days with sickening attitudes.

It's possible to recover from quality scares. Clover Food Lab, which got its start as one of the MIT food trucks, had to deal with a salmonella outbreak over the summer. These news reports and blog posts by the founder document what happened:

Salmonella outbreak sickens 12 in state, triggers closure of Clover restaurants: http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/2013/07...

Clover Food Lab delays reopening after Salmonella scare: http://www.metro.us/boston/news/local/2013/07/23/clover-to-r...

First response by the founder: http://www.cloverfoodlab.com/is-this-your-first-time/

Did we say Wednesday? We meant Thursday…: http://www.cloverfoodlab.com/did-we-say-wednesday-we-meant-t...

Read the blog posts by the founder, and the comments. Transparency about what was going on was key to keeping their customers informed, as well as curious members of the public. They also worked very closely with health officials. Clover was able to survive with its reputation intact.

Don't you think it says something about Silicon Valley that your first thought is to characterize this as a PR issue?

It's Airbnb "ransackgate" all over again ...

"If we focused too much on quality, we'd run out of VC money!"

The angry comments in every solyent article are pretty silly imho. You are under no obligation to use it. Those that do are still permitted to dine with family. :/ Any bugs will get worked out over time.

These days I usually make a smoothie for a quick breakfast... perhaps some unsweetened almond milk, protein/vitamin powder, ground flax seed, a bit of fruit/veggies, sometimes even a healthy oil. The concept is not terribly different than soylent.

I do like to keep my blood sugar in a moderate range, however. I might be interested in trying soylent if they had a low-carb version, one not significantly made of oats and maltodextrin.

> Any bugs will get worked out over time.

Meanwhile, they'll still market it as optimized nutrition to put you in perfect shape and fine for everyone even if they have allergies etc etc.

Maybe they've gone a bit far with that, but I've not yet encountered marketing that didn't put a positive spin on its product. As always take with a grain of salt.

What happens when the Move Fast and Break Things philosophy is applied outside software. :)

People dont realize what little regulations supplements face compared to "food".

Most products you buy at nutrition/health stores (like GNC/Vitamin Shoppe/etc.) are not really tested. You can pretty much be getting chalk and no one will know. Or you get an overdose of Ephedra and die.

See superdrol (anabolic steroid with high liver toxicity) and Craze (meth analog)

This was exactly what I was talking about. Muscle building supplements and bath salts.

Seems like Soylent is taking advantage if the entire industry loophole called supplements. If the loophole didn't exist, this type of entrepreneurship wouldn't.

Food companies are also doing real experiments. I don't see tasteless goop shakes disrupting the market any more than sport shakes.

EDIT: I stand corrected on the first paragraph. I still believe the 2nd to be true.

Soylent is a food and not a supplement. The commercial version of the product is being produced in an FDA approved and GMP certified facility - RFI.

I stand corrected. Good for them!

I love how nonchalant the CEO was when he called the VICE reporter to tell him not to eat any of the spoiled batch of Soylent.

It's unfortunate for Soylent to end up in such a situation given how easily it could have been prevented.

For me however it does not discount the product in the least, and I would expect a rethinking of the production process to be posted soon in response.

While it may not take away from the product itself, I think that this definitely shows some level of inexperience from the people behind Soylent. The idea is there, but the process hasn't been perfected.

Unfortunately, when dealing with matters of health and sanitation, you don't have the luxury of trial-and-error iteration.

some level

They're just treating nutrition like we build databases. Ignore all relevant history, research, field knowledge and make up what you want for yourself. Iterate until downtime/heart issues stop.

they will fix that in the next agile iteration.

;)

> For me however it does not discount the product in the least

You can get better products from reputable companies.

Or you can buy this gloop, from a bunch of people who clearly have little clue about what they're doing.

Perhaps I should clarify, I would hate to see this hurt the entire industry. If Soylent does not do a complete rethinking after what has happened I expect someone else to take their place.

They're using a copacker now, which means a proper, approved, factory. So things should be much better for the actual product.

I dislike the way the founder keeps saying “I want to be totally transparent,” - but only after someone has seen a rat or found mold or whatever.

The algae stuff sounds interesting. Is anyone already working on it?

> You can get better products from reputable companies.

What products specifically?

Ensure / fortisip / Optifast (as seen in the video in the submutted link, where the doctor tells him that liquid total food replacements have been available for decades) / etc etc etc.

Here's Abbott Nutrition http://abbottnutrition.com/

Here's Nutricia https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//

It's frustrating that this question is asked, and answered, every single time Soylent is mentioned, and people then dishonestly say that these products are somehow not meant to be used as a sole source of nutrition, even though that's how they're regulated and sold.

Yep. My mom got all her nutrition from Ensure for a couple months after stomach surgery. She lived.

Thanks, I'm going to try some Ensure.

I've also been drinking Carnation Breakfast Essentials occasionally but I'm not sure how much different it is from drinking a glass of chocolate milk and a multivitamin.

Plus, at least one of those products is available a block away from me at the supermarket.

It is not "unfortunate" it is incompetent. They basically do not know what they are doing. Why did they start manufacture when they were not set up properly?

I think a lot of software startups do extremely similar things with customer privacy. In fact there are probably places where the security flaws are worse than anything Soylent is doing.

That is not to excuse it, more to shed light on the fact that it is much more apparent when they are failing in the food industry.

> In fact there are probably places where the security flaws are worse than anything Soylent is doing.

As an experiment, ask people whether they'd rather risk having their credit card number compromised or risk becoming violently ill from a foodborne illness.

I bet they won't even ask the odds when they give their answer.

That's an excellent way to put it in perspective, I completely agree.

I think they've gotten very lucky that no one has gotten seriously ill from that manufacturing first set up. Hopefully that has and will continue to improve.

Perhaps they should have hired someone who knew anything about food production. Instead they hired a frat buddy to be a Chief of Customer Success. Hope he has experience handling foodborne illnesses.

This is, IMO, the stupidest thing ever. Why just WHY give up on food? Cooking and enjoying food is one of our essential pleasures in life; I just can't see myself replacing it to some hipster matrix-like shake of nutrients. Just no thank you.

Anyway the title feels a lot misleading for someone that is used to do water fast. That is truly 'eating no food', and some do it for lengths of 30 days (yes it's safe for most people).

Cooking your own food, experimenting around and occasionally doing some fasting is, again IMO, the true way to eat happy and healthy. That's what I do.

Some people really hate the whole process of shopping, cooking, and eating. Or, at least, they're tired of spending hours every day on it. Can you really not think of anything you'd rather do with your time?

Sure, of course. Nowadays every single piece of 'time' is invaluable to be productive, to get rich, to achieve something.

But we lose the pleasure in the process. Sure, I'm not able to cook a pleasant meal on midweek as I do on my weekends. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to the extreme of blending all up and feed myself with a straw. Finding a balance is the way to go.

The three NYC food critics (11:20 in the video) really bugged me. Their immediate smug dismissal of the product and idea was predetermined. Maybe I'm reading too much into what was shown, but I got the impression that there was no possible world in which they give Soylent a chance.

I'm not necessarily a believer, but I'm noticing this behavior more and more often as I get older and it's increasingly bothering me.

> Their immediate smug dismissal of the product and idea was predetermined. Maybe I'm reading too much into what was shown, but I got the impression that there was no possible world in which they give Soylent a chance.

Why would they? The best possible case is that it tastes like a milkshake or malt or something good like that. At which point, they're still arguing against a monoculture of millions of identical milkshakes, which are still hell for anyone who actually enjoys food.

I'd expect any food critic's attitude toward this stuff to make their attitude towards corporate fast food look pretty mild by comparison.

I believe no one associated with Soylent has ever claimed it to be a culinary delight, and no one is trying to stop people from enjoying food when they want to eat for that purpose. To have these critics evaluating Soylent by their usual metrics in a pseudo-experimental setting is disingenuous. The guy critic even used the word "stupid". It's not a stupid, it's just not good at something it never claimed to be good at.

From a different perspective, has anyone ever taken the time to read local health department restaurant inspection reports (if available)?

I assume most people here eat at restaurants without too much concern, but if you ever read the reports, you'll find experienced industry professionals cited for far worse infractions than these.

I live in the UK. My local town has a 5 start system. "rats in the same building" would get a place shut down.

What makes Solyent special vs other meal replacements? I take a meal replacement called Raw Meal (only one meal a day) that's make mostly from sprouts. I feel great when I make myself do it every day. Is the difference that Solyent isn't made from any plant material but rather is raw chemicals?

Best part of this for me was the information that the Optifast product exists. I hope soylent is successful, but I like knowing there are existing total-meal-replacement competitors I can order now on amazon (which I just did).

Gross, why are human beings packing Soylent?

I feel like you can get 90% of the way to soylent's promises with whey protein milkshakes, multi-vitamins and fish oil. Toss some fiber in that diet and you get the rest of the way. Athlete? add some creatine to your morning shake and eat something with more carbs post workout (carbohydrate supplement powder works great and is cheap). Having a minimalist diet isn't rocket science, but I guess it is reassuring to have that stamp on the bottle that says a doctor approved of the macro-nutrient ratios.

"Lacking background in chemistry or nutrition, Rhinehart developed the formula through research and self-experimentation." (from the Wikipage article)

OMG, yes, that sounds like a totally reliable product to, you know, like, trust one's own existence to.

Not to mention the incredibly sad, and dehumanizing experience of losing all the marvellous things of a great meal that are not related to nutrition: textures, flavor, a time to disconnect and relax, a time to chat with friends, family, etc, just to mention a few obvious ones.

For those who feel like they are missing out on the social aspect of eating out. Perhaps restaurants can start offering Soylent-based meals in their menu but with a twist. Instead of a plain shake in a cup, they could mold and dye the Soylent powder to look like a natural food like an apple, strawberry, or even a steak and serve it on a plate.

No stigma from having to turn down a restaurant invitation or a get together with friends.

I've been following this story since the beginning, and here's the part that I'm baffled that people always forget:

They're open-sourcing the recipe.

That should remove all the accusations of it being a scam. If it's a scam, it will be easily proved such.

If there are nutritional problems, they can be fixed, either in the official branch, or in one of the many forks which already exist.

I found this very troubling:

"I wasn’t drinking enough water. At the factory, Rob told me that was a common mistake; since Soylent is a shake, people figure they don’t have to drink extra water—an easy way to get dehydrated."

Failing so thoroughly to communicate how to use your product that users become dehydrated within two days is a serious mistake, though thankfully not a common one.

I'm really tempted to set up a kickstarter for a documentary of me living for 6 months on the various existing liquid feeds.

It'll be tricky getting a doctor to fit a feeding tube up my nose, but I'm sure someone would do it. (Bit scary using non-medical people because of the risk of the tube going into a lung.)

I wouldn't mind eating this once and a while when I'm low on time and don't want to drive somewhere or whip something up.

I wouldn't see myself eating this ONLY, cause the video did bring up a good point, eating is also a social thing. Hey babe you want to go back to my place and eat some soylent?

We can cook it, oh wait, don't have time.

Meh. Sensationalist piece. I know Vice and the shenanigans they use to get headlines. I trust none of it.

My initial thought was " Don't most people that go on weight loss diets shake do this anyway?" ... followed by "whats actually different about this product and existing food replacement shake diets?"

I'd kill (well, pay up to $600/mo) for a low-carb version of Soylent. Even if he made it in a (clean) residential kitchen, although I'd prefer if RFI did it under contract.

Even better if you could get monthly blood analysis and then have your Soylent customized for you.

SoylentPro, perhaps.

Disruptive!

> Eating will become like boozing—something we do recreationally with friends, or as a hobby

or, part of the grimdark future where the trend of hobby eating sends the prices of food out of reach of the lower 7/8 of society

IS the stuff on vice.com real? I read about a guy who claimed to only eat raw meat, and it seemed a bit far fetched.

Ok, this Solyent is believable, but why??? Eating is one of life pleasures.

I would compare this to a tech startup becoming the victim of an exploit. i.e. an injurious but not life-threatening data hack. There are many examples of hacks on tech startups due to technical malfeasance that sometimes show neglect in the handling of data or poor planning in the current operation of the system.[0]

I think Soylent has plenty of potential and while this will darken views toward the brand for a time, it will most likely recover. The idea is too good.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/2009/monday-morning-madness

doesn't your digestive system have to re learn some tricks if it's not used for a long time ?

I Quit watching the video at the part were he says "i was eating leafs, it so strange".

Zuckerburg will drink Soylent only if he can kill it first.

These top comments are really the worst of HN. Thoughtless, emotional vitriol.

Until Soylent is proved unsafe, there is no basis for calling it unsafe.

We see unsuitably dressed workers scooping powders from uncovered boxes on a factory floor into other boxes to be mixed, with rats in the factory.

They've left that factory now, but it's telling that even though Rob didn't think the factory was suitable for a number of reasons he still went ahead and prepared and shipped product to (I assume) paying beta testers.

What more do you need?

Eh. I'm not so squeamish. I know that pretty much every restaurant will have or has had rodents, it's just part of life.

Agreed.

I think part of the backlash is from Soylent's hubris about how it's perfectly optimized, etc. I think we have a long way to go before drawing any conclusion, but it's a promising technology.

> Until Soylent is proved unsafe, there is no basis for calling it unsafe.

This is exactly backwards, and is precisely the reasoning scammers use to sell worthless treatments.

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