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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate to see that the product uses animal-based foods, and eggs at that. Something like Soylent should in my opinion be vegan (for the environment and the animals). If I recall correctly, Soylent was pretty close to vegan.

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We see vegans as a huge potential market, because right now being a vegan is a ton of work since you have so many restrictions on how you get vital nutrients. But in the same way being a vegan is a ton of work for you, a meal replacement bar for vegans is also a lot trickier to develop. So we're definitely going to prioritize veganism for future MealSquares product lines if we get there.

That's excellent news! Thanks!

A bit offtopic, but I'm always sad that more research hasn't been done in making eggs/milk cruelty-free - that the "cruely-free science" went straight to synthetic meat. I'd love to see more research in mass-cloning female chickens to avoid the "sexing" problem, or painless alternatives to de-beaking, or hormonally-induced lactation in cows. Even the ideal pastoral rural hobby egg-farmer has intrinsically cruel aspects because of the useless male chicks and occasional violence between chickens... but it feels like these would be lower hurdles to overcome with technology than weaving synthetic beef on a magical meat-loom.

I think it's because cruelty-free is already quite easy to get: just buy food from local, organic farms that actually raise animals instead of mass-producing them.

But my point is that even local organic farms have to deal with the useless males problem. For eggs: if they have a rooster to breed more chickens, they kill the male hatchlings as soon as they're old enough to be sexed (which can be at birth or a few weeks later depending on the sophistication of their sexing techniques). If they purchase their chickens from a breeder, the same problem exists there.

I mean, simple respectable pain-management could help with de-beaking, but the existence of unwanted male birds is a hard problem.

I'd be a lot more comfortable with ovo/lacto vegetarianism (which is what I do) if those problems could be solved, and I'm no luddite - if there was a high-tech solution to these problems using crazy cloning techniques or somehow inducing parthenogenesis or something, that would be great.

I agree. The good news is that there's Hampton Creek Foods, who are researching egg replacements: https://hamptoncreekfoods.com/

Unfortunate for you, but I bet most people (like myself) don't think this is a problem.

Not a problem, more an missed opportunity. There are a pretty large market of Veg*n folks, why exclude?

One of Soylent's marketing points is that it's 100% vegan, IIRC. My criticisms for Soylent aside, I would actually be willing to try it. I'm sure those of us who object to an animal product-based meal replacement are in the minority though, and I'm sure this product will carve its niche right along Soylent.

I find it unfortunate that it doesn't contain more animal products. I do love me some tasty animals.

The Vegan option for Soylent is to order it without the otherwise included fish oil additive.

because most people, myself included, don't really give a shit about that.

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