The End of Food?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Well, to be frank, I'd rather be eating. What's the point of your life if you don't have time to even eat, let alone enjoy yourself.
If you were never hungry, would you eat for enjoyment?
Soylent's premise is that you have time to do other fun or profitable things instead of making time for a meal.
The texture of life is varying psycho-physiological states. What is fun without these? Well, other things are fun too but missing the experience of a great meal after a hard days work seems just sad.
ps: didn't mean to vote you to negative, I expected your post to have a positive score and to give an "I disagree" downvote.
Absolutely, I would. The range of sensations available through the consumption food is second only to sex in its breadth and power and sensuality. Anyone who would forego that because it's "inconvenient" utterly baffles me.
And at the same time, there are people who drink only when they want to get drunk -- or who abstain altogether, not liking the bite of alcohol or the consequence it conjures. And that's totally normal.
I think it's more likely than not that at some point in the future, eating food will be the same way -- there will be a pronounced spectrum of interest once it's decoupled from the need for subsistence.
Eating tasty, whole some food is one of the biggest joys of life.
>>Soylent's premise is that you have time to do other fun or profitable things instead of making time for a meal.
Your productivity problems will come due many other factors than breaking for a meal. If anything breaking for a meal will ensure you will come back and work with a lot more focus.
From a nutritional perspective, $3 is pretty decent for a balanced meal. Much healthier than fast-food at that price. Obviously you can cook real food on $3 a meal, but some people can't always plan for that.
I'd love to add something like Soylent to my "arsenal" to make it easier to skip cooking now and again and make calorie control easier. I manage to keep my weight by regularly counting calories, but it's incredibly tedious and easy to slip up with.
I'd rather focus my enjoyment on a smaller set of high quality meals a week.
"Good morning," said the little prince.
"Good morning," said the merchant.
This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to
quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you
would feel no need of anything to drink.
"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.
"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the
merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these
pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."
"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"
"Anything you like . . ."
"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had
fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my
leisure toward a spring of fresh water."
Every time Soylent comes up, I'm reminded of The Matrix, where the crew is discussing the food eaten outside of the Matrix:
> Dozer: It's a single celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.
> Mouse: It doesn't have everything the body needs.
I've bonded with countless friends over meals. I've bonded with co-workers over meals. The whole "eating" thing, while it is the point of a meal, requires people to (usually) stop, and take time out of their day to do not much but eat and talk. It's not "profitable" and the food prep takes work, but the time spent with other human beings is — to me — anything but pointless.
As a one-off, I suppose, though they're making it about as unappetizing as possible. There are frozen burritos, and they taste better. The biggest argument seems to be "they're unhealty": well, yes, but you're not supposed to eat them all the time. Most "comfort food" is not healthy, physically — it's for your mind. Honestly, I wonder if the lack of social interaction from fast meals wouldn't cause negative mental health effects. (And whether that would outweigh the gains in physical health.) I personally detest eating at my desk: it's lonely.
But, maybe the creator gets this. Buried in that article,
> [The fridge] contained Miller Lite, condiments, and a pitcher of Soylent. I noticed a bag of baby carrots: food! Rhinehart, who refers to food that is not Soylent as “recreational food,” […]
Of course, > Well, to be frank, I'd rather be eating. What's the point of your life if you don't have time to even eat, let alone enjoy yourself.
Every time Soylent comes up, I'm reminded of The Matrix, where the crew is discussing the food eaten outside of the Matrix:
> Dozer: It's a single celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.
> Mouse: It doesn't have everything the body needs.
I've bonded with countless friends over meals. I've bonded with co-workers over meals. The whole "eating" thing, while it is the point of a meal, requires people to (usually) stop, and take time out of their day to do not much but eat and talk. It's not "profitable" and the food prep takes work, but the time spent with other human beings is — to me — anything but pointless.
As a one-off, I suppose, though they're making it about as unappetizing as possible. There are frozen burritos, and they taste better. The biggest argument seems to be "they're unhealty": well, yes, but you're not supposed to eat them all the time. Most "comfort food" is not healthy, physically — it's for your mind. Honestly, I wonder if the lack of social interaction from fast meals wouldn't cause negative mental health effects. (And whether that would outweigh the gains in physical health.) I personally detest eating at my desk: it's lonely.
But, maybe the creator gets this. Buried in that article,
> [The fridge] contained Miller Lite, condiments, and a pitcher of Soylent. I noticed a bag of baby carrots: food! Rhinehart, who refers to food that is not Soylent as “recreational food,” […]
Of course,
> Brown grabbed a taco and tore open a piece of “chicken.” [(Beyond Meat, a meat substitute for vegetarians/vegans or anyone who wants it)] The white substance was remarkably meatlike: it tasted slightly fatty, and the texture resembled muscle fibre. “See how this pulls?” Brown said. “This is really what sets us apart.”
Beyond meat does match the look of chicken quite incredibly. The taste, not so much. I've found that it tends to taste good when accompanied with other stuff (such as in a taco, which has a variety of toppings), but that the taste comes from the toppings, not the "meat", which is itself pretty bland.
> “There’s no afternoon crash, no post-burrito coma.”
That I might welcome.
> Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad.
This is my concern. (The author then proceeds to visit a bagel shop, and is thankful that he isn't eating the unhealthy bagel, which may distract from the "featureless" problem, but is otherwise unanswered.)
But then, I also tend to like doing dishes, I think because it's one of the few parts of my day where things slow down and I'm not longer forced to be thinking, and I can finally — ironically — think. > Brown grabbed a taco and tore open a piece of “chicken.” [(Beyond Meat, a meat substitute for vegetarians/vegans or anyone who wants it)] The white substance was remarkably meatlike: it tasted slightly fatty, and the texture resembled muscle fibre. “See how this pulls?” Brown said. “This is really what sets us apart.”
Beyond meat does match the look of chicken quite incredibly. The taste, not so much. I've found that it tends to taste good when accompanied with other stuff (such as in a taco, which has a variety of toppings), but that the taste comes from the toppings, not the "meat", which is itself pretty bland.
> “There’s no afternoon crash, no post-burrito coma.”
That I might welcome.
> Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad.
This is my concern. (The author then proceeds to visit a bagel shop, and is thankful that he isn't eating the unhealthy bagel, which may distract from the "featureless" problem, but is otherwise unanswered.)
But then, I also tend to like doing dishes, I think because it's one of the few parts of my day where things slow down and I'm not longer forced to be thinking, and I can finally — ironically — think.
In the future, we might see a wider gap between what's eaten for sustenance versus enjoyment.
It's similar to stories about electric cars. Someone will always comment about how electric cars won't work for people who have to drive 500 km non stop on a daily basis, therefore they are doomed to failure.
That said, when my month's supply arrives, I'm looking forward to giving up food for a month entirely in favor of brown paste. I see it as a fun opportunity for an interesting cleanse --not a permanent lifestyle change.
Every report I've read from people trying out a 100% Soylent diet has been consistent: You feel fine. Your jaw gets stiff from underuse (chewing gum is recommended). You poop less and less often. The biggest problem is really social awkwardness. Eating with people is important. It's awkward being the guy at the table with a bottle of brown paste.
I had not heard of this side effect. I would have thought that regular talking would have sufficed. Very interesting!
Because the original posts about it talked about replacing almost all meals with it, to the extent that it included a description of how replacing almost all meal with it caused Rhinehart to almost stop defecating.
And because it's easier to get media interested in a story they can title "The end of food" or "The Man Who Would Make Food Obsolete" (recent Atlantic headline) rather than "Yet another meal replacement".
And because a marketing aspect of Soylent is the idea that even if you probably won't replace every meal with it, you can.
(For my part I'm interested in it to try replacing some meals - certainly not all - but that angle would certainly make for a whole lot less PR interest)
Wasn't that it's original pitch? I'm pretty sure that when the Soylent guy first started talking about his idea the Unique Selling Point, compared to all the other meal replacement products already out there, was that Soylent would be the first product engineered to completely and permanently replace the need for any other food.
There's still too much we don't know about how we get nutrients from food to be able to fully replace fresh unpackaged products with powders. I suspect we're still at least a few decades away from being able to do that safely on the long term.
Nutrition research has been terribly inconclusive for the past century and there's no indication that this is changing anytime soon. It's not the researchers' fault: the domain is incredibly complex when you take in consideration various timespans, all the various human generic permutations etc.
I doubt Soylent will be better or worse for you than the diet of a typical HN user if taken in the long term. Time will also tell: if after 5 years no adverse health effects are reported after a sufficient number of heavy users begin drinking it, then that's probably as best a "green light" as one could ever get.
This seems a little ignorant to me. Farms (at least in Australia) are amazingly industrialized. I visited my cousin's dairy farm recently and one person was working at milking dozens of cows at a time.
I walked away with the image that modern farmers are technical early adopters, looking at ways technology can improve their return on investment.
There is something true when he says that farms are inefficient factories. They sometimes fail to give a proper income to the famer, considering the work they put in. But for me the solution is not overspecialized industrialized farms growing one crop for the rest of the world. It would be better to have highly versatile farms dedicated to fulfill the needs of specific areas to minimize transportation impact. I've never seen any environnemental protection concern related to the soylent production. It's all about saving time while eating healthy.
I saw a documentary about chinese farmers growing tomatoes. They could not imagine eating what they were growing. Pretty sad for a farmer.
That said, I quickly had to come up with a better name than Soylent. I call mine Science (for human consumption). It makes it distinct from food. "Did you get lunch?" "No, I just had Science today."
The idea is great in specific context. People have been living on single food item in multiple occasions so far. CBB to find references for all now, its easy if you need them but there are known cases of
1. Potato only for 6 months (http://goo.gl/XqxMx)
2. Bananas only for months (i.e. extreme '30 bananas a day' diet)
3. Meat only for a year (Vilhjalmur Stefansson)
4. Water only for > year (in extreme obese case).
5. Protein powder only (i.e. Last chance diet, case to the point of what could get wrong. )
6. Synthetics only (I am sure Kurzweill probably experimented with this with his 200++ pills per day).
7. MC Donalds for a month
... and so on
Its important to note that inventors are young people. Young people are very resilient - they also have full reserves of stem cells that are used to repair damage. Soylent might speed up this process because it certainly doesn't contain 'everything body needs' (because we don't know this at the current technological level) in which case one theory is that body will use its triage system (Ames) to redirect resources to the systems that are most important and shut down or reduce output in less important systems for immediate survival (such as reproduction). More appropriate would be to say 'everything body tolerates for a period'. Its certainly far better move then eating only pasta or rice for entire day.
One may hope that whatever is the eventual damage that could be done to you by use of this food surrogate is going to be fixed by the future medicinal, yet to be discovered, techniques.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5369778
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6175079
his blog: http://robrhinehart.com/
A short documentary style video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg
I know this is a bit of an extreme comparison to make, but the "risk" between soylent and traditional food should be quite a lot.
In other words, a sample size of one.
I haven't an opinion on the safety of the product, but a sample size of one only proves it's not an outright poison. It's likely not actively harmful, but still, nutrition is a complicated thing.
I just think the whole idea of it couldn't be more depressing. People who don't get enjoyment out of food freak me out a bit. There are few things I enjoy more than cooking and eating well prepared food.
It doesn't have to be either/or and certainly the end of food. I love to cook and take a lot of care about what I eat. This probably is never going to change. But on occasion I would love to be able to slurp down a meal and not have to worry about it. I wouldn't consider living on something like this though and I don't know why anyone else would either.
Whenever discussions of Soylent come up, I always wonder - would the same people who want to take Soylent also agree to taking a people that made their sex drive disappear? It will definitely save time and money to not have to worry about sex, after all.
NOTE: This is not a pro- or anti- Soylent sentiment, it's a mind experiment.
I've never heard anyone say that sex is a chore, but I often feel that way cooking food that I don't want to eat, but have to because I'm hungry.
But other differences are that: lots of the food you eat when you have no time (microwaveable dinners, tacos, fast food) is really really unhealthy for you. Relieving yourself sexually in the normal way is never unhealthy for for you (and is actually quite healthy). Quenching hunger also takes hours and costs money. Sexual release can be quick, and is free.
I really hope that reading the word "sex" in a [thoroughly unsexy] hacker news comment wouldn't get anyone fired.
It's certainly not a revolution by any means
To be clear: I'm not biased against Soylent. If it's indeed just as healthy as regular food it can save a lot of time, and maybe it can even solve some hunger issues in the third world. I'm merely saying it should be studied more before jumping on the bandwagon. I mean, it's made by a 25 year old electrical engineer who failed a cheap cellphone tower startup. In an apartment in The Tenderloin. If you want to put your life in his hands by all means go ahead, but I'll just stick with actual food for now, at least until I see the results of some clinical trials.
On a side note: food as a business is hard. Medicin is even harder. There are so many rules, regulations, government agencies, etcetera. They're mostly there for a reason: to keep food and medicine safe. I hope these guys realize what they're getting into. If there's only a hint of claiming something is 'just as healty as regular food' you're opening a giant can of worms...
> I mean, it's made by a 25 year old electrical engineer who failed a cheap cellphone tower startup. In an apartment in The Tenderloin. If you want to put your life in his hands by all means go ahead
When you buy a burrito at Chipotle you're eating something that's made by a 19-year-old who's probably failed at something too, but it'd be weird to call eating that burrito "putting your life in his hands".
The world food programme already have a wide range of supplements that are produced in developing nations and are much cheaper than Soylent.
Note that Soylent requires clean water to mix, and a large proportion of the world don't have clean water.
Perhaps the main difference between Soylent and drinks like Ensure and Muscle Milk lies in the marketing
It's amazing how taking an old product and repackaging it for a different purpose can be a source of business success and glory. I believe this is the story behind both Coca Cola and RedBull.