The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable
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I'm a foodie. I delight in trying new dishes, restaurants and cuisines. I'm also a marked extrovert. I constantly seek out social settings and experiences. Combined with my ineptitude at cooking and address in Manhattan, we have why I eat one to three meals out a day. I manage the healthfulness of my diet with simple rules. Salads for lunch, finish all the greens on your plate before moving to other things, defaulting to seafood over red meat, etc.
But this comes at a cost, both in dollars and in time. Many times, a meal will go half eaten, because I have to rush out for a call. Other times, dinner gets pushed out so late that the only options aren't healthy. Yes, I could schedule meals into the day, but sometimes I prefer doing other things. And it's not just work! I feel starved during film festivals, too, between full schedules and my refusal to feed on solely popcorn and tapas for two weeks.
I don't think too many people will ever seriously replace a majority of their meals with something like Soylent. But even shifting my weekday lunches and late-night snacks from salads, paninis and starving to something cheap, healthy, and available would be welcome. A prerequisite to this would be Soylent not tasting like pancake batter. Utility doesn't have to be unpleasant. But there is a place for this amongst people who love food, love people, and aren't necessarily workaholics.
People mentioned all of the existing similar products.
Soylent supporters said that those products are only supplements, and you could if you wanted live on mothing but Soylent. (Those people are wrong about the other products - you can live on some of them).
Now some Soylent supporters are saying "of course you wouldn't live on it. It's just for supplemental use." In which case, what advantages does Soylent have over all the other products?
Other products come in a range of flavours; you can get unflavoured versions; you can get savoury versions; you can get formulations designed for naso-gastric feeding and, importantly, they've got many dietitians and registered nutritionists working with them. (I realise that Soylent have nutritionists now.)
There are plenty of products available to you today that you could use tha do mot taste like pancake batter. They're not particularly pleasant.
Soylent proposes an alternative to cheap $0.50 noodles that is a lot healthier. I know if it was available when I was a college student, it would probably have been in my pantry. I haven't tried Soylent yet, but probably will give it a shot to fill in those meals I can't make due to time constraints.
You are absolutely correct, and I should have been more clear about the complete-meal-replacement aspect. I was referring to the small segment of people that would love to replace every meal with something like Soylent. So maybe "complete-food-replacement" would have conveyed my intended meaning a bit better.
I too ate lots of Ramen in college, but in order to prevent myself from wanting to slit my wrists, I'd usually seek out at least one meal a day with some nutiritional value, and, more importantly, flavor that wasn't just salt water.
I certainly can't, and that's the niche Soylent fills. It markets itself to the mass market.
My problem with these supplements is the amounts of vitamins for example contained in a product say nothing of absorption, I'm not even sure we have any good information on absorption. I guess you'd have to put people in a lab, control their eating and drinking for a several weeks and weigh and examine their BMs and fluids to know what's being absorbed.
It's true, the market has an itch: people are health conscious and want to eat well but they are stretched for time (and money in most cases). But is a nutrient extract meal-replacement the answer?
After investigating the obstacles people in Toronto face with preparing healthy food, this is what we, at Meal Garden (http://www.mealgarden.com), have come to understand:
There's almost always a trade-off between TASTE, CONVENIENCE(time/money), and HEALTH. If the meal satisfies two out of three, most people will opt to eat that meal. But one of those three priorities is compromised - and that is the market itch that Soylent has not been able to scratch. But it doesn't have to be a "two-out-out-of-three" trade-off.
Food should (and can) be healthy, convenient and taste amazing all at the same time. But people need shortcuts and tools to connect them to food providers in their area. As well as a general health guide on what options are healthier than others.
All this can definitely be done given the right amount of time to build these marketplace tools (web and mobile applications to be more specific).
Costs $5, 45 - 60 minutes of my time, and is probably less nutritious than the $3 Soylent. And I have to do something similar at least twice a day every day. I don't understand how people don't see the improvement here.
I don't understand how anyone can see a horribly tasteless, gastrointestinal disturbing, chalky goop could be an improvement on literally any other option.
But, I am excited to prepare and eat my meals every day. The taste of the food and the experience of eating is important to me (as is the forced time away from keyboard). Not everyone feels the same way, obviously (though they are wrong! ;) ).
Pick three.
ABC = Homecooked meals, ACD = fast food, BCD = eating out, ABD = Soylent. Not complicated. Soylent provides a specific set of design tradeoffs that suit certain situations better than the alternatives.
If it tastes like gritty pancake batter, it can't be any worse than a diet of brussels sprouts, turnips, rutabagas, radicchio, eggplant, etc.
[1] http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/2/157.full
[2] http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060918/full/news060918-1.htm...
[3] http://tools.lifetechnologies.com/content/sfs/manuals/qPCR_l...
Being at the very end of the supply chain, they got the worse, least desirable MREs after the variety had been cherry-picked by everyone else upstream. I forget exactly which ones they were but it was pretty grim.
Of course this advice might not apply in a 400 sq. ft. NYC studio without two burners and room for two pans, but for most people that's not the issue.
I know how to pan sear a fish and stir fry vegetables, but what I didn't know was how to do grocery shopping for 1 without ending up with wasted/spoiled food. For me, it's not the cooking that's hard, it's the grocery shopping/meal planning.
These are exactly the shortcuts and "cooking infrastructures" we're designing for busy people and families at Meal Garden (http://www.mealgarden.com). If healthy rated meals can easily be procured or prepared we wouldn't need bandaid solutions like Soylent.
From 2002 to 2005 I researched nutrition and supplements _a lot_. Long story short, what's cheap, healthy, "pleasurable" (non-sexually), and fast/easy to make? Vegetables, whole-wheat bread or brown rice (pasta), an assortment of nuts, a protein shake (protein powder, milk, flax seed powder, spinach, and blueberries), and vitamins/supplements (multivitamin, fish oil, others I take for brain health/performance).
Works great! And when I eat out (again non-sexually) I have chicken breast, turkey, or fish.
Christ, it's as if he's willfully ignored everything; that's the POINT of Soylent, to give the option of a functional meal not for pleasure, so that you actually have a choice whether. Right now you don't, you have non-nutritious meals that don't take preparation time and are cheap, and nutritious meals that take vast amounts of time to prepare and/or are generally more expensive to acquire/prepare.
Now you have a third choice, complete nutrition at cost, minus the pleasure associated with the above two choices.
Soylent strikes me as a food not unlike MREs for the military or some of the dehydrated food that astronauts take up to space. That is, it could be the kind of nutrition that targets people in extreme circumstances, who might desperately need nutrition and energy but, because they're in the middle of a war zone, or in a space suit hovering above Earth, cannot get to it.
Pleasurable or not, Soylent does offer huge value in these situations simply in that it's a way to not die.
The famous Ethiopian famine was the direct result of a war.
Just because it's cheap for people in the first world doesn't mean it's cheap for people in the third world. It's really important to remember that.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/nestles-infant-formula-scanda...
Also if they don't have access to clean water they have bigger problems than access to food.
And yes, they do have bigger problems. And yet access to food is still one of their problems. And giving them food that needs water added doesn't help them.
Furthermore, there's no reason Soylent can't be baked into a solid form and distributed/eaten that way.
It's not even a disruptive product--there have been similar meal replacement shakes available at Whole Foods for many years now, at similarly outrageous prices. Soylent's innovation is its marketing--especially in identifying and chasing its target market.
Here is one manufacturer. http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands
I live in a third world country and I buy from the market at really low prices. At first this $3 figure seemed off the mark, but upon further consideration it's true, you could live on that much for a while at market prices.
But it means a couple of bowls of rice and a small quantity of nutrient-unknown vegetables, with a few bites of some D-grade, fatty bony meat to live on less than $0.50 a day of food. Obviously, this is going to lead to malnourishment and an early death if they can't supplement with something else.
Lots of people keep small farm animals for an easy boost. A neighbor of mine had a 2-year old dog that started to eat her own chickens. After trying to correct the dog's behavior, it didn't work, so they killed the dog, cooked it and offered me some (I didn't bite, but it was considerate of them.)
Perspective.
Soylent needs clean water and currently costs a couple of hundred dollars per month.
20% of the world's population live on less than $1.25 per day. About one billion people lack access to clean water.
http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/index.htm...
The World Food Programme already has a range of products to use for develping nations. See their information, especially the pricing, here.
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition
http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
"Fights world hunger" is just another claim made by Soylent in apparent ignorance of what already exists.
Currently the answer for me is subway on campus. It's not a good answer. The dilemma of "I need food right now" is severely understated in our current society, and probably a not insignificant causative of obesity (just about everything you can get quickly is terrible for you).
It's possible that, for some people, Soylent (and similar products) is the only place where benefit exceeds cost. Perhaps the only foods you enjoy are extremely unhealthy. Or perhaps you don't have the time or money to buy and prepare fresh food for yourself.
> It’s true that people sometimes eat meals that are mainly for sustenance (cheap frozen dinners, dried ramen, corn dogs) and other times we’re looking mostly for pleasure (72-hour short ribs). But I suspect that most of the time, for most meals, we want both sustenance and pleasure.
There you go. By the way, there are plenty of "third choices" as you state it, and have been for years. Soylent is nothing new, just YC startup noise.
And honestly, when the world seems to be moving towards whole foods, organic meals, and avoiding processed foods, this seems to be going in the opposite direction. Not saying it has bad ingredients, but that the appearance of being processed will dissuade people.
I'm working on the website Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).
With Soylent, I know exactly how many calories I'm eating. I can increase or decrease very easily to make room for "cheat meals" on evenings and weekends which I enjoy much more frequently and with less guilt than I did when I was trying to control my calorie intake with regular food. My weight loss progress has resumed to exactly the rate it should based on the number of calories I'm eating, which is possibly further proof that my estimation skills on a non-Soylent diet were not very good.
Soylent is a preferable solution to this problem over something like Slim-fast or Ensure mainly due to cost, but also taste. The meal replacement shakes marketed for calorie-control/weight loss are generally very sugary or sweet tasting which is not something I could do for 2-3 meals a day for 5 days a week. Something more bland and flavorless like Soylent is much easier to handle as a staple meal long-term.
I'm a buyer of these shakes because for me, the consumption experience is mediated by before-and-after aspects as well as what the product tastes like. "Will I feel good an hour after I have this?" I tell myself. And while I have to pay a little more for the privilege of that, it's worth it for me.
Will it be a fad? I don't know. The trend has been upward so far and I think Soylent could easily ride it.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Carnation-Breakfast-Essentials-Chocola...
It is only about sustenance for some people. Many (probably most) people enjoy a lot of the food preparation and eating process. Others, myself included, do not. Maybe it's because my sense of taste or smell is stunted. Maybe it's because I'm socially underdeveloped. So be it. It's certainly not because I'm a workaholic tech employee, even if I currently am, because it has been the case as long as I can remember. Whatever the reason, I really don't enjoy the experience of preparing or eating food.
Are we really supposed to just take soylent as a healthy alternative for sustenance so we can continue to work? Just buy a juicer and keep it natural then. But really, take the break and eat a meal with a human being. You've got one life. Live it.
It's essentially pure sugar.
A real good juicer goes a long way. It changed my perspective the first time I tasted a fresh cup of what I describe above. Invigorating and healthy.
Additionally, no one is saying that if I buy a bag of Soylent then I can never eat a pleasurable meal again. Why do people continue to use this "argument"? It doesn't logically follow from anything.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food_substitute)#Ingre...
Also, from what I understand many of the benefits of these nutrients are diminished or not observed when they are injested from industrial refined supplements like those used in Soylent as when they are eaten in whole plant foods like Kale.
The five nutrients where Kale had less were Sodium, Selenium, Pantothenic acid, Vitamin D, and Vitamin B12. Kale's Sodium was still 127% of the RDA, Selenium was 82% of the RDA, and Pantothenic acid was 91% of the RDA. Not bad for a single plant. I suspect that in a well-rounded whole plant diet these deficiencies would be resolved. If you grow your own Kale then you will make plenty of Vitamin D :) If you don't make enough then you can supplement Vitamin D like millions of animal-eating humans do. B12 is not included in plants, so obviously if you eat only plants you need to supplement it. It costs less than US$0.01/day so I don't see that as a major problem.
I'm highly suspicious that you will find many nutritionists who would say that Soylent is more nutritious than a diet of whole plant foods.
Notes: the USDA data for nutrient amounts in foods are not always very accurate. I believe the nutrient amounts linked by the parent represent an old Soylent recipe, since they have only 5g of fiber which is less than RDA of 25g (female) and 38g (male). "-" in the table indicates I don't have data for this. (+ (* 4.1 400) (* 50 4.1) (* 65 9.3)) => 2449.5 calories for the Soylent data you linked [edit: I'm not sure if carbs included fiber so it's possible that the Kale diet has 1% more calories than the Soylent diet]
Obviously I'm not recommending people eat 74.6 cups of Kale each day, but you can get all you need of these nutrients from a much more tasty diet of a variety of whole plant foods.
| | Soylent | Kale |
|---------------------+---------+----------|
| Calories | 2449.5 | 2449.1 |
| Carbohydrates | 400 g | 437 g |
| Protein | 50 g | 213 g |
| Fat | 65 g | 46 g |
| Sodium | 2.4 g | 1.9 g |
| Potassium | 3.5 g | 24.5g |
| Chloride | 3.4 g | - |
| Fiber | 5 g | 179 g |
| Calcium | 1 g | 7.4 g |
| Iron | 18 mg | 73 mg |
| Phosphorus | 1 g | 4.5 g |
| Iodine | 150 μg | - |
| Magnesium | 400 mg | 2349 mg |
| Zinc | 15 mg | 28 mg |
| Selenium | 70 μg | 45 μg |
| Copper | 2 mg | 74 mg |
| Manganese | 2 mg | 32 mg |
| Chromium | 120 μg | - |
| Molybdenum | 75 μg | - |
| Vitamin A | 5000 IU | 83220 IU |
| Vitamin B6 | 6 μg | 13.5 mg |
| Vitamin C | 60 mg | 5997 mg |
| Vitamin D | 400 IU | 0 |
| Vitamin E | 30 IU | 77 mg |
| Vitamin K | 80 μg | 35227 μg |
| Thiamin | 1.5 mg | 5.5 mg |
| Riboflavin | 1.7 mg | 6.5 mg |
| Niacin | 20 mg | 50 mg |
| Folate | 400 μg | 7047 μg |
| Biotin | 300 μg | - |
| Pantothenic acid | 10 mg | 4.5 mg |
| Lycopene | 500 μg | - |
| Omega-3 fatty acids | 750 mg | 9000 mg |
| Ginseng | 50 μg | - |
| Ginkgo biloba | 100 μg | - |
| Lutein | 500 μg | - |
| alpha-Carotene | 140 μg | - |
| Vanadium | 100 μg | |(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kale , 28 calories per 100g, 2500 calories would be 8,928g or 19.6829 lbs.)
I mention that it's a lot of Kale and allude that it's not practical to eat that much ("Obviously I'm not recommending people eat 74.6 cups of Kale each day"). The parent said there exists no combination of plants that could match the Soylent nutrients, and I showed that just using a single plant and a single supplement you could get almost there on all the nutrients for which I had data, so it's plausible there does exist some combination that gets there (except for B12, and possibly some of the other nutrients for which I don't have data if they do not exist in any plants).
Not that I'm not excited about soylent - I most definitely am, and hope to make it my lunch at work. At ~$4 a meal it's still a little too expensive for just a healthy filler until I get home (my current meal: beans/lentils and mixed veggies), but when it comes down a bit it will be great for me. Yet I feel some around here are anointing it as the end-all-be-all of healthy consumption, superior to natural options, which I'd argue is a bit premature. And I'm not educated enough to speculate on benefits of nutrients in plants vs. those industrially derived.
http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Omega-3s-have-no-be...
I didn't see any stipulations on the soylent website requiring you to avoid socializing and stay chained to your desk while drinking it. Maybe I missed some small print?
A bit hyperbolic, but this type of argument can be made for pretty much any disruptive technology that allows humans to overcome physical limits in order to make more choices about how they spend their time.
I enjoy eating food, but having the option to speed up my meal by a large factor and bond with friends over a different activity is pretty much entirely positive.
Still, I don't see how this is different than a bag of nuts and some veggies... Maybe cheaper and easier, but I'd rather put veggies in my body over powdered supplements...
nobody says you can't go out for Thai. but if you find yourself regularly scarfing down a Subway sandwich for lunch and losing an hour of time in the process, Soylent might be a healthier, more efficient alternative.
Obesity in America would like to have a word with you.
E.g.:
- Omega-6 fatty acids will push out the much better Omega-3 fatty acids. IIRC, the recommended ratio is 2:1 (Omega-3 to Omega-6)[1].
- Absorption of iron is inhibited by calcium.
[1] FYI, most oils have a ton of Omega-6, and not much Omega-3. One exception here is coconut oil, which has little of either.
costs about $3 per serving
GNC quality protein shakes be damned. This stuff has to hit the 25 cent mark, per glass, to qualify for it's target market: the unwed and unloved who have no one to cook them decent meals while toiling away at shit jobs.
Never mind stuff like soy and rice, which are probably (well, obviously in soy's case) the basic inputs that end up in soylent, and already have massive economies of scale working in their favour.
The only thing that could possibly make soylent faster than fast would be drive-thru. If I could order a 24 oz. soylent for $1, instead of a strawberry shake, I could envision a future where I might actually eat soylent more than once a week and across a cumulative duration of longer than 4 weeks per any given year.
Also, they might be a niche player now, but could grow and negotiate better deals with suppliers.
If you have Soylent for one or two meals a day, then you'll really enjoy everything else. The mechanics of pleasure are well understood - you enjoy things more when you don't get them so often.
And it's cheap(ish), and apparently not too unhealthy.
That's really too early to say.
I bought all the ingredients and made DIY soylent from one of the hacks someone posted... The taste was a serious problem. I wanted to drink it for a week, but there was a 0% chance of that happening the way it tasted.
Then I tried making Soylent Pasta, but boiled out all the nutrients and the water turned piss yellow (http://juliansarokin.com/soylent-for-science-pasta-bad-decis...)... But if there was a way to not mess that up, I think that could be really interesting.
Still waiting on my official Soylent, hopefully it tastes better than my catastrophe.
Given the choice between unhealthy almost-but-not-quite zero-variety food and healthy actually zero-variety food, the latter strikes me as the better option - and if you don't happen to live near a source of good food (no bakeries, butchers, delis, fresh fruit vendors, etc . . .), being low on time or money means making that choice (or not having one to make).
Speaking for myself, the cheap and ultra-quick food I usually ate during my years at school was just the same thing over and over - it didn't taste very good to begin with and certainly didn't improve with time. I couldn't fix something myself, or wait for someone else to fix something, or spend time socializing (that's what weekends were for!), or go somewhere else. I can say that I honestly would have preferred something like Soylent on grounds of both convenience and taste.
There is a lot we don't understand about how food and human nutrition works, and I'd be nervous about relying on a heavily engineered food as more than an occasional addition to my diet.
Worth noting that in some reports, multivitamin preparations have been associated with adverse health outcomes. Popping pills of whatever kind can be dicey.
People who think nobody will eat Soylent because it isn't a pleasurable home cooked product have missed the mountain of products on sale that are nothing much more more than starch and oil with salt and msg added. Take something soylent-like and add a flavour pouch that will make it taste like instant ramen. Then you just have to work out how to make it 99c a meal and you will clean up.
http://www.thecitrusreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Pa...