I simply don't understand why someone would willingly give up one of life's great pleasures for consuming something resembling thinset.
I'm glad Julia Child isn't alive to see this product.
I'm glad Julia Child isn't alive to see this product.
Why not Soylent? Because it will kill you. It's pretty simple, I think. I am a big fan of Michael Pollan, and his main argument is that even nutritionists and doctors, people who dedicate thier lives to studying nutrition, can't answer lots of the more complex questions: "Eat carbs! No, wait, eat protein! No, eat whatever you want, just get enough vitamins! Fast! Eat constantly!" What are the chances that a single non-nutritionist got it right? I think exactly 0, and I'm not willing to prove that theory wrong using my own body.
Edit: ideal situation is where the human body naturally requires only 1-5 meals per week. Then I could easily see myself cooking a few gourmet meals. Alternative: be so filthy rich that you are either less busy or have a chef ready to cook for you any time of day.
Did you ever explain why Soylent will kill you?
Everything kills you. Oxygen, water, sugar, protein. You have about a billion heartbeats before your heart gets too tired. The goal is to find the right balance of things you eat, do, don't do, etc so that you maximize your useful lifespan. I am sure that Soylent kills you faster than a balanced diet, because (a) it's processed (b) not diverse enough and (c) uses subpar ingredients. It is the whole meal equivalent of hot dogs: techincially has fats, proteins, carbs, micronutrients, but eat enough of them and you will suffer.
Besides, Soylent is not a new idea. Take a look at Ensure shakes. Would you drink those for the rest of your life? If not, then why drink basically the same type of stuff but with a different label? Because a software developer is selling it?
Edit: another idea for a convenient complete meal: McDonalds. Protein (burger), fats (fries), and carbs (soda). Blend it and you have Soylent 2.0.
Completely agree with you about nutrition angle.
On the other hand, when I do manage to make breakfast, I feel like a million bucks!
I like food quite a bit, but i just don't cook often enough or well enough to eat healthy and regularly. So, i found a solution that works really well for me.
Of course, if i had lots of money and a personal cook, i wouldn't drink soylent. I would gladly eat normal food, all the time and on time.
One fantastic thing about a versioned product like Soylent is that it actually may make it possible to determine those answers empirically. Given the existence of a simple standardized diet that people are willing to eat exclusively outside of a laboratory setting, you could pay a bunch of volunteers to eat soylent you provide which either has or hasn't been modified to include different amounts of vitamins, different amounts of carbs or whatever.
> I'm not willing to prove that theory wrong using my own body.
Fortunately you can't stop other people from experimenting in just that way. The world is full of people who eat odd restricted diets and live reasonably long, healthy lives. There's no reason to let the best be the enemy of the good. Start with something that's just barely "good enough" and iterate on it until you really have something.
As others in this thread have said - Soylent for breakfast and lunch but real food for dinner sounds pretty good, actually.
I honestly don't understand the appeal of an unproven and difficult to source food product, but I would appreciate hearing your thoughts.
I'd add balanced, certainly more so than fast food and microwave meals.
I bought a month's worth. I only eat it for dinner around 4 - 5 times a week, meaning it will last me 3 months. My time is worth a lot to me, and I would much rather spend the free time I have after work doing things I love to do than things I don't (which include cooking).
I am a bit of a foodie. I love good good, I love going out to dinner, I love trying new restaurants, and I love eating with friends. Soylent does not affect this in any way, because I don't eat out or eat with friends every night of the week.
Side note: People look at the cost of Soylent and don't factor in the cost of the time it takes to gather ingredients and prepare / clean up meals, which is pretty short sighted in my opinion. This cost is not insignificant.
I generally agree, I crave "real" food immensely when I'm eating Soylent a majority of the time, but...
I have pretty severe TMJ and everything I have to chew increases the overall pain that I feel, and it's not temporary pain, it's persistent pain that is actually distracting.
Drinking Soylent helps alleviate this to some degree, to the extent that I'm willing to make a trade off.