Silicon Valley gets a taste for food | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley gets a taste for food

economist.com

50 pointsdeegles27 comments

I've been eating soylent for "utility" meals for about 2 weeks now and I couldn't be happier with the product. I usually eat one meal a day for the satisfaction of eating food, but it's nice not having to deal with preparation for the breakfast or lunch at work. This article is even slightly outdated as soylent 1.4 was released a couple of weeks ago.

I actually just got my first batch of Soylent this week, and I'm cutting out 'traditional' food for 2 weeks as an experiment. I've only been eating it for about a day and a half now, but changing from eating discrete meals to sipping on a cup of Soylent continuously throughout the day is very different.

Have you noticed any psychological changes in how you view food since starting?

I have been using Soylent as my primary source of nutrition since November. I will generally have around 3 non-Soylent meals a week. Part of the reason I started Soylent was for financial considerations, as I am a graduate student on a relatively low-paying stipend.

In terms of how I view food, I am less willing to go off Soylent for foods that I do not enjoy considerably. Whereas before I would eat at Subway or McDonalds on a weekly basis, since starting Soylent I haven't eaten fast food in months. On the other hand, I order a nice greasy pizza from a local pizzeria every couple of weeks, which is more frequent than before. I never really cooked before, and Soylent is considerably cheaper than eating out for every meal, so I have more food money to spend on things I genuinely enjoy.

As Rob says in this article, I find myself able to separate the feeling of hunger from the desire to enjoy food. When I have specific cravings or when a meal is part of social interactions, I have no qualms about eating "real" food. But when I'm alone and hungry for nothing in particular, why would I eat something that's more expensive and less healthy than the Soylent I already have sitting in my fridge?

The most noticeable thing to me is, before I started using Soylent as meal replacement, I noticed my brain would shift attention and in a way interrupt me to say "you need to go eat now, you're hungry". These days I don't notice the interruptions as often and when they do happen they're not as significant. Instead it's more like "Ok, I'm done with that task, what should I do now. Oh yeah, I haven't eaten lunch yet..."

I'm curious, is there any reason you're breaking your Soylent consumption up into meals? I've just been keeping a small mug of it on my desk and sip regularly while I work; every hour or two I'll get up and refill it.

Aside from the convenience factor, it's nice (and strange) to go through my day only feeling hungry in the morning before I've started eating.

Actually I just used the term "lunch" to communicate the idea. I do similar to what you've described. But generally I try not to let it sit there too long, mainly because I imagine a spilled glass of Soylent might not be good for the laptop :)

Out of curiosity, what drove you to try soylent?

The idea of being able to eat a balanced meal without having to meticulously plan and prepare it. It's hardcore efficiency at it's finest and for a relatively good price. If I'm left to eating regular food, I tend to go out to eat more than I should because I procrastinate going to the grocery store or even preparing what I already purchased. This ends up a lot cheaper and a lot more healthy.

cool. Soylent actually sounds like what some people on Hackernews told me about called the "velocity diet", a nearly liquid diet that's mainly protein powder.

beyond meat's patent is such a fucking joke. https://www.google.com/patents/US20120093994

How is that a real patent? As far as I can tell (and I'm not a lawyer), they're patenting mixing protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water in specific ratios to make a meat substitute. Why isn't every veggie burger ever prior art in this case?

I showed it to a former patent examiner.

It's just an application for a patent. It was rejected on 2/20/15. Now it's just kept around as prior art.

They also requested and then denied a refund on their filing fees apparently. Cause it's a really stupid patent.

Well no not exactly. Yes, a final rejection was issued by the patent office on 2/24/15, and the applicant still has up to 6 months to respond to the final rejection or to file an appeal. With respect to the request for refund, the applicant requested a refund of extension fees and excess claim fees. The refund for extension fees was granted but the refund for excess claim fees was denied. None of this has anything to do with the merits of the patent application itself.

To check on the status of this patent application, go to http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, enter the captcha, and then enter the patent application number (13/272,825). Select the Image File Wrapper tab to view the various documents relating to the prosecution of the patent application.

What's interesting about this tack is that it would go against the anti-corporate anti-big food movements which have steadily grown since the mid seventies and had taken root vigorously in the recession and expressed itself with people cooking at home more, cooking from scratch more. A belief that the closer to the source the healthier the food.

But this is an attempt to figure out how to feed a growing world cheaply (pocket-wise and ecology-wise) which small local organic farming would have trouble achieving, presumably.

Is there a working theory yet on how taste and smell work?

(Can they be decomposed like the RGB triplets of vision, or the frequencies of sound?)

Taste comes down to combinations of 5 basic flavors, but smell is very complex and as far as I know, not well understood. The actual experience of food however, combines both of these as well as temperature, texture, color, and more.

The hamburger substitute sounds promising, but if the point of this is to create protein efficiently then this doesn't make any sense to me:

"Mayonnaise made without eggs that is creamy and smooth."

Eggs are one of the most efficient sources of protein there is.

Right, but (at least in theory) the total economic/environmental cost of growing the plants is lower than that of raising the chickens to produce the eggs.

Do you have information on the environmental cost of growing the plants vs eggs?

I would agree that factory farming of eggs has a terrible effect but it seems like on a small scale it wouldn't necessarily be true.

True, but making mayo for 300M Americans will never be small scale.

It takes ~2.4 kg of feed to grow ~1 kg of (cooked) eggs.

(this is called the feed conversion ratio)

Eating vegetarian gives the baseline for comparison, a conversion ratio of ~1:1 (I think it is better to not claim exactly 1, animals eat different things than humans and maybe do better with extracting value from fiber).

The details of a given process for making a lower compromise meat replacement would have to be considered to calculate the equivalent measure. I don't think it would even be 2:1, but that's just a guess.

> Eggs are one of the most efficient sources of protein there is.

Eggs aren't even one of the most efficient animal based sources of protein [1]. When comparing the energy input in terms of fossil fuels against the energy output in terms of protein broilers have a 4:1 ratio, while eggs have a ratio of 40:1. The same value for corn is 2.2:1. (which goes up to 3.1 when accounting for bioavailability).

Looking at total caloric energy input against output isn't any better (worse for the broiler, better for the eggs). We here get a 6:1 conversion factor for eggs, and 9:1 for broilers [2].

[1] Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full [2] Land, irrigation water, greenhouse gas, and reactive nitrogen burdens of meat, eggs, and dairy production in the United States: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/11996/F4.expansion.html

Silicon Valley needs to understand the food domain and it's environmental impact better before investing in these processed food startups. We already have the most efficient machine that converts plant matter into meat. It's called a cow. Cows and other ruminants have evolved over millions, if not billions of years, to make this process super efficient using just solar energy (photosynthesis) and water. Who are we to think we can do better in a few years in the lab?

Have these companies thought about the environmental impact of growing more row crops to create this fake meat and eggs? Row crops destroy ecosystems and reduce topsoil. It's also a system that sounds like it would need lots of logistics and energy to operate. Also it's not sustainable.

Silicon Valley should instead fund organizations looking to work with nature to create the future of food. Companies like Summer Technologies [1] are doing the right thing by acknowledging nature and creating technology that empowers sustainable agriculture that scales. With the right tools, these kind of farms can be more productive than massive industrial farms [2], feed the growing population of the world [3], while improving the quality of land and reducing CO2. It's a win-win-win if I've ever seen one.

This article also fails to mention anything about how the dangers of meat are greatly over exaggerated and not corroborated by modern science. [4] And what's wrong with eggs? They're one of the most nutritious foods out there with healthy omega-3 fats and a variety of minerals that are sorely lacking in modern processed food diets.

[1] http://www.summertechnologies.com

[2] Soil Carbon Cowboys: http://www.carbonnationmovie.com/about/clips/225-new-video-s...

[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world...

[4] http://chriskresser.com/red-meat-it-does-a-body-good

I don't see any evidence that we have "the most efficient machine" and that it's a cow. Evolution is incredibly slow, and humans outpacing it (using their brains) is exactly why we're at the top of the food chain.

Who are we to think we can't do better in the lab, when almost every worthwhile human invention has been precisely that – beating evolution at its own game?

I do agree with your initial premise though, we should be very careful and spend a lot of time considering the environmental impact. It's also very easy to say that as a well-off westerner with abundant access to food, though ;)

The most efficient protein-producing machine is certainly not a cow. Chickens and especially insects are way more efficient. Some species of insects are over 90% efficient in turning raw food into protein, with way less water used to boot.

I happy that they're not only working on taste, but also try to add all the healthy nutrients to the product.

If only SV could first get a few decent restaurants they might not feel the need to invent industrial chemical food.

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