Then when you want to have a regular old meal experience just don't drink the Soylent.
It's not a lifestyle choice, it's just a convenient meal replacement.
It is? Not really for me and people I know. You can still make calorie stuffing enjoyable. Even if I'm alone I can whip up a 10 minute meal that tastes damn nice compared to what Soylent is supposed to taste like. E.g. heat a wok with a bit of oil, dump in a package of pre sliced wok vegetables and a handful of cashew nuts. While that is going soak some noodles. After a couple of minutes add soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger syrup and the noodles, and you are done. With some practice you can make this in 5 minutes. I don't understand why somebody would rather save 3 minutes (roughly 1/500 of a day) and drink Soylent. Can't you sleep 3 minutes less instead?
I've always thought of food like sex. It keeps you healthy, but that's not why we do it. Optimizing food (or sex) to minimize the time spent while ignoring the enjoyment completely misses the point for me, so that's why I find it interesting and incomprehensible that Soylent is so successful.
Your lack of empathy for others' lifestyles is outstanding. Not everyone has access to a kitchen at lunch, or wants to deal with the grocery buying and washing dishes that come with cooking from scratch (which you excluded from your time calculation). Soylent replaces shitty convenience eating like McDonalds, not home cooked meals. Your argument can (and should) be aimed more at fast food, which is both pricier and less healthy than Soylent.
I'm not talking about making this for lunch, but for dinner. Which lunch is available to you of course depends on where you work (though even in that case you can take something with you, like muesli+yogurt+fruit or a sandwich, but I can understand why some people might prefer Soylent in that case). Unless you eat 100% Soylent you are not going to save much time on grocery shopping because you have to go to the supermarket anyway, so you might as well take a few packages of vegetables with you. If I understand it correctly then Soylent requires washing a blender and a glass, not much different than washing a wok and a plate (and you don't even need the plate).
That's not really true. We're finding that our grocery bills have been cut quite a bit and the amount of ingredients we keep around (especially quick to prepare stuff) has basically gone to zero. Prep-time is virtually zero and cleanup time is rinsing the container when it's empty -- thus our dishwashing has also dropped quite a bit.
And we still eat great dinners prepared with fresh ingredients from our garden.
And it's still healthier than even your quite good sounding 10 minute meal.
As a fun challenge for yourself, see if you can assemble a 5 minute meal that's as nutritious and balanced as one serving of Soylent. And i don't mean guesswork, run the numbers, compare to FDA guidelines and see what you come up with. (then please share the recipe because I'd love to eat it!)
1. It's quite likely less healthy than eating a variety of foods. 2. It tastes bad. 3. It saves 10 minutes per day.
How much time do you spend maintaining your garden?
run the numbers! don't guess!
I also agree that if you're going to eat food, eat a wide variety of stuffs. It's about the only way to accumulate the best possible nutrition, and it keeps it from getting boring. I personally prefer lots of variety in food, but I really want to spend the time to enjoy it when I sit down to eat it.
> 3. It saves 10 minutes per day.
No, it saves 10x3 + cleanup (let's say 10minutes per meal) or 1 hour per day if you eat it for every meal (I don't).
Actually for my use-case it saves 0 minutes per day since I was just grabbing donuts at the coffee shop or breakfast bars or whatever on the way out the door in the morning. So in this case, it's not any less convenient, while it's far more nutritious.
> 2. It tastes bad.
It tastes "meh". But so do most things. One thing I've started to appreciate even more since getting Soylent is how "meh" most meals are, no matter where they're from or how they're made. I think sometimes we just have different kinds of meals just because it's "different" even if it's not better or even good.
> How much time do you spend maintaining your garden?
More than I'd like to, but not so much it's a huge burden. We grow long peppers, lettuce, perilla (just now starting to get good flavor), green onions. The lettuce and onions are from seed, the rest from sprouts. We're thinking of squash and cucumbers for next year. We've tried tomatoes but they're super fussy and you end up fighting with the stupid plant half the time. I'd like to get into garlic and potatoes.
you can't just run numbers. none of the daily recommended numbers tell us what will happen when you eat the stuff for 100% of your meals for 10 or 20 years. On the other hand, eating a variety of normal has been shown over thousands of years to be mostly reasonable. Soylent may or may not be fine and even better for people, but numbers in a chart simply can't possibly tell us that.
>It tastes "meh". But so do most things.
I think you must have been eating the wrong things. I enjoy pretty much everything I ever eat (and avoid things that I don't like to eat) while sticking as much as possible to "healthy" foods. Frankly I think eating is one of the most enjoyable activities in life, IMO.
Now that being said, I can still see a reasonable argument for using soylent for maybe 1 meal a day, likely breakfast as a time saver. I can't even remotely imagine replacing all meals with it.
For me, something like Soylent reminds me of when I prepared bottles for my baby. An all-in-one food was her primary formulation for the first 6 months of her life. But even in that case, there's more variety: because she breastfed. So her nutrients changed from day to day depending on what my wife ate, and slowly changing over the weeks to match her developmental stages.
To assume that a grown adult can survive on a monotonous diet does not sit well with me. I think this relies on some assumptions that haven't been well understood yet.
If not, do you stay within driving distance from your home so you can go there to do this?
Then, I envy your meals, but I don't envy the leash you have on your life. Personally, I travel far enough away from my home every day that were I to follow this pattern, I literally would spend all of my day on the road in between meals.
Or do you ever just grab something to fill an empty stomach and get on to what you need to do? Or just out for a full day somewhere far enough from your kitchen that you can't drive back home to make your meal, and your available choices range from dirty water dogs to chain restaurant? Do you do this more than 2 or 3 times a week because of your busy schedule?
Then Soylent is probably for you. I can almost guarantee it will be the superior alternative for whatever you end up eating in those cases.
(Sorry for derailing the soylent debate, but having a recipe is more interesting to me than debating nutrient transport vehicles :)
Are you missing that much if you don't have your scrambled eggs most mornings or skip that mediocre sandwich from the deli down the street for lunch?
People drinking Soylent typically replace those boring meals that waste time with a bunch of food prep and cleanup while still enjoying new food in the company of others.
Once you have a jug of Soylent in the fridge, it's your choice whether to pour yourself a hassle-free meal or make the extra effort to consume other foods. When you're used to Soylent, you have more choices in life. It's a tremendous tool to have in your meal toolbox.
You probably won't die...