Soylent - the end of food

overcome the tyranny of food!
http://soylent.me
[url=http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/12/140512fa_fact_widdicombe[/url]

food is fun

i mean, some of it. i just ate a power bar, and i'd rather eat than soylent, unless they make it taste really good

for that one guy, it's April 1st every fucken day of the year

This is a step in the right direction, however it should not be in the hands of private entities.

It is too bad this Soylent is not made from people. So many problems would be solved that way. There are too many resources wasted on the preservation and burial of dead bodies. Imagine the energy we could harvest if we used the bodies for food and fuel instead.

Imagine?

i'm considering purchasing some and trying it out (for weight gain). the plan would be to use it for breakfast, afternoon, and late evening, and then try to eat a decent "normal" lunch and dinner along with it. apparently it makes you fart a bunch during the first week so i might consider starting it when i have a few days off work in a row.

banaka? jeebus is Brodie going to make an appearance too?

glanced at this article (instead of doing work, sadly). i like the idea, except that, for many people, eating is -- at its core -- a nervous reaction or a means of getting psychological comfort or a socializing experience. replacing food with soylent isn't going to take away those other reasons to eat. if anything, i'd worry that soylent would make people heavier and drive up food costs, because instead of replacing meals, they'd wind up supplementing meals (same thing happens when you eat a lot of protein bars in addition to your regular meals, without enough offsetting exercise). still, if you can address those other reasons people eat, it's a nice idea.

the article does touch on that a little:

Soylent has been heralded by the press as “the end of food,” which is a somewhat bleak prospect. It conjures up visions of a world devoid of pizza parlors and taco stands—our kitchens stocked with beige powder instead of banana bread, our spaghetti nights and ice-cream socials replaced by evenings sipping sludge. But, Rhinehart says, that’s not exactly his vision. “Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.” Soylent isn’t coming for our Sunday potlucks. It’s coming for our frozen quesadillas.

yeah, i saw that. again, it's a nice idea in theory, but i kind of doubt people would be so well-regulated and disciplined to really limit their actual food intake to limited eating for "experience and socialization." but who knows? if there was a real increase in food-scarcity or much higher food-prices because of global warming, maybe we'd finally get some of that "big consciousness shift" that some people have been expecting forever.

i nervous/anxiety-eat so much that anything i take, on a regimented-program, tends to be just extra stuff i eat, unless i'm being super-disciplined and constantly thinking about it.

i don't imagine that people who love food (i.e. nearly everyone) are in danger of having soylent significantly damage their lifestyle, but i'm not one of those people so i probably don't have the right perspective. i do enjoy the cultural rituals of sitting around a table and eating with friends and family, it's just that for me, the sheer quantities of food that we all shove into our mouths multiple times a day is unbelievable. i've made an effort to keep up and stuff myself so many times, but my digestive system revolts. it makes me feel like an alien sometimes, this fundamental disconnection from nearly everyone else.

there was a gawker article on this about a year ago that summed the feeling up well:

But then, couldn't hunger be seen as a sort of chronic condition? And food the medicine you treat it with? Imagine if the only way to treat some disease was to buy many different ingredients from a store, then cook the ingredients into medicine according to a complicated recipe, then clean up all the equipment after. Wouldn't you want a simpler medicine, something you could just chug? I was beginning to see the logic that led to Soylent.

of course, that fleeting sentiment was quickly followed up with

Then I took another big gulp of the stuff and my feeble, lasagna-fired mind faltered and I thought of bodily fluids and began to gag, so I dumped the whole thing in the sink.

it makes me feel like an alien sometimes, this fundamental disconnection from nearly everyone else.

no; i think the ability to limit food-intake is great and i'm jealous of this trait.

if there was a real increase in food-scarcity or much higher food-prices because of global warming, maybe we'd finally get some of that "big consciousness shift" that some people have been expecting forever.

yeah, compared to the possibility of relatively rich people in developed countries shifting to soylent, it seems much more likely that soylent would take hold among the billions of people who are going to be fucked by climate change. it would be a food of necessity, not choice. soylent's creator wants to get it down to $5 a day, but if they could get it down to $2 a day, imagine the effect on the 2.5 billion people who currently live on less than $2 a day. but that almost sets up a sci-fi dystopia where billions of people are subsisting on soylent, made by (what would by then be) a megacorporation!

at some point the WHO will get interested, I'm guessing

Billions of people silently chugging down Silicon Valley hipster protein shakes seems a lot less likely that billions of people rioting because there isn't enough food. And that's a long way off - between there and here is the gradual increase in the cost of meat. People will just eat less and less meat, possibly provided in still-actually-recognisable-as-food forms by fast food chains. And even then it's still a long transition period, because it takes 1000kg of grain fed to a cow to make 1kg of beef.

was it established that this definitely isn't a viral marketing campaign for the soylent green reboot? I remembered reading something about the trademarks over the word "soylent" still being suspiciously held by whatever production company.

what if it is a vegan catholic trojan horse instead: tryina get us all to give up pleasure for the remainder of earthly life

it takes 1000kg of grain fed to a cow to make 1kg of beef

The gross exaggeration would be more recognizable if you had said a zillion.

7 kg dry grain (including soy) for 1 kg beef. For pork, its 4 kg, and for chicken, tilapia, and catfish, about 2. Modern chicken and herbivorous fish are remarkably efficient at feed conversion when antibiotics & digestive enzymes are added to feed.

xp ogmor

Outside of famine areas, macronutrients aren't the issue. Unless one is eating very low-protein staples like taro and cassava almost exclusively, there's adequate protein (as well as essential n-6/n-3 fatty acids) in most calorically adequate diets. Micronutrients, on the other hand are a problem, even in developed countries. There are better ways of getting micronutrients into the underprivileged. I'm rooting for famed biochemist Bruce Ames and his Chori bar.

Most calorically adequate whole food diets, that is; sometimes I forget there are still people that consider Coke or white bread as foods.

not getting enough of certain micronutrients isn't nearly as much of a health concern as getting too much salt and sugar.

Why is this called "soylent"? I can't imagine a less appealing name.

i ordered a week's supply of soylent from the kickstarter about a year ago, but i wouldn't have in retrospect. first of all it was supposed to arrive in like September 2013, but it's still not here yet! also somewhere along the way they switched the primary ingredient from oat powder to soy lecithin, which was a big disappointment for me. whether or not you think soy is a bogeyman, it's already really easy for me to get an efficient balanced diet from soy products, an all-meal-replacing soy-based shake isn't really adding much new value.

i thought lecithin was for mouthfeel/emulsifying?

oh is that right? i thought in one update e-mail they said they replaced the oat powder with a soy byproduct (lecithin i thought)

i just notice lecithin in a lot of chocolate bars (which i would rather be a meal replacement). i suspect it gives it a chalky taste, too, but could be imagining. the organic ones don't have it.

Lecithin an emulsifier (a detergent like molecule, like those in your cell walls) and is to keep fats from separating out and forming globules. It shouldn't have much of a taste at all, certainly not chalky.

Some non-dairy milks actually use chalk as a calcium supplement. Terrible if added to soups.

sorry Phillip, you already got this

Waitaminute:
Drinking Soylent was saving him time and money: his food costs had dropped from four hundred and seventy dollars a month to fifty.

Exfuckingscuse me but how does a single college student spend $450 a month on groceries!? Thats over $110 a week! The shit was he buying!?

probably going out and buying food daily instead of groceries, like my brother does

no but seriously, why the heck is this named the same thing as the famous fictional foodstuff that was made of human corpses?

i love eating but in my perfect world it would be more like sex. like you can do it a bunch of times a day if you want but you could also never do it once and would be ok. i can really relate to these programmer dudes' frustration that they *have* to eat every day. i get annoyed at that too.

the name and how terrible it is gets discussed in the new yorker article btw

i thought lecithin was for mouthfeel/emulsifying?

― Philip Nunez, Sunday, May 11, 2014 4:17 PM

nah, she was the bassist for a perfect circle

i have this stuff:
http://images.iherb.com/l/GOL-11414-4.jpg

it tastes ok but clumps horribly. like you need to drink it within 30 seconds or you have to deal with chewing on wet sand-like globs. i think i'm going to start making smoothies with it+chocolate soy milk/ice.

“Food was such a large burden,” he told me recently. “It was also the time and the hassle. We had a very small kitchen, and no dishwasher.” He tried out his own version of “Super Size Me,” living on McDonald’s dollar meals and five-dollar pizzas from Little Caesars. But after a week, he said, “I felt like I was going to die.” Kale was all the rage—and cheap—so next he tried an all-kale diet. But that didn’t work, either. “I was starving,” he said.

probably going out and buying food daily instead of groceries, like my brother does

Didn't even think of that, good point.

whether or not you think soy is a bogeyman.

― een, Sunday, May 11, 2014 4:11 PM

in layman's terms, why is soy arguably a "bogeyman"?

because it mimics estrogen in the body according to some reports that i am not at all qualified to evaluate

The concept of feeling like you have to/dont want to need to eat seems so very sad, to me.

i've read that the value whole foods can't be reduced to their parts and that taking a bunch of supplements is not equivalent to eating vegetables. is this not true? the only times i've felt healthy are those when i was eating a lot of greens and vegetables.

the Breatharianists take this to an even more absurd extreme...until they die shortly after beginning said 'diet'

lol of course this was invented by a white male engineer from an upper middle class background who was too inept to take care of himself in his early 20s.

me i'm not gonna gamble against phytochemicals

close correlation in my experience between people who think eating is a waste of time and people who think talking to people is a waste of time

i'm tempted by this but i'm not an early adopter. the article gets into this, but i'm assuming they are missing some important stuff in the soylent mixture and we'll find out after folks have been using it for a few years.

if i ever do try anything like this i'd supplement it with a fair number of fresh fruits, veggies, and nuts.

the Breatharianists take this to an even more absurd extreme...until they die shortly after beginning said 'diet'

lol a perfect excuse to revive one of my favorite old-school ILX threads!

Carrots scream when you pull them out of the ground, etc

this is the creepiest fucking laughable idiot shit ever and I want it destroyed in a big explosion

along with all humanity, if we so much as consider subsisting on this

do you feel the same way about ensure?

I had an ensure shake earlier today. I ordered a case I early April in a failed attempt to adopt the Walter White I'm Dying Diet. It hasn't worked, mostly because I find it hard to keep them down without barfing. I'm hoping the Soylent will be a little more palatable.

there is a difference between what you eat and what your body absorbs, but who cares, any attempt to lifehack nutrition reads like an impotent existential howl to me. this stuff is appealing insofar as lots of peoples' circumstances lead them to eating rubbish several times a week anyway & I'd rather mindlessly slurp some big soy/oatmeal smoothie than scoff two packs of skips and a boiled egg with furious impatience

yeah, i think the idea (as articulated in the NYer piece) is "this has to be better than mac and cheese and frozen quessadilas"

i wonder if this stuff would make me feel full or if i would just want to nosh

as I am back on steroids and don't recognize my body anymore, i'd be fine w/ food as pure fuel, mostly, and in the minimal servings for good health

was it established that this definitely isn't a viral marketing campaign for the soylent green reboot? I remembered reading something about the trademarks over the word "soylent" still being suspiciously held by whatever production company.

― Philip Nunez, Sunday, 11 May 2014 18:56 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Would be amazing if this was true and they raised $300k in kickstarter cash for a fake product.

I need to couple this with modafinil so I can give up eating and sleeping.

I would not be surprised at all, merely because "Soylent" is about the last fucking name on earth a company serious about taking this product to market would choose.

it seems like Soylent is still at the startup stage where the people who originally came up with the idea (Rhinehart et al) are still in charge of the marketing. Rhinehart strikes me as a guy who may not be in touch with human emotions as much as the average person. there's a part in the new yorker article where they mention that every one they've ever met with has been like "change the name, wow that's a terrible name, you have to change the name immediately", and Rhinehart just ignores them because he's a robot man. i would guess that at some point in the near future he'll have to cede the marketing to someone else, and then the name would change

i'm not sure he lacks empathy as much as he's just kind of impish.

...or an actor!

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I tend to feel like 95% of food is either disgusting, morally reprehensible, or ridiculously expensive (nb I have no money), and often find myself resenting this chore that I have to go through in order to stay alive. If I didn't think all these ppl are going to develop serious health conditions after many years with little or no phytonutrients and stuff like that, I'd hop on board and be glad to be done with it.

On the other, obviously that attitude is a result of a broken food system/overall culture, and this shit is not going to push it in the right direction.

okwaitaminute Sanpaku you are losing major "I know science" cred with this:

Lecithin an emulsifier (a detergent like molecule, like those in your cell walls)

also I am srsly stunned that VC got behind this stuff. I mean a kickstarter campaign is one thing, but I am flummoxed by actual investors thinking this is going to make them money.

sorry to be the guy that just quotes from the new yorker article, but here i go again:

During the next two months, Soylent plans to ship its product to all of its twenty-five thousand initial backers. The company has ten thousand dollars in new orders coming in every day, and has started to become profitable. U.S. military and space programs have asked to run trials on Soylent.

i dunno, seems like a viable business to me

It's like the old scifi thing of "all your meals will be a pill!" which apparently is attractive enough to some people that they'll come-a-running with checkbooks out and ready to go

this stuff is appealing insofar as lots of peoples' circumstances lead them to eating rubbish several times a week

ding ding ding, anybody familiar with world hunger!?

Yah I hear ya but I mean the NYer pointed this out, and I will point it out again: meal replacement has been around for forever, for sick folks who for whatever critical illness situation can't eat "real" food in the "usual" way. This isn't new science. It's new marketing, I guess is the thing.

I am going to be sharing office space with hospital nutritionists and am totally looking forward to getting their opinions on Soylent!

now that should be interesting. good food (argh) for thought

Also (and maybe this should be posted in the NYer thread instead): when reading about these SF dudes living on Costco processed foods and/or resenting the fact that they have to take time away from coding to, y'know, eat, I could not but help but superimpose these dudes with this SF IT-startup-house-junk-food-coding-VC-blahblah thing:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/14/131014fa_fact_heller?currentPage=all

Open letter to the New Yorker: stop with the articles about SF IT-startup-house-junk-food-coding-VC-blahblah culture thing.

I guess soon enough we'll be able to cheaply make sushi and caviar using 3D printers and various chemical components.

in our homes, i mean

ding ding ding, anybody familiar with world hunger!?

― brimstead, Monday, 12 May 2014 18:40 (20 minutes ago) Permalink

$4/meal is hardly a solve-world-hunger price point

yeah lets just feed all the poors thick tan nutritional slurry, perfect solution

During the next two months, Soylent plans to ship its product to all of its twenty-five thousand initial backers. The company has ten thousand dollars in new orders coming in every day, and has started to become profitable. U.S. military and space programs have asked to run trials on Soylent.

i dunno, seems like a viable business to me

― famous instagram Dog (Karl Malone), Monday, May 12, 2014 2:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's a little early to say that. $10K a day in sales is meaningless at this point -- it could be initial hype that's going to die down, or it could be the beginning of something much bigger, but it's not enough to sustain a business like that at current levels ($3.5 million in gross revenues a year), so whether it's "viable" is speculation.

ding ding ding, anybody familiar with world hunger!?

― brimstead, Monday, 12 May 2014 18:40 (20 minutes ago) Permalink

$4/meal is hardly a solve-world-hunger price point

― Doritos Loco Parentis (Hurting 2), Monday, May 12, 2014 12:03 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah lets just feed all the poors thick tan nutritional slurry, perfect solution

― call all destroyer, Monday, May 12, 2014 12:05 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh stop being silly. It's the idea. Obviously $4 per meal is not feasible!
And yes if they can't afford food otherwise and can afford megacheap nutritional slurry i don't see what the problem is? That they won't experience the pleasures of bacon or something?

It's not like I'm advocating taking "food" away from poor people and forcing them to drink slurry, yeesh

McSlurry is a seasonal item

What difference does the "idea" make if no one has actually come up with a nutritional slurry that is cheaper and more nutritious than rice and beans?

in terms of bang for buck, I think the mcdouble is supposed to be champion, which I suppose you could blend into slurry form.

Can't wait for the new Dairy Queen SlurryFlurrie(tm), coming this summer!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut

@ Quincie:
Soy and egg lecithin are both mixtures of phosphatidylcholines (PC), the same class of detergent-like chemicals that comprise 50% of the phospholipids in our cell walls. Like detergents, they have a polar, water soluble head (with charged choline and glycerophosphoric acid) and a long, non-polar, hydrophobic tail (in this case a couple of mostly C18 fatty acids). In a soap bubble or a cell wall, hydrophobic tails prefer to interact with each other and form membranes. Compare a PC to detergent SDS:
http://lipidlibrary.aocs.org/Lipids/pc/Figure1.pnghttp://0.tqn.com/d/chemistry/1/0/i/5/1/SDSsodiumlaurylsulfate.jpg
SDS isn't just used in shampoos (where its called sodium laurel sulphate). Its also used to disrupt cell membranes in the lab, so clearly the PCs in cell membranes do differ from commercial detergents in being having more moderately polar heads, and longer, more stabilizing tails. Both work fine, however for emulsifying fats, lecithins forming microscopic globules that don't separate in foods, and detergent's water-soluable grease droplets when cleaning up.

Dude only plants have cell walls. Non-plant cells have cell membranes. This is MoBo 101, sorry!

Detergents *disrupt* cell membranes. This is why soap (detergent) is an effective anti-bacterial and anti-enveloped viral.

Sorry to be pendantic, but it matters.

What difference does the "idea" make if no one has actually come up with a nutritional slurry that is cheaper and more nutritious than rice and beans?

― Doritos Loco Parentis (Hurting 2), Monday, May 12, 2014 12:17 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so the "idea" is worthless because it's not cheaper right now? i feel like a total moron right now but what if you could buy slurry or a pill or w/e that fulfilled your nutritional needs for *significantly* less cost than "food", is this such a crazy idea?

just because it's been thought of before doesn't necc. mean it's not worth trotting out again, look at the Dorito Locos taco (sp?)

the idea is likely not worthless but i'm highly skeptical of the position that we might just give poor ppl this rather than fix the underlying issues that deny them the dignity of access to actual food.

like, it's a depressing place that i'm not ready to go to.

rather than fix the underlying issues that deny them the dignity of access to actual food.

yeah, you're otm here. i guess i think the feverish backlash is a little ridiculous, re: not talking about *replacing* food but just having more options or w/e

yeesh @ techgeek social engineering

like, it's a depressing place that i'm not ready to go to.

sucks for you but the earth is dying, get used to it

guy was on colbert last night

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/2kgoki/rob-rhinehart

seemed a bit humourless but didn't get riled by the poking and made a few good points.

It's up on youtube if anyone is interested:
htts://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYMCicWaFkc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYMCicWaFkc

i will go ahead and put myself in the shitty company of weirdos in the tech industry and freaks of nature (like myself) that aren't obsessed with food:

the backlash (to the extent that anyone cares) about soylent (not in this thread, just generally) is hilarious and weird and sad. to read comment threads on it you'd think that there was a govt coup and the new evil overlords are forcing everyone to drink soylent. i suppose it's not that they feel threatened (i'll give the benefit of the doubt to people that they understand that there is zero possibility that soylent would ever become a dominant replacement for food), but there seems to be a complete lack of empathy and imagination in considering the idea that there are people out there who don't love to eat food and would rather do something else with their time. it turns out that there are people who have different preferences about how they'd like to live that are different than the masses! and the creator of the drink has social problems with communicating! holy shit! i crapped my pants!

i'm typically blowing everything out of proportion, but jfc humanity just let people drink this stuff if they want to without lording your love of food over them. if it's not actually improving their lives they can quietly go back to the usual crap that they eat. yes, it's not a sympathetic crew because drinking soylent is associated with tech assholes, but just let it go. fuck

bacon

vegetarians have been getting similar flack since the dawn of tofu time.

It's hard sometimes, but don't lose your tempeh!

i can't help it, i worship seitan

the whole idea behind this is very silly cause theres literally no one whos gonna replace all their food with this stuff to the extent that they need it to have all the nutrients in the world, i suspect even people who find eating to be a burden will not find this gloop monotonous after not too long cause hey its just not very good food!

like if u want to skip a meal just drink a protein shake or something it doesnt need to be a weird unpalatable dystopian startup food, banana/yogurt/unsweetened whey powder is pretty tasty

the thing that people are reacting so negatively to is the idea that this is a solution to the problem of food which is just getting in the way of accomplishing our important tasks like building a weird meal replacement start up, its such a dire materialistic mechanistic approach to life, caring for oneself is just another burden obstructing our ambitions, our bodies are such haters lol

its still food, bad food

I can see that some people regard food not as bad or repellent, but simply as uninteresting. I've met a few. They eat because if they don't eat there are annoying consequences. They spend only the minimum amount of time engaged with food necessary for the basic transaction of nourishment. They don't seem like bad people to me. At least not for that reason. But this is still food and must be eaten, so they might find it not especially interesting for that reason alone.

i bet this stuff will help people to appreesh real food after not too long, be curious to hear zachs experience if he goes through with it

if there was a pill-sized equivalent to soylent (apparently providing nutrients you need to live), i think all the soylent fans would switch to it, without exception. i wonder how the backlash to food substitutes would evolve at that point.

btw not totally on topic but u know what is a really good prepackaged snack larabars http://www.larabar.com theyre just dried fruit and nuts and theyre really tasty, like some of them have literally two ingredients just dates and cashews or w/e

xpost

i'm not going through with it, at least not all the way. i do enjoy food, sometimes. last night we had a great meal at an authentic chinese place that was amazing. i'm not looking to replace that kind of thing with a drink that makes me fart a bunch. i would consider it to replace some meals, particularly friday afternoons when i'm working from home, or when i'm in the midst of some creative project that is all-consuming at the time, and i don't feel like breaking away from it for an hour so that i can prepare some meal from scratch and be like "fuck yeah, this meal! this is what i LIVE for, god i love the process of keeping myself alive for another day and having temporary tasty moments & then pooping it all out later while i read magazines!". there are many times when i'm in the midst of something and i would love to just make my stomach stop gurgling and keep going.

i think if soylent (or some equivalent) does take off, that'll be it's use for most people. lag00on's totally right - only a few people would ever 100% switch to it for very long. and a good chunk of the people that do will quietly return to their previous eating habits, assuming no better alternative (from their perspective) is available. but i very much doubt that anyone who was 100% soylent for 5 months would return to "real food" and have a saul>paul experience and get a cooking show and 3 book deal. they'll go back to making kraft mac and cheese.

saul>paul by this i mean saul to paul, not that paul is less than saul. (although it's interesting to consider that saul was probably a really cool guy and party animal and after he became paul he was probably a big religious downer to all of his previous friends and seemed crazy because he was trying to convince them to worship some dude who thought he was god)

jesus was a good cook tho

the new 10 episode, single season Netflix exclusive - jesus drinks soylent 100% of the time and farts a bunch and is crazy but then realizes he made a mistake and gets a cooking show and a 3-book deal, or as fans affectionately refer to it JDSOHPOFTAFABAICBTRHMAMAGACSAATBD, or as megafans refer to it, JABADDABING!

feel like if you're not using it to replace all meals their are prob more pleasurable cheaper options

even just like ensure is not too bad

isn't ensure like a very sweetened/high calorie supplement for people (the elderly) whose appetites are low? Like isn't it largely sugar?

idk lol

i drink ensure every once in a while to supplement meals. my gf's sister is a nutritionist from NYU and said that ensure is decent. not that this stranger's opinion means anything to anyone else but i trust her.

"drink ensure - some guy said that his girlfriend's sister said it was decent" tm

im on board

i think the vice story on this was definitely best of all the coverage. it was a documentary of a journo trying to actually live on nothing but soylent for i think a month. the problem that seemed to catch up with him first wasn't actually the taste of soylent or being deprived of tasty food. it was the foregoing of social interaction, like even when he went out with friends to restaurants he felt really disconnected from them because he wasn't eating the same thing (or anything at all). on balance i think lagoon's point is a better conception of the good life than the 'the world is just a bunch of problems to be fixed' approach. the possibility that if soylent catches on people will become even more isolated than modern technology already tends to make them is a legit concern i think.

i think i read rhinehart's blog a long time ago and he seemed to frequently claim that "our ancestors were starving cold and miserable." kind of have to guffaw about that kind of claim about the emotional lives of people in the past, like reported rates of happiness have been in decline since the 50s, as a guy he seems really taken with the assumption that efficiency is an absolute good

I'm less troubled by the ideological thrust behind it (which seems similar to arguments for veganism or against resource-intensive industrial food production, none of which I have any "beef" with har har) than its positioning, which reminds me in a weird way of Dr. Dre's Beats (beets?). There certainly must be more nutritious, cheaper, and more delicious all-food substitutes around (like say a potato) just like there are probably headphones that are cheaper, sturdier, and less sonically adulterated (like say a sennheiser or something). What they are actually selling and what is actually valuable about them is enabling a largely superficial lifestyle, which is fine, but it's the implication that what they're selling is superior by any reasonable metric to the alternatives is what is insulting, but maybe without that lie, these products aren't commercially viable?

i look at the (uk) tv schedules and see how crammed they are with food programmes and the way newspapers all have food supplements, the way facebook is full of pictures of food and i wonder how we got to this state, this fetishism*. it's only food. life's too short to marinate.

(* i also think that about sport fwiw - *every* news bulletin has sport on the end for instance.)

replace food or sport with anything ppl do there, we'll all have an argument, pleasure centres battered in the immediate now and the communion of this experience with others vs the aloof delight of the ascetic meh or w/e

food and sport r both very good i enjoy combining them

hurling

my programmer college roommate friend lived by himself one summer, lived his perfect 26 hour day (dude really did wake up two hours later every day), and lived off of mostly papa john's and mountain dew. he was really lazy with taking out the garbage and had an entire kitchen cabinet full of perfectly-stacked empty pizza boxes

even he would not eat soylent

"I came up with the idea of creating a food product that was fortified with 100 percent of your daily requirements of vitamins and minerals." -Scott Adams, 1999

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2b/DilBeriTO.jpg

put soylent in my vessyl a voice told me i was a ghost who had been dead for a very long time

I laughed at the Dilberito's decade-early parody of the Innocent Smoothies aesthetic ("yummy tasting veggies, rice & stuff you like!"), and then I googled and discovered it had been a real product

wow

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-waited-five-months-for-my-soylent-and-now-i-cant-get-rid-of-it

had to tube-feed a pet recently and consequently have a half-tub of just-add-hot-water* powder for a complete carnivore diet** in the fridge. I am not going to eat it myself as I am not completely crazy*** but I am sort of wondering how much difference there is between that and Soylent

* I say "just" but I'm not sure that is the right adverb for boiling water and then cooling to exactly the right temperature before mixing carefully measured amounts and loading a syringe
** not intended for oral or human consumption, so I can only imagine it would taste pretty bad
*** about 98% since you ask, though these footnotes may bump it up to 99.7%

One user posting on the Soylent forums threatened to burn the founder’s house down if the shipment were delayed again, writing, "I am extremely serious."

lmao

"I have to say it was not life changing as many have suggested," one user wrote.

other than becoming homicidal

yeah the only friend that I know who had ordered a bunch has been pretty bummed out / annoyed that the shipments are so so so slowwwwwww

"“These heavy metals accumulate in the body over time and, since Soylent is marketed as a meal replacement, users may be chronically exposed to lead and cadmium concentrations that exceed California’s safe harbor level (for reproductive harm). With stories about Silicon Valley coders sometimes eating three servings a day, this is of very high concern to the health of these tech workers.”"

oh no they wont be able to reproduce :(

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/08/18/2137612/why-soylent-is-a-dangerous-cult/

It'd be really good to see more (any) articles by people about the health risks, as written by people who don't hate the whole idea anyway?

(I've been on a Euro soylent-clone for two meals a day for a couple of months and its great, like KM upthread I've always just felt like an alien when people talk about food as an intense and central pleasure)

http://i.imgur.com/jd2WUTA.jpg

http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/dvdboxart/8782/p8782_d_v7_aa.jpg

https://m.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3soonx/how_i_currently_feel_about_soylent_20_as_a_new/

In which some people defend the company knowingly selling moldy products and not throwing it out.

lolling at the impassioned arguing style of "SoylentFarts"

SOYLENT_IN_MY_ANUS

Grocery stores wouldn't be able to operate with your desires.

did anyone post the inventor's blog in here? he seems unhinged. takes uber everywhere under the argument that it's more environmentally friendly. justifies every action he takes in like amount of kilojoules of energy expended or something

Our new roommate drinks this stuff, there are several depressingly blank-looking bottles of it in the fridge right now. I came here to worry about this but if ILXors I respect like Karl Malone are down then maybe I should adjust my assumptions. Though I do believe the people who created this product are alien monsters, if only to the extent that their statements convey a horrifying Randian techbro sensibility (life's pleasures are inefficiencies in the eyes of the very narrow subset of pro silicon valley coder types who voluntarily choose a nightmarish career; well surely this idea would appeal to the average person unless they're a foolish sheep-type; also I bet this could solve all the big world problems that we surely understand better than anybody else, now where's my Ted Talk?) that I don't find in anybody's post itt. Jury's out on the roommate though.

I never ended up trying it! I was kind of at a low point upthread in terms of frustration with weight issues. I am still not where I'd like to be (and not getting better), but I'm done struggling with it. For now, at least. "Fuck it".

I agree that the creator is probably counting down the days until he can upload himself onto the transhumaninternet and finally rid himself of his nagging human bodily desires and requirements for maintenance, and that people who drink this stuff are probably farting a lot and introducing new problems for plumbers. But I still think at least some people would have a legitimate use for Soylent (or some equivalent) and that it might really improve their lives, and I feel bad that something that is a solution for some people is just ridiculed as a joke by others.

is it really substantively different from those diet shakes other than the fact some bottles have mold in them?

I mean, it IS funny on many levels and it's not reasonable to expect people not to laugh at it. I get that now (more than I did upthread). I guess I just tend to sympathize with the subset who don't deserve it

Soylent 3x day + treadmill desk + sleep in a truck in the employee parking lot at Google HQ = the perfected life

Google's Soylent-using employees switching to truck-sleeping would be a real boon to people trying to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Oddly enough, none of these nightmare people seem to take their Matrix brain-in-a-tube dream lifestyle perfection in that direction.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-employees-live-in-the-parking-lot-2015-10

S. Daniel Abraham expresses his delusions of grandeur through trad bazillionaire philanthropy instead of composing essays about his Uber usage - I think that's the main difference between this and Slimfast

is it really substantively different from those diet shakes other than the fact some bottles have mold in them?

giggling like a fiend at this

Dear Jesus

See Also

A Google employee living in a truck in the company parking lot is saving 90% of his income — here's what he does with that money

A 23-year-old Google employee lives in a truck in the company's parking lot and saves 90% of his income

A Google employee lives in a truck in the company's parking lot — here's what his family and friends think

yeah that is basically making me never want to even walk past a Google campus

ok wow i legit didn't know that this parking lot thing was a thing

yeah, it is... not hypothetical

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331

The Soylent guy is kinda...special.

It's one thing to be the type of person whose personality type is such that they want to treat real-life with the same impulse as if they were min/maxing their MMO/Final Fantasy stats.

It's quite another that there's a sizable chunk of Silicon Valley sycophantic press treating this as this glorious ultimate behavioral goal disrupting everything, as opposed to being a manifestation of deeper issues.

thinking outside the box while living out of amazon.com boxes

there is definitely no .com 2.0 bubble though
the new valley boom is based on real advances in humanness

like "bulletproof coffee"

gosh, google. bring back the 90s cyberdelic global village hippie types

i guess this is basically the same thing

https://i.imgur.com/dqydfuu.gif

Of course, solar would have been prohibitively expensive and complicated had I not reduced my consumption to a fraction of what the average home uses. Here is how I did it.

Kitchen

Kitchens are expensive and dirty. This home manufacturing center has been by far the most liberating to eliminate. They are the greediest consumers of power, water, and labor and produce the most noise and garbage of any room. Moreover, they can be made totally unnecessary with a few practical life hacks. First, I never cook. I am all for self reliance but repeating the same labor over and over for the sake of existence is the realm of robots. I utilize soylent only at home and go out to eat when craving company or flavor. (...) Next, I switched from beer to red wine. I buy with Saucey so I don’t have to use awful retail stores. (...) I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. (...)

Transportation

Public transportation is leagues more efficient and I love trains. Still, the energy costs are substantial and the infrastructure requires a lot of maintenance. I take Uber around the city and to work (most of them are Priuses which use DC motors so I’m good there). I take the bus often too. It’s pretty good in LA. Runs on CNG. (...) The streets were originally made for people. The automobile’s takeover has destroyed more than millions of lives (cars have killed far more Americans than war and AIDS combined), it has trampled the prime conduit of community in our cities and exiled us to the indoors to sit in front of televisions. I hope the next generation of transportation technologies will give us back the streets.

For today though, Uber works pretty well. (...)

This guy is so fascinatingly right at this cusp point where all of his admittedly niche lifestyle values could, but don't, fall over into collective solutions. Mass transit is sorta good but, ehhh, the infrastructure takes maintenance, fuck it, I'm taking Uber until there are robot cars. Or take the argument about the inefficiency and cost of individual kitchens, something that's been noted many many times before, including by architects and most notably by turn-of-the-century socialist-feminists who saw the future in replacing individual kitchens with collective kitchens for each apartment building. Obviously that idea would raise lots of the same hackles Soylent does, but it's telling that it's not even on this guy's radar. Note also that if any collectively-shared service requires human employees (power stations, transit) that's treated as a huge negative; if his fantasy world comes true and all those people are out of a job (not to mention never able to afford the robot cars in the first place) that's not his problem. I realize that I'm going after a ridiculously easy target in the most obvious ways but every few months I brush back up against these people and it drives me up a fucking wall.

oh man i just got to the clothing section

Clothing

I enjoy doing laundry about as much as doing dishes. I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me. Shipping is a problem. I wish container ships had nuclear engines but it’s still much more efficient and convenient than retail. Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them, and I donate my used garments.

The overwhelming majority of clothing Americans buy is made overseas anyways. I just buy direct. And container ships are amazingly efficient.

It bothers me immensely that all clothing is hand made. Automation is woefully absent from the textile industry, but I don’t think it always will be.

i mean, god damn. one of the commenters points out that elsewhere in the same article he declines the idea of using a grocery-shopping service since he "cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through" that "multisensory living nightmare." but chinese sweatshops are okay - for prices you would not believe! to be fair his opening line is "The walls are buzzing. I know this because I have a magnet implanted in my hand and whenever I reach near an outlet I can feel them," so i should probably not be wasting my day on this.

wait so he doesn't wash his clothes and just gets new ones

????????

that is what he is claiming, yes.

these people must be stopped.

not only does he not wash his clothes but he donates them DIRTY

you're not saving water if you just treat it as a negative externality for poor people

that he is an "engineer" who thinks nuclear engines would be an improvement over diesel is also a good diagnostic for loose screws

remember, he thinks bottled grey sludge is an improvement on eating

it's hard to fix that in your mind in its full significance because who would even

I don't think they container ship the clothes to his door.

theres something kinda liberating/fulfilling abt the work all the time outsource yr life lifestyle. when i was working crazy hours this summer i would sometimes sleep at work and never cooked and sent all my laundry to a service and took lots of ubers everywhere and it was kind of easier. like i only had to think about my job, spent most of my time at my job and had no real stress. its clarifying to just be doing this one thing and trying to do it well i guess? idk i guess i get why that lifestyle is appealing for certain kinds of ppl

There's a lot of "missing the point" with these guys. You pour endless energy into scraping away any possible drag or entropy loss on the absolute barest amount of energy/time/cognition cycles expended in order to do....what? What other aspect of your life does all this newly created surplus of time & energy & processing power allow for? At least in WoW or any JRPG, min-maxing the pinnacle utmost character means you could be demonstrably stronger, faster, richer, better at playing the game which is the equivalent of living in the game's universe.

Here, other than I guess pouring yourself into work(which is possibly why start-up types flock to this behavior and/or horse semen-like food replacement), what aspects of life is benefited by this process? Or is this process just the end-result in and of itself because you have nothing else to fill that space?

more time to spend installing new apps is my guess. or blogging about them. tbf i wouldn't be surprised if some of them at least would argue that it frees up time for the things that they think make life worth living, some of which might be things most ilxors would be down with, like reading their favorite books or spending time with friends. it's just everything else about the attitude and how they get there that just seems crazy. for others i suspect more work/productivity probably is the "point" in some freaked out hyper-protestant ethic of we-were-put-on-earth-to-accomplish-things thinking or something.

Yeah, it's all well and good and actually GREAT that the Internet keeps letting out-there people find each other and share their tips n' tricks for navigating life while out-there, it's the proselytizing nature of it that drives you up the wall. Like, dude, you did not achieve an objectively better existence than others because you figured out how to spend more time on devops with Docker. You just figured out how to trade off food truck sandwich time and laundry folding time to, uh, write fresh devops scripts. That's it.

I'd guess that Rhinehart would totally object to characterizing his blogs as evangelizing his particular life choices to others, but he totally is. It would probably be nice if more people like him recognized that.

see when you buy new clothes? they're not clean

people like this are a useful cautionary tale for those who are overly proud of their work ethic, burrowing to nowhere with maxiumum efficiency

conrad has hit on the innocuous detail that bugs me the most about this

Like, dude, you did not achieve an objectively better existence than others because you figured out how to spend more time on devops with Docker. You just figured out how to trade off food truck sandwich time and laundry folding time to, uh, write fresh devops scripts. That's it.

I wish I could fit this on a t-shirt

Soylent offers vomiting customers refunds on nutrient bars: https://twitter.com/vicenews/status/786650723274547200

Weird, that article seems to have disappeared. Here's another one:

http://gizmodo.com/soylent-customers-search-for-answers-after-barf-bar-fia-1787747966

I feel bad for these folks though.

eat larabars instead, they taste good and dont make u vomit

nobody should ever eat bar-shaped food except when it's candy

hmm wow strong if inconsistent opinion re food shape

Stick shaped food is a totally different story

20% of my diet is clif bars.

food should be cylindrical and heated on metal rollers

gotta love soylent's ongoing commitment to disrupting the food space tho: first their drink made you ill slowly with dangerously high levels of cadmium and lead and now their food just straight-up gives you the rusty-water shits

finding new efficiencies by closing the loop, since iirc the latter is actually one of the core ingredients in their signature product

the reports that it smelled/tasted like bleach or soap makes me think... people were eating food machine sanitizer

xp next step is a food replacement pill that kills it's users stone dead instantly. No more need for food!

SOYLENT GREEN IS PURELL

http://www.heavymetal.com/v2/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/SoylentGreen.jpg

maintaining normal food safety standards is exactly the kind of drag on innovation that characterizes the old fashioned brick and mortar economy. they're disruptive, get with the program.

facebook is always recommending huel to me

can i buy vomit inducing soylent bricks w bitcoin this is important

i got banned from seeing huel's ads on facebook cuz I kept trolling them about whether their product was as dangerous to human health as soylent

one of my proudest achievements tbh

kudos

SOYLENT GREEN IS PURELL

― doo-doo diplomacy (bizarro gazzara), Sunday, October 16, 2016 12:34 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

i'm hesitant to out myself here, but i feel like soylent doesn't deserve half the shit people give it (excluding puke bars of course). i drink a soylent 2.0 once a week as a meal replacement on the gym night where i have to go after dinner cuz i don't like having food in my stomach. i looked into slimfast or carnation meal replacements but they don't have enough calories. also i like the taste of soylent (somewhere in between pancake batter and cheerios)

sure the rhetoric about food 2.0 and the idea of replacing all your meals with it is completely insane, but i think it has some merit as a good meal replacement option.

by posting your tolerance of soylent here, you have made all other food taste bad for other people and also permanently enlisted yourself into the new revolution alien spacefood corporation army, which is on a collision course with the the normal food-eaters of earth and must be destroyed before their 1.15x productivity bonus compounds enough to overwhelm the old-timers that retain the ability to enjoy the taste of a well-cooked meal

i still have never tried soylent

your new name is D502_copy

yeah i mean youre just using soylent like a meal replacement/protein shake which is basically what it is which is why it really doesnt justify all its bs marketing and vc funding which is what ppl r making fun of it for xxp

fwiw this is the best tasting prepackaged protien shake ive had

http://i.imgur.com/y8FFTAk.jpg

whats funny is because soylent is vc funded by ppl who usually invest in apps its doomed to go out of business once those ppl realize theyve invested in a protein shake not an 10000000x multiplier unicorn

i mean there are a fuckload of similar products available mostly made by experienced food companies, but only one of them has super creepy marketing and frequent contamination issues

will def try those shakes ^

only 260 calories to soylents 400 fwiw

I eat like one kirkland protein bar a day - they are strangely good and bad at the same time. They aren't quite complete nutrition in the sense of having all the vitamins and whatever you supposedly need, but they do have a good amount of both protein and fiber.

i like larabars a lot, tho havent been eating them recently, its just fruit and nuts!

yeah those are actually tasty, more on the clif bar end of the taste <-> high protein spectrum

i used to do an odwalla / fruit smoothie for meal replacement

xp Wait Soylent is only 400 calories? The Naked juice protein shake is about at that and is pretty decent.

yah or Odwalla, pretty much any of the decent fruit smoothie brands

whats funny is because soylent is vc funded by ppl who usually invest in apps its doomed to go out of business once those ppl realize theyve invested in a protein shake not an 10000000x multiplier unicorn

― lag∞n, Monday, October 17, 2016 12:02 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is what totally killed me about the vegan mayo scammer people that were buying up stores worth of their product to artificially inflate the numbers -- people actually like their product! I figured it was hot garbage and the sales were all fake, but a few food review people really like it. It's just that there's no exponential growth curve for selling fake mayonnaise.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-28/soylent-will-stop-selling-two-meal-products-and-rework-formula-after-illnesses

"stomach-related symptoms"

I just had a tooth extracted and I guess I'll try to survive the very soft foods only period with Soylent and maybe tomato or butternut squash soup to break the misery.

Life with my daughter showed me that a surprisingly wide array of foods can be successfully puréed. (But pasta isn't one of them.)

Eeee i bet.

Good time to get into congee! Maybe with some pumpkin! Kinda jealous tbh.