Soylent - the end of food

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"

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.