Soylent - the end of food

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.