Introducing Soylent 1.6 Powder

Every time I see a comment like this, I'm amazed at the commenters inability to not take everything to the extreme. YOU CAN EAT SOYLENT AND STILL EAT FOOD. If you don't have much time on your hands, and you want a quick meal, it works really well and is better than, say, McDonalds.

1) Eating isn't pleasure for me 2 to 3 times a day. I eat lunch because I'm hungry. I'll go out and eat a nice meal once or twice a week. You can drink Soylent and still eat food. Everyone is different.

2) You can drink Soylent and still eat food. And I only eat socially a couple times a week anyways.

3) Cooking takes time to prepare, time to fetch ingredients, and time to cleanup. This is a non-negligible amount of time. I'd rather spend 10 minutes total on a meal than 30+ mins.

4) Do you know if everything that goes into every processed food you eat? Do you have verification?

5) You can eat Soylent and still eat food.

6) This clearly isn't about cost.

7) Soylent is evolutionary in the sense that it's one of the first food replacement marketed to consumers that doesn't have a load of sugar in it.

8) Doesn't every company have dollar signs in their eyes? How is that a fault? They're providing a product that people want at a price point people are willing to pay. There isn't much to complain about there.

I am going by how they market it, not by how you use it. If company makes market claim "x", which is ridiculous and I criticize that claim, someone then saying that he personally hasn't bought it because of claim "x" does not make my point invalid at all.

1) We differ there, I can well get all of my calories from normal food without being annoyed by eating.

2) But it's marketed as complete food replacement, not as a simple nutritional supplement. Though I don't fancy the supplement industry either.

3) I think it's stupid to consider this time as waste instead of time well spent.

I had rice with fresh salmon today: Wash rice, put it in the rice cooker with 1 1/2 parts of water and some salt - wait 15 minutes (you can do whatever you want there) - use a non-stick pan, some olive oil, fry the salmon, use some spices, in between you can start cleaning up whatever kitchen equipment you have used - 5 minutes later rice is cooked, salmon finished, arrange it on a plate, some soy sauce and Wasabi on the side. Total time of work maybe... 8 minutes? Total time to clean up... 2? Total time to eat (quick eater)... 5?! And that's a pretty decent dish I think, I have my go to foods too, when I really can't be bothered. I can easily have a banana, an apple, eat some peanuts (100 grams have 620 calories, important and healthy fats, 25 grams of protein), can make some hard boiled eggs (can make them in the morning, eat them during the day), I can just take some bread, butter, tomatoes, and salt, sit in front of the computer watching something and eat during that. Takes no time really, and in the end you don't have much to clean. Food allows for creativity, be creative.

Have we all forgotten how to deal with real food?!

I hate to go to the store to buy, what I can I buy in bulk, sometimes I buy things frozen (it's often incredibly healthy food, when immediately frozen the nutritional value is great) and when I really can't avoid making an effort, it's not a waste considering what I get out of it.

4) Standards for food production are higher, I can touch it, I can see it, I can ask where it's from. Not sure where you have been buying your food. A banana I eat is not the product of a badly regulated industry, where hobbyists create mixtures of their liking.

5) It's the same point you made with 2)

6) It's an argument I have encountered multiple times, and it's also something I remember from the early days of Soylent. "It only costs x dollars a day and is all you need" (see my intro)

7) You mean "revolutionary"? It's not revolutionary by any means, if you mean it's revolutionary because it has taken something previously not used as mainstream food and marketed it as such, then yes maybe. I don't think that's a great achievement.

8) You are only addressing part of my ending here, talking about the high profit margins and that I think they are acting in bad faith was part of the larger point, that what they are doing is fundamentally easy and a lot of it is simply improvised, they don't really know themselves, but they claim to know. They buy it in, they mix it, dress it up, and market it. Anyone can do it, I can't however raise cattle, grow tasty bananas, peanuts, and catch delicious fish every day. So talking about profit margins, I think their profit margins are quite higher than people realize, their expertise is lower than what people think, their claims are 100% marketing, what they do is easier than people give them credit for.

>2) But it's marketed as complete food replacement, not as a simple nutritional supplement. Though I don't fancy the supplement industry either.

I'm not sure where you got this idea, the Soylent guide they send you when you get your first shipment even tells you that it's not necessary to go 100% Soylent. And, as far as I can tell, the website never says that you should eat only Soylent.

>3) I think it's stupid to consider this time as waste instead of time well spent.

Is the 10 minutes of making breakfast sausages really time well spent every day? That 10 minutes where I'm still somewhat sleepy, somewhat groggy, and pretty grumpy? I'd much rather have a serving of Soylent for breakfast, takes me 30 seconds to pour out a cup and spend an extra 10 minutes running in the morning, reading a newspaper, etc.

>4) Standards for food production are higher, I can touch it, I can see it, I can ask where it's from. Not sure where you have been buying your food. A banana I eat is not the product of a badly regulated industry, where hobbyists create mixtures of their liking.

As for the health of Soylent, you can find every ingredient and amount [1] for every iteration of it. While there's definitely less regulation in this industry, Soylent themselves have done a decent job of publishing the nutrition facts [2] and ingredients, is this that far removed from another traditional food? Can you really verify what pesticides were used in the production of that banana that you're eating?

[1]: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/211343763-1-6-Form...

[2]: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/200789315-Nutritio...

I remember when the Soylent-Creator was on the Colbert Report, and he clearly marketed it as a 100% food replacement. Saying that you don't have to replace food with it completely is smart, it opens up additional customers, makes sense. Their Soylent promotional video however makes the claim that 1) it can replace any meal 2) while not having to replace every meal, it certainly insinuates it can (which is way different from other supplements).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPt1W9IAx0I

I also do remember the piece by motherboard on Soylent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg

Fair, they were a small operation back then, but even if it might not tell you how they work now, it certainly shows you how low the standards are. Their facilities don't even have to be inspected, ... at all.

So you are too tired to cook, but fit enough to run? And usually I have to get dressed, have to shower, pack up my things, work over my schedule, read some mails, activities where I can have something on the stove at the same time. If something needs 10 minutes to cook I am not staring into the pot for the duration.

The composition of the ingredients does not tell me how they know, where they buy, anything in beyond. I rather see food, touch it, smell it, know where it's from, I don't really bother about whether the fish I just bought has 1 gram fat more or less, that's not the "quality" in food I am looking for.

I thought about this, but all the food you eat was trucked to a distribution center, then trucked to the store, then driven home by you. There’s lots of packaging involved there too. Meanwhile a shipment of soylent goes straight to you, cutting out all those middlemen.

I'd be interested to see if someone has done the analysis to see if 2000kcal of soylent uses less resources to ship than the same amount of calories from a grocery store.