Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick • Hacker News Board

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#671

Post by timdorr » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

throwaway898908 wrote: post #207

timdorr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having entirely lived on Soylent for a full year and having went back to solid foods with no weaning period and no ill effects, I doubt the veracity of your unsubstantiated claims.

@timdorr: "Crazy to think that over the last year and a half, more than 50% of my diet has been in the form of liquid @soylent." [1] So not all of your diet. I very much doubt your ability to refute my claim, given that you did not meet my criteria of not eating solid food. [1] https://twitter.com/timdorr/status/694271673248264192

I switched to 50% Soylent for the 6 month period following the year, with a break for "normal" food in between. The first year was almost 100% Soylent, with some occasional solid food when Soylent wasn't available. I had no ill effects from any of these temporary diet changes, nor the period immediately following either period of long-term usage.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#672

Post by freehunter » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #591

anExcitedBeast wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself. That defeats my primary use case for MRP: not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life.

but cooking good meals is so damn easy, there are even companies which will deliver the ingredients to very nice meals if you want to cook them. anecdotal at best, but a friend years ago was diagnosed with adult diabetes and told he had to change his diet. this guy never cooked. part of his transition was cooking classes provided as part of his diabetes counseling. he discovered a world of quick and easy meals, many…

I subscribe to Blue Apron, one of those companies you describe that deliver ingredients. I'm thinking about canceling because it takes so damn much effort to cook their meals. I have to chop my own garlic, where I would just use garlic powder or minced garlic before. I have to prepare my own kale, which I would just get kale with the stems removed before. I have to fry my own sage, which... well I would never use a garnish before. It's a meal I'm eating, not a meal I'm selling.

Saying "it's so easy, they deliver the ingredients" is a non-sequitur. Sure you don't have to buy groceries, but cooking still takes a lot of time and effort. Sometimes it's a solid hour that I spend cooking, then a half hour eating, and a half hour cleaning up.

I get four hours I spend at home between work and sleep, and two of those are spent preparing to eat, eating, and cleaning after eating. It's much quicker and easier to pick up KFC on the way home instead. That's the problem Soylent solves.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#673

Post by DavidHm » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

dankohn1 wrote: post #633

Just a quick counterargument from a regular Soylent consumer: I drink a coffiest for breakfast every morning and drink two liquid Soylents on days when I don't have time for a nice lunch or dinner. It's convenient, healthy and tastes good. I've never had any intestinal troubles. I use it as a meal replacement, not a complete food replacement. It sucks that they included this ingredient in their powder and bars that h…

When we make mistakes in making a website, people get frustrated.

When we make mistakes in food, people die.

Not every industry can accept the "move fast and break things" mantra.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#674

Post by timdorr » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

muppetcore12 wrote: post #249

timdorr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having entirely lived on Soylent for a full year and having went back to solid foods with no weaning period and no ill effects, I doubt the veracity of your unsubstantiated claims.

Tim...I have a lot of sharp words for you now, probably because members of my family have spent many years inside the food industry. 1) I do not doubt the veracity of these claims 2) They are substantiated. It's clearly your research that is not. People die because of this kind of ignorance. If you want me to elaborate, I've got the grizzly details. I wish I didn't.

"They are substantiated. It's clearly your research that is not." Where is the evidence? Link me to one scientific paper or credible news source on this. There is no backing to either your claims or the throwaway account's claims.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#675

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #300

BurningFrog wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you ever have things to do? I like a great meal a lot, but if that was the three top events each day, I'd consider it an empty life.

You are clearly not French or have you lived there. A great meal should absolutely be one of the highlights of a day. Food can be (and should be) the catalyst of great conversations, great ideas or even meditative self-reflection. Soylent seems to me to be a hipster Ultra Slim Fast and consumed for the exact same reasons legions of working women have that stuff in office refrigerators. I can respect that people have…

Even if I was French, I would be happy to ignore arguments about how I must to things because it's The French Way.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#676

Post by ajamesm » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:31 PM UTC

efvxcgci wrote: post #659

ajamesm wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way" I'd love to see a restaurant use that line. Food safety is hard!

Go look into health inspection reports. Restaurants of all kinds routinely violate health codes.

Not because health codes are a hard problem to solve, it's because the proprietors are lazy pieces of shit who make up their margin by storing their bleach next to their raw chicken.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#677

Post by TallGuyShort » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:31 PM UTC

efvxcgci wrote: post #659

ajamesm wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way" I'd love to see a restaurant use that line. Food safety is hard!

Go look into health inspection reports. Restaurants of all kinds routinely violate health codes.

I used to follow these quite closely. In my experience in Silicon Valley, there was a decent correlation between how good the food was and how badly they perform in those inspections :)

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#678

Post by duaneb » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #158

duaneb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm anorexic. This shit is amazing.

There are a lot of products, like Ensure, which have a much longer researched track record than Soylent. It's more than sticking a few things into a powder.

Ensure gives me digestive issues that I haven't experienced with soylent. Obviously I'd love some more insight into why.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#679

Post by nnq » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #32

deepGem wrote: post #26

Man, this is a bummer. As much as I hate the concept of Soylent as food, I see it as the only way to scale food production for the growing population, without killing our planet. The other options are still in the labs. Artificial tissues for instance. Vertical farming is one alternative, but that is again fraught with massive energy consumption. I hope Soylent gets to solve this.

Isn't Soylent primarily made from rice and soybeans? These are commodity crops that require huge amounts of fossil fuels (chemical fertilizer, fuel for tractors, transportation, processing) and government subsidies in order to be profitably cultivated.

> commodity crops that require [...] government subsidies in order to be profitably cultivated

Wait, what?! Why would governments need to subsidize such crops? Can't the price be left to increase a bit, and have the market sort this out more "organically"?

Only reason I'd see for the US government subsidizing such crops would be to make your food exports more competitive, a pretty "dirty" tactic in a globalized economy, but at leas it would make sense...

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#680

Post by Latty » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 2:33 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #11

I'm really amazed by all the supporters on here. When I first heard about Soylent, I thought it was a terrible terrible idea. I mean, there's so much to food. It's not just eating it, it's all the flavours and ingredients and cooking with friends and loved ones and parties and such. I'm guessing most people on here use it as a supplement + regular food, but when I saw it originally, it seemed like it was intended to…

I love food. Too much, I'm very overweight because of it. My initial reaction was the same - why the hell would I want to take calories and not taste something great? It sounded like madness.

Then I tried Huel (Soylent equivalent made in the UK), and I get it. The best way I can describe it is that food had become like music for me. Rather than just sitting down and listening to music, I have some music on all the time, in the background. I constantly wanted to be tasting something, eating.

I found that by using Huel, I changed that habit. I can prepare it in a minute and drink it quickly, and it stops me feeling hungry. I can limit my calorie intake perfectly without having to think about tracking it, and it means I can avoid thinking about food at all. Then, on occasion, when I go out with friends or whatever, I can have a real meal and really enjoy the tastes.

It's like only listening to music when I go out to a concert and that's all I'm doing.

It's not for everyone, for sure, but there are definitely real cases for it. I'm sure on the other end of the spectrum, there are people that just don't care about food and this helps them remember to eat the right amount.

Assuming that your relationship with food is the same as everyone else's is your mistake.