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Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

bloomberg.com

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Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#21

Post by harveywi »

hammock wrote: post #2

>Algal flour is a fairly novel ingredient that serves as a vegan replacement for butter and eggs. Derived from algae grown in fermentation tanks and then dried Reminds me of fungal protein, aka quorn aka mycoprotein. They were advertising it as the next big thing in protein sources. Its also grown by fermentation. If you google it, there are safety concerns.

Soylent will be using pulverized cricket protein in their next evolution of the product. It's so sustainable after all. In fact, it will be so sustainable and good for you that it will become a moral imperative, eventually enforced by law, that citizens consume (20%, 50%, 85%) of their daily caloric intake from Soylent sources unless religious or medical restrictions prevent them from doing so.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#24

Post by rosser »

jdavis703 wrote: post #16

Well one of the reasons I liked their products was because of the "algal oil" (no word on if they're going to remove that also). This is basically vegan fish oil, which as a vegetarian is one of the things I've missed.

As a long-time vegetarian, I've been buying algae-sourced EPA/DHA capsules for years from a company called Vegetology. They actually, you know, test their product for safety.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#26

Post by dkersten »

glenda wrote: post #4

Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.

They've been playing this game from the start. I remember the original announcement blog post talking about how he figured out the formula through trial and error.

We can eat small amounts of poison and never notice that it's damaged our bodies, for example. Who knows what the long term effects are.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#27

Post by pavlov »

glenda wrote: post #4

Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.

Samsung tried the same thing with the Galaxy Note 7. They gave up after one round of "if it doesn't explode then it was the battery vendor".

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#28

Post by harveywi »

harveywi wrote: post #21
hammock wrote: post #2

>Algal flour is a fairly novel ingredient that serves as a vegan replacement for butter and eggs. Derived from algae grown in fermentation tanks and then dried Reminds me of fungal protein, aka quorn aka mycoprotein. They were advertising it as the next big thing in protein sources. Its also grown by fermentation. If you google it, there are safety concerns.

Soylent will be using pulverized cricket protein in their next evolution of the product. It's so sustainable after all. In fact, it will be so sustainable and good for you that it will become a moral imperative, eventually enforced by law, that citizens consume (20%, 50%, 85%) of their daily caloric intake from Soylent sources unless religious or medical restrictions prevent them from doing so.

The downvoting is interesting. Perhaps they are not familiar with the efficiency of crickets as a protein source. Big Cricket Farms [1] in Youngstown, Ohio is moving in this direction. Partnership with Soylent would be a natural fit, since the physical characteristics of culinary crickets are still intimidating, whereas pulverized cricket protein poses no stigma.

[1] http://bigcricketfarms.com/

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#29

Post by kjbflsudfb »

homulilly wrote: post #10

someone should inform the author of this article that algae aren't plants

Would you prefer they complicate the discussion by trying to explain what they are? My understanding has always been that they have many plant-like characteristics, but not all. In fact, they are even a part of the plant kingdom. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070619182508.h...

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#30

Post by rosser »

glenda wrote: post #4

Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.

Let's remember that these are the same rocket surgeons who neglected to include iron in their original formula.

Trial-and-error, with someone else's health as the stakes, is apparently the name of the game here.

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