81–90 of 341 posts
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I think that the downvoting is more likely tied to your outlandishly wild claims as fact of both cricket usage in Soylent and that the government will force consumption of it. Neither of those claims are at all verifiable or likely within any basis of reality.
What is wrong with reasonable speculation? You just speculated about why I was downvoted.
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> That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies. Obviously there are caveats for their allergy claims. The first ingredient in Soylent is soy protein, and while it's not as common as peanut allergies there are definitely people that can't do soy: https://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/soy-allergy
But that's the point - they claim it's fine for everyone, even those with allergies, but then formulate the product with known allergens. And now, with the new formula, when people are complaining of sickness they're saying it's a potential allergy or sensitivity to algae.
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Really doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. A neighbor of mine has an allergy to MSG and it took him years to realize it. He's still does trial-and-error on new foods to determine which ones contain MSG as part of their "natural flavors" (sometimes with painful results). The difference here is that Soylent i…
> People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies. Soylent's words: > "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is…
http://www.medicaldaily.com/alexandra-allen-utah-teen-rare-w...
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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.
You can also eat small amounts of poison and become immune. Everything will be damage in large quantities. And some common things probably do long term damage (e.g. any amount of charring on meat) but we never question them.
Part of the issue is their desire to keep the product vegan. Instead of using known-safe, health-promoting sources of polyunsaturated (O3/O6) fats like fish oil, they use algal sources, which have very little data supporting them as safe/effective sources of O3.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fish-oil-friend-or-foe-20... There are other safe sources of omega 3's.
edit: Harvard health seems to even disagree with themselves: http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/why-not-flaxse...
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But that's the point - they claim it's fine for everyone, even those with allergies, but then formulate the product with known allergens. And now, with the new formula, when people are complaining of sickness they're saying it's a potential allergy or sensitivity to algae.
How many products claim they're for everyone? Why not go after one-size fits all baseball caps too? It's just another round of marketing bullshit.
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...
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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/
I have a reptile and feed it crickets daily. You can't simply hope crickets will be full of good stuff naturally. We need to "gut load" them and cover them with vitamin and calcium powder. We make them eat quality nutrients before feeding them to the reptiles. Otherwise they are only almost only empty calories and not very good for the animal's health. We humans would simply eat what the crickets eat instead of eatin…
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.
You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant. I really don't understand the hate that's directed towards this product. Nobody was seriously injured, it was a relatively small number of people that got sick. Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it…
the professional food industry knows damn well there are no acceptable risks. if people are getting sick entire batch numbers are yanked from retail.
the one time a big company purposefully ignored resulted in jail time for executives from Peanut Corporation which knew they were selling contaminated product. As in, people are getting sick and they did not pull it
Perhaps the name of the product is more on-point than we realize...