181–190 of 341 posts
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What products would those be? Most meal replacement shakes marketed in the US are for people trying to lose weight, so they have far less calories and fat than a meal for people just trying to eat healthy.
Jevity?
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And they've taken active steps to prevent it happening again.
And yet, they are still struggling to fix their reputation and get customers back in the door. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...
[1] I didn't stop going because of the incident, I stopped going because I stopped doing what I was typically following with lunch at Chipotle.
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Chipotle's issues were sanitation related. Soylent's problem was people being allergic to an ingredient they didn't know they were allergic to.
You (and Soylent) have absolutely no idea whether that's true. Which is the problem.
Blue Bell in Texas shut down for months due to listeria. Would that put some companies out of business? Maybe, that's ok. This is public health we're talking about. Disrupt. Move fast and break things. Iterate iterate iterate. Fail fast. This may be okay when you're making a better spreadsheet, but not everything can be a startup.
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All those examples you've mentioned fill a very different niche than what Soylent is filling. Most people on Soylent aren't looking for something to keep them from getting hungry until they get a more balanced meal. They're looking for a quick, healthy, balanced meal. Soylent fills that desire, your examples do not.
They actually DON'T NEED Soylent, that's simply the magic of marketing. I tip my hat to their marketing skills, however. I never would have thought they could get anywhere selling a bland sludge to affluent consumers as a replacement for food... who would've thought that could work? They did it and did it well for a while at least.
Soylent doesn't fill a separate need from normal food, it fills the desire for a more efficient vehicle of nutrition than normal food. For example, I use Soylent not as an "I'm too lazy too make food" but rather as an easily replicatable nutritional base that is easier to customize to my nutritional needs and preferences than any other option out there that I'm aware of (there may very well be something better out here).
Their success is the result of "magical marketing", but of filling a niche desire of the market. In fact, Soylent didn't even do marketing for the first year or two of its existence. Rinehart just started experimenting, realized it hit a nerve with the hacker community, and created a product that appealed to the demographic that responded to his experiment.
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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.
For example, since Soylent explicitly aims to keep the product vegan, including cricket protein is unlikely even if nutrition and economic reasons are not a concern.
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> if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. Chemistry and biology doesn't work like this. This is excessively simplistic/reductive. Food is a concoction of elements of chemical composition (naturally and/or synthetically produced). The reaction of one chemicals is _dependent_ on all of the other chemicals present and the quantities of the…
Can you give any examples of reactions between food ingredients making people sick? The usual reasons that foods make people sick are quite specific to an ingredient: digestive issues usually stem from inability to digest a particular sugar, and allergies arise from food-specific antigens. Neither is created or modified when you mix two foods together, or digest one in the presence of the other.
Without commenting on whether this applies to the case at hand: the medical term "potentiate" refers to one substance increasing the effects of another; one substance can also decrease the effect of another. Neither substance in isolation causes a problem, but the two taken together can cause harm.
One common example: you shouldn't drink milk or other high-calcium foods with some types of antibiotics (such as those based on tetracycline), because the calcium binds to the antibiotic and prevents absorption.
A less well-known example: drinking grapefruit juice with various different medications (such as blood-pressure reduction medications, some antihistamines, and some statins that lower cholesterol) can prevent the drug from breaking down as quickly, increasing the concentration in your system, such that it builds up as you take more. That interaction can kill you in various ways, such as increasing the effect of the drug in question, or destroying your kidneys.
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Nothing in your post was close to reasonable.
Just because an idea makes one uncomfortable ("eating sludge", "efficient and sustainable nutrition impacting public policy", etc.) does not make it unreasonable, least of all unreasonable for discussion. The opposite should be true.
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You (and Soylent) have absolutely no idea whether that's true. Which is the problem.
I believe Soylent has a pretty good idea. They know what changed in their formula, they know the difference between the products receiving complaints and the products not, and they have evidence from other companies (Honey Stinger) who had similar issues.
Things that are going into my body should not be rapidly developed and released. It's slightly different than Facebook launching a new feature that may or may not break.