301–310 of 341 posts
Here's what I don't get... There is all this bad hype about Soylent. Why not just get one of the dozens of other meal replacement shakes in your average health food store?
Wrong subculture. Health foods are marketed for hippies and athletes and dieters. Soylent is for nerds! /s
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Ya, but it seems to me that's exactly what happened here. They pulled the batch numbers that were contaminated. I guess I don't really see the difference. This isn't unprecedented in the packaged food industry, and it doesn't seem like they're handling it any worse than any other company has.
It is in that Soylent used an experimental ingredient which had not been shown to be appropriate for this use.
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> The population at large has a very poor level of education about food, and Soylent seeks to exploit that very large business opportunity. Conceptually, the advantages of a product such as Soylent includes long shelf-life, reducing the frequency and time needed to shop food, offering healthy fast-food meals, having a lower carbon footprint and being more sustainable than regular food, reducing the time spent prepari…
I agree with you overall, but my different viewpoint comes from witnessing other companies addressing the advantages you've mentioned. Just as trends in the computer industry have been largely led by power users, there are also food "power users". These are people who save time cooking with new equipment (powerful blenders, sous vide, etc), have high quality, freshly-picked food delivered in weekly boxes, have conven…
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There is no such thing as just "eating food" - you are making diet choices, consciously and/or subconsciously in everything you choose to eat. Your comment is loaded with all sorts of diet judgement (fiber good, salt bad, balanced good, processed bad). We could find out barley causes cancer, or even though you thrive on a meaty diet, it causes heart disease. Or diet doesn't matter and it is all genetic or micro-biome…
The odds of finding out that something like barley and chicken are especially carcinogenic are a lot less than the odds that Soylent or Paleo or some other fad is frankly unhealthy. Ignore the bulk of nutrition "research" which is after all, crap, and focus on the few things that are relatively sound. High fiber, healthy weight, good blood levels, get your nutrients. It's not that hard.
Soylent's problem is not a seemingly overlooked ingredient. Their biggest problem is inability to run the continuous food processing loop. What's the point of tweaking the recipe if you can't guarantee the execution and your customers get, basically, randomness for lunch? We had a corporate subscription for Soylent 2.0 drink. The taste varied from batch to batch on the scale from "milk in a cereal bowl" to "sewage wa…
Where is the FDA in all of this? I would hope that after the widespread issues with the product, they would have stepped in and blocked shipment until safety studies have been done that comply with regulations.
Some common plant products are actually quite dangerous. For instance, grapefruit can interfere with the body breaking down Xanax and Valium.
But there's no call for the FDA to stop grapefruit farming.
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All diet choices amount to beta testing with your health. There is no (known) correct way to eat, so we choose the best we can based culture/health class/news stories/diet gurus/doctors. It is very hard to make the case that eating Soylent (never tried it myself), is meaningfully different from choosing to go macrobiotic, or paleo, or following the food pyramid.
How about just... eating food? I know, I know... so unpopular, but "Paleo, Macro..." all of that crap? Let it go. Outside of people trying to sell you shit, including books, the best advice you'll ever get is just to eat a relatively balanced diet, keep up fiber intake, and maintain a healthy weight. Whether you prefer or personally thrive more on meaty diets, or eating a lot of barley isn't really that hard to figur…
"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
And:
"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
Oh boy, another Soylent discussion. Here is what all the off topic discussion will be: Person1) "What is so hard to understand sheeple?! Soylent isn't for all your meals, just ones that you are too busy to eat. Also, it has all the vitamins you need not like all those thousand other bars/drinks!?" Person2) "I'd rather move to the bottom of the ocean than buy Soylent. Why would you ever skip a meal?! Capitalism is the…
Soylent is more than food...the company and, more importantly, the idea (increased productivity/efficiency) that it embodies is a poster child for the social norm-disrupting technology that is coming out of SV. Many of this site work in the area and belong to its culture/brand (whether they want to or not) and it's their identity and what other people, friends and family included, quickly judge them by. It's not rati…
Oh boy, another Soylent discussion. Here is what all the off topic discussion will be: Person1) "What is so hard to understand sheeple?! Soylent isn't for all your meals, just ones that you are too busy to eat. Also, it has all the vitamins you need not like all those thousand other bars/drinks!?" Person2) "I'd rather move to the bottom of the ocean than buy Soylent. Why would you ever skip a meal?! Capitalism is the…
Soylent is more than food...the company and, more importantly, the idea (increased productivity/efficiency) that it embodies is a poster child for the social norm-disrupting technology that is coming out of SV. Many of this site work in the area and belong to its culture/brand (whether they want to or not) and it's their identity and what other people, friends and family included, quickly judge them by. It's not rati…