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How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

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Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#131

Post by sillysaurus2 »

yuvadam wrote: post #69

Soylent might, technically, work. It might be safe and healthy, it definitely looks simple and allows you to forget anything related to grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up afterwards. But thinking about the prospect of the future makes me sick to my stomach. Soylent paints a disgustingly frightening dystopia where humans are fed 100% "correct" food to allow them to continue being cogs in the business machine, n…

humanoids who continue the endless pursuit of some vague promise of capitalist fulfillment (work hard, be rich, be happy), ignoring the fact that the direct opposite of such a lifestyle leads to a much more healthier, happier life which remains in touch with our basic, primal human existence.

You'd enjoy the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/zen-motorcycle.pd...

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#132

Post by jlgreco »

lowboy wrote: post #123
jlgreco wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the relaxed attitude I am talking about. Soylent, used as hyped, should not need to be proved hazardous. Soylent, used as hyped, should be shown to be safe.

Going back to lawnmowers, it would be like not wrapping the handle with leather for comfort because we can't prove that it's safe for the lawnmower. We think it's safe, we're pretty sure from our understanding that it's safe, but we can't prove it. I say give it a try. Let's wrap the handle, observe in operation, and then react when we have more data.

Back to your hyper-relaxed "the human body is no more complicated or serious than a machine" thing?

I can't believe I have not made myself clear on this already, but I'll give it one more go: You can fuck around with lawn mowers because breaking one typically doesn't fucking kill somebody.

If you break your fucking lawnmower, you buy a new one. You don't get to buy another human.

Such a lazy attitude towards human safety is positively chilling. Have you learned absolutely nothing from the horrors seen over past centuries of people treating human lives like any other test subject?

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#133

Post by ramy_d »

derleth wrote: post #125
tolmasky wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its funny because we already live in this dystopia and you simply don't notice it because the plastic food we eat "looks real" and "tastes good". What is the difference between the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds and Soylent? The fact that its basically "molded" to look like the real food we used to eat? The reality is that we long ago crossed the line into having a society that mostly eats ab…

> the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds Define 'completely artificial' here. It's meat, it's bread, it's vegetables and condiments.

you are very generous with what you call meat, bread, and vegetables.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#134

Post by hokkos »

yuvadam wrote: post #69

Soylent might, technically, work. It might be safe and healthy, it definitely looks simple and allows you to forget anything related to grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up afterwards. But thinking about the prospect of the future makes me sick to my stomach. Soylent paints a disgustingly frightening dystopia where humans are fed 100% "correct" food to allow them to continue being cogs in the business machine, n…

The Soylent guy keep mentioning that current food system will not scale, but gives no evidence that his system will. It appears to be very wasteful to grow or synthesize each components in their original form, separate them and then finally mix them, compared to naturally occurring food.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#135

Post by diydsp »

lowboy wrote: post #78
dragontamer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you do, is then you hire a 10-year veteran of the food preparation business. What you DON'T do, is pickup a few textbooks on body chemistry and assume you can figure it all out by yourself.

Why not? The human body is a machine, and we can examine and alter that machine. We've been doing that throughout history. I don't like the early claims of Soylent being "perfectly optimized" and the like.

The human body isn't a machine. It is a more complex thing that includes many machines. There are so many features of the human body that we can not examine and that we don't even know where to look...

The real question is "Soylent is perfectly optimized... for what?" Soylent may be optimized for "meeting the models of nutrition that we have." Yet, those models may be like using an FAQ to run a nuclear reactor. I'm not trying to fear-monger. I think Soylent is a great experiment. I wish I had to guts to carry out the reporter's month-long experiment.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#136

Post by stinkytaco »

fleitz wrote: post #112
stinkytaco wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so I like cooking and eating food. I think soylent is a scam, or at the very least just another in a long line of unappetizing "diet replacement shakes". But just allow me a moment to conduct a thought experiment, or at least play devil's advocate. For years you've been walking to get where you are going and you've been plowing your fields with a couple of very high maintenance animals that are costly and risky.…

The breaking of bread is one of the most important social aspects of humanity. Soylent is perfect for the disconnected from humanity factory worker. I fully appreciate that it's cheaper than food, and might be nutritionally healthy for you. Mental healthwise, it seems like a disaster.

Off topic but, I think that really gets to the core of our problems with food in western culture.

Sharing food is the only bodily function we share publically. We don't use the bathroom together. We generally sleep and procreate in private with select people. We don't give play by plays of our breathing or hygiene, even if they are technically public.

But food, food is such a powerful cultural symbol that we share it with our loved ones and even complete strangers. The power of food is so great that it's the centerpiece of many cultural touchstones (the harvest festival, the sacrifice, the fertility ritual). We talk about the food our grandparents made in tones so reverential it might as well be religion.

But when we get our lunch we get food in our cars and eat it alone. It was prepared by someone we didn't see and will never know. Not that long ago even convenience food was prepared by a person we knew. I realize that most of us don't do this every day or even most days, but certainly the rise of eating as an exercise of convenience and driven strictly by our taste buds has coincided with the rise of our fat society. I know that correlation does not equal causation, but in this case it seems likely to me that one has led to the other.

We've already started to disconnect from our food in dangerous ways. Why not add a new meal replacement if it's healthier? And it's not like the internal combustion engine made us a bunch healthier either.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#137

Post by lowboy »

jckt wrote: post #126
lowboy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a poor analogy. 1) We're starting from a functional state, 2) Changing diet is nowhere near as violent as hitting something with a wrench. Humans are very adaptable wrt. food, generally speaking. Look at the different diets all around the world, or even in one person's lifetime. The only issue I take with Soylent is their claim that it's perfect. I think we need MUCH more time to gather data.

Maybe not as violent, but a bad diet can quickly lead to disease. We never see it in the affluent West but micronutrient disease was and still is a pretty big problem -- you are getting enough food energy, so while you're not starving, you're still dying from your diet. We've only begun to start understanding some of these diseases (like Pellagra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#Epidemiology ), and we don't rea…

Yeah, I agree that there's a lot that we don't know about the human body, and I disliked any claims by Soylent that overreached in this way.

But we do know about nutrients and have a good idea of the proportion of them for the avg human.

I think my main problem with the backlash is with the argument that boils down to "We don't know, so let's not risk it". I don't see why we can't try it, and then monitor and react. If I started using Soylent and then 30 days down the road I was feeling ill, I'd probably stop using it first thing while exploring other causes.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#138

Post by crygin »

ramy_d wrote: post #133
derleth wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds Define 'completely artificial' here. It's meat, it's bread, it's vegetables and condiments.

you are very generous with what you call meat, bread, and vegetables.

Can you clarify the definitions of those terms that you'd prefer to use, which exclude the products on a McDonald's hamburger?

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#139

Post by stinkytaco »

lowboy wrote: post #128
stinkytaco wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's pretty solid evidence that biointesive techniques use less water because they make better use of the same space. If I grow two tomato plants in the space I used to grow one, I waste less water. But yes, you're right, I don't know if "vastly" is the word I would use.

Does biointensive === organic? Organic is a loaded term nowadays, so maybe it's just semantics.

No. Really, singling out "biointensive" was unfair as any intensive agriculture would have the same benefit.

>Organic is a loaded term nowadays, so maybe it's just semantics.

So loaded as to be basically meaningless.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#140

Post by derleth »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #91

These top comments are really the worst of HN. Thoughtless, emotional vitriol. Until Soylent is proved unsafe, there is no basis for calling it unsafe.

> Until Soylent is proved unsafe, there is no basis for calling it unsafe.

This is exactly backwards, and is precisely the reasoning scammers use to sell worthless treatments.

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