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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

#151

Post by jacalata »

stinkytaco wrote: post #90
fleitz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shush, they have plenty of testimonials from real customers saying it works. Soylent is a true superfood unlike scams like acai berry juice. Solves long standing dietary issues that have gone unsolved by modern medicine? Check. Helps you lose weight? Check. Saves time and money? Check. Testimonials? Check. Even people with sciency sounding backgrounds think it's good! Let me just get out my credit card and sign up fo…

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.…

Breaks down and you have no idea how to fix it and have to hand over cash to the guy you bought it from, because your generations of accumulated animal husbandry knowledge is now useless? Does not magically replace itself with newer models like your farm animals did? Introduces new and unexpected dangers like a blade that accidentally cuts off your childs hand, because while you and your children are very familiar with the dangers of farm animals, machinery is totally unfamiliar? Check, check, check...

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#152

Post by dpapathanasiou »

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…

Not to worry, the last two paragraphs explain why it won't take over the world:

"I was euphoric. I felt the endorphins rushing through my body, the gob of chicken skin wandering down my esophagus, the juices staining my chin. Rob, who'd joined us, led a conversation about the food technology; the chicken was sublime. Before long, I might as well have been stoned. For a half an hour, I sat there, overwhelmed, unaware of any foodless world outside my brain."

"For a few minutes, the future didn’t matter; the taste, the the swirling talk took over. The food anchored me to the glorious present, and eating was all."

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#153

Post by dragontamer »

nightski wrote: post #65
dragontamer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly isn't a scam. However, I went to an engineering school, and have met Food Engineers. Food Engineering is a difficult branch of chemical engineering. You've got regulations, you've got people's lives at stake. The Soylent guys just went at it like a hacker: because thats what they are. They're taking the "startup culture" and trying to apply it to food. And that is incredibly dangerous. Anyone who has any…

The food industry as a whole is one big hack, even with it's fancy regulations and bureaucracy. People are dying constantly due to the failures of the industry. It is nice to see fresh ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

Learn history yo before making ignorant comments.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#154

Post by aianus »

[deleted] wrote: post #114
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…

[deleted]

That's only because urban housing and infrastructure is largely a zero-sum game. If you want to live in a house in San Francisco you have to outbid all the other rich people who want to live in a house in San Francisco.

It's totally possible right now to raise a family on a single income working remotely with a better than 1950's quality of life. Unfortunately, you'd have to move somewhere outside the first world which very few people are willing to do because they're caught up in a never-ending race to out-compete and out-consume their peers.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#155

Post by freyrs3 »

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.

A laymen thinking they have a sufficient understanding of biochemistry to "hack" the human body isn't only naive, it's unethical. There's a reason we license people to become dieticians.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#156

Post by refurb »

tolmasky wrote: post #146
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.

There's a difference between "meat", and grain-fed, antibiotic treated cow meat. And last time I made bread, it didn't magically develop high fructose corn syrup or ammonium chloride, and yet, somehow it appears in the "bread" of a McDonalds hamburger. It goes without saying that the condiments are more or less by definition artificial processed foods. And let's not even get into the amount of sodium in this thing. Y…

I can't tell if this is just hyperbole or if you actually believe what you're saying.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#158

Post by skizm »

I feel like you can get 90% of the way to soylent's promises with whey protein milkshakes, multi-vitamins and fish oil. Toss some fiber in that diet and you get the rest of the way. Athlete? add some creatine to your morning shake and eat something with more carbs post workout (carbohydrate supplement powder works great and is cheap). Having a minimalist diet isn't rocket science, but I guess it is reassuring to have that stamp on the bottle that says a doctor approved of the macro-nutrient ratios.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#159

Post by DanBC »

tolmasky wrote: post #115
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…

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…

> What is the difference between the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds and Soylent?

No one tells you that you can live on McDonald's alone.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#160

Post by mathattack »

caublestone wrote: post #75
mathattack wrote: post #67

Seems like Soylent is taking advantage if the entire industry loophole called supplements. If the loophole didn't exist, this type of entrepreneurship wouldn't. Food companies are also doing real experiments. I don't see tasteless goop shakes disrupting the market any more than sport shakes. EDIT: I stand corrected on the first paragraph. I still believe the 2nd to be true.

Soylent is a food and not a supplement. The commercial version of the product is being produced in an FDA approved and GMP certified facility - RFI.

I stand corrected. Good for them!
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