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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

#241

Post by timr »

ebiester wrote: post #239
timr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes...the "McDonald's is bad, so let's feed people glop instead" argument. How about this: let's help people get access to, appreciate, and learn how to prepare "real" food, instead of jumping to the lowest common denominator. That's what I'd call "disruption".

The disruption is the prep work and cleanup. I dream of a kitchen in a way that cleanup takes less than three minutes and my veg is uniformly chopped for me while I'm on my way home. (I'm quite capable of doing each, but I'm slow, and getting my mise en place takes far too long.) That leads to me only cooking on weekends when I don't have anything going on. I'm a good cook, but by the time the brussel sprouts are roa…

"I dream of a kitchen in a way that cleanup takes less than three minutes and my veg is uniformly chopped for me while I'm on my way home."

Um. You can buy most vegetables pre-chopped. They cost less than Soylent. They sell them at Walgreen's!

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#242

Post by brymaster »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #32

EDIT: Unbelievable. Both the title and the link to the article I commented on have been swapped from the PandoDaily article ( http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/12/vice-investigates-soylent-f... ) to the Vice article which PandoDaily referred to, but that tries to give it a positive spin. This goes well beyond whatever policy pg was trying to defend recently. This is deeply manipulative. --- It looks a scam, it sounds lik…

> This goes well beyond whatever policy pg was trying to defend recently. This is deeply manipulative.

YC has stake in Soylent (http://blog.soylent.me/post/64789154918/soylent-funding-anno...). I think people sometimes forget who's website this is they're commenting on.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#243

Post by ebiester »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #195
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…

You go ahead and eat your fake food. I'll continue working very hard but still have time for my family, and I also eat real food. Heck, I can cook a whole pizza from scratch in 30 minutes, dough included. Now that's a hack that's centuries old I'm guessing. No, I'm not putting it on Kickstarter :-)

Probably not, considering when quick rise yeast came on the market and the necessity of electric stoves for that kind of speed. In most places, you would have a central stove and going to and from would take ten minutes at the least. ;)

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#245

Post by pyrocat »

ruswick wrote: post #215

Honestly, I just don't get Soylent. What is the purpose? As a health measure? The market for weight-loss shakes and other dietary solutions is saturated, and most of it appears to be complete shit. Dietary shakes are easy to come by, and are almost universally reviled because they don't work as advertised and taste disgusting. Is Soylent a supposed to be a remedy for malnutrition? Why is drinking a bunch of vitamins…

> I'm sorry, but if you can't find time to eat human food, the issue is your schedule, not the food. Correct me if I'm wrong, but eating is pretty fucking important. If you are in a position where feeding yourself actual sustenance is inconvenient, then there is a probably a severe deficiency with your schedule and a problem with your priorities.

You don't sound very sorry. You sound incredibly judgmental of anyone who has different priorities than you.

Personally, I love food, I just hate preparing it. Spend 30 minutes to cook a meal that I will eat in 5? No thanks. So I eat out all the time, which is really fucking expensive.

You've heard of the PM triangle right? Same basic idea here. Food can be cheap, tasty, quick, and healthy, but not all at once. McDonalds is cheap, tasty, and quick but not healthy. That steak dinner you just cooked yourself is cheap, tasty, and healthy but not quick. I personally always pick the quick option, but the other items can vary. Thus I'm usually eating quick, tasty, and healthy items. I have trouble finding things that are quick, healthy, and cheap. This seems to fill that niche nicely.

It doesn't mean I'm going to suddenly stop eating out, but it will mean I spend less money in the long run, without having to spend extra time. For all of the comments on Hacker News about how time=money, even when you're not on the clock, you'd think this concept would make sense more immediately.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#246

Post by itsameta4 »

I've been following this story since the beginning, and here's the part that I'm baffled that people always forget:

They're open-sourcing the recipe.

That should remove all the accusations of it being a scam. If it's a scam, it will be easily proved such.

If there are nutritional problems, they can be fixed, either in the official branch, or in one of the many forks which already exist.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#247

Post by refurb »

tolmasky wrote: post #181
refurb wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Proposing counter arguments is considered to be an effective way of reconciling two differing beliefs, as opposed to simply questioning my sincerity. I would be more than happy to know the factual inaccuracies I have stated, and to change my position accordingly.

OK, I'll be less snarky with this reply...

>There's a difference between "meat", and grain-fed, antibiotic treated cow meat.

The meat used in McDonald's hamburgers is the same meat you would buy in the grocery store. Is it a super high quality cut? Of course not, it's likely made from cheap cuts of meat, but that's what you do when you're grinding it up for a burger.

>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.

Fine with the HFCS, but ammonium chloride is a common baking ingredient in baking. It's used as a nutrient for yeast and it's also used in medicine to acidify your urine.

>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.

Tomato sauce is made from tomatoes, a vegetable. Sure it has a lot of salt and sometimes HFCS in it, but it's not "artificial". Do you consider homemade dill pickles to be "artificial" because of them amount of salt in them?

>You'll also notice there's basically no fiber in this thing (that's why it lasts so long).

The fiber content of something has nothing to do with why food lasts so long, it's the moisture content. Stuff that has no moisture will not support bacterial growth. If you take wheat and make hardtack with it, it won't rot at all, but that's natural isn't it?

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#248

Post by thaumasiotes »

stinkytaco wrote: post #99
beambot wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... it could put humanity in a position to provide a balanced nutrition as a fundamental human right, delivered right to your doorstep by USPS. If the economics worked out it could be provided everywhere worldwide, and then other food consumption could be purely for enjoyment. There are always people who scream "dystopia!" every time a new technology arrives. That seems very pessimistic.

>it could put humanity in a position to provide a balanced nutrition as a fundamental human right, delivered right to your doorstep by USPS. If the economics worked out it could be provided everywhere worldwide, and then other food consumption could be purely for enjoyment. So... why not just do that with the food we've got? Drop a few packages of surplus food on the doorsteps of some African countries and call it go…

> Some of the food problem in major US cities is lack of access to grocery stores that sell real food.

Assumed without evidence.

http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11060...

From the conclusion to the paper:

> In our longitudinal study, neighborhood supermarket availability was generally unrelated to both adherence to fruit and vegetable recommendations and overall diet quality (reflecting compliance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans).

They do claim that the paper supports zoning restrictions on fast food restaurants, because of their finding that among men, greater availability of fast food cooccurs with greater consumption of fast food. Among women, not even that.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#249

Post by aianus »

mikk0j wrote: post #228
aianus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing products have really terrible marketing. They sell them in pharmacies and generally broadcast a message of "for supplementation or diseased/senile people only". Kudos to Soylent for trying to normalize liquid diets.

That's it. I had to read this far before I realized that's exactly what their core is: "trying to normalize liquid diets" (as in make them normal, acceptable, approachable, I think?). There's nothing natural (as in biologically normal, desirable or standard) about a liquid diet, so that's going to be an uphill battle.

I have some kind of psychological problem where I chew 5x more than normal people. This causes me to fill up on very small quantities of food and it's very difficult to hit 2000 calories a day without eating a lot of small meals or taking liquid supplements. So, at least for me, a liquid diet would be highly desirable.

As for biologically normal, it all turns into a liquid sludge in your stomach, doesn't it? Past that point I don't see how your digestive system can tell the difference as long as the composition of the sludge is similar enough.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#250

Post by nsxwolf »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #214
nsxwolf wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not following. In what way is a McDonalds hamburger artificial? It's bread. It's meat. Even if there are mechanically separated parts of the meat, they're still meat. Even if it's as artificial as you say, isn't food that "looks real" and "tastes good" better than food that "looks like deplorable shit" and "tastes like deplorable shit" and is unapologetically named after something horrible from a 1970s dystopian…

McDonalds only recently (last year) stopped using 'pink slime' in their burgers: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mcdonald-confirms-no-lo...

"Pink slime" is meat. If it had been invented by a molecular gastronomist, we'd be heralding it as an exciting, innovative gourmet food.

But the media-invented pejorative nickname "sounds gross", therefore that is scientific proof that it's not "real food" and will kill you.

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