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Soylent on the latest Vice piece

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Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#121

Post by timr »

nostromo wrote: post #49
thinkalone wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What shitstorm? The Motherboard piece was overall positive, and didn't have the tongue-in-cheek holier-than-thou tone that most articles about Soylent have had.

The nascent shitstorm was the story PandoDaily wrote that cherry-picked the mold and rat incidents from the Vice piece to make the content more salacious than it otherwise was.

Dude, say what you will about PandoDaily, but it is not OK to have rats running around in a food prep facility.

The health department in SF will shut down restaurants for less.

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#122

Post by aianus »

lambda wrote: post #111
gfodor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ensure tastes like shit. If Soylent tastes reasonably OK, and has stronger guarantees that it can be a true meal replacement than supplements like Ensure, then sign me up.

I was replying to a comment that suggested he was interested in using it merely as a supplement (replacing only lunch). Ensure is perfectly capable of doing that. I'm not sure what "stronger guarantees" Soylent would have. Ensure has been used to replace meals for tons of sick people for 40 years; why do you think that a few computer geeks will be able to suddenly do better than 40 years of industrial research? As fa…

You have to chew rice and beans. It's still easier and faster to gulp down some slop.

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#123

Post by mdisraeli »

cgh wrote: post #57
lnanek2 wrote: post #38

I don't really understand why Soylent needs a factory anyway. Just white label some generic meal replacement shake like Ensure and they are done. The only thing interesting about the company is they managed to market a product that already exists as something new to a new audience.

Please see this discussion, in particular the response from "rob": http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-... Summary: Soylent aims for something more ideal than a suboptimal solution. It's a day to day meal replacement for otherwise healthy, active people. Given the ingredients of Ensure, I wouldn't want to try to live on it for 30 days. It's like Google vs. Altavista, if you'll pardon the strai…

From the link: "I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal"

I have family ties into this industry, and quite frankly this comment is rather ignorant. Ensure is a brand range, with a lot of variation, some of which are, for example, extremely high in calories.

It is also worth noting that one of the uses of products like Ensure is to actually mix in with regular cooking, increasing the calorific and nutritional value of normal food.

Comparing existing products in the market with "Altavista", and Soylent with "Google" is also very disingenuous, as it serves to discredit all the work put into existing products, and ignores their business model. Funnily enough, Ensure isn't marketed as hipster-food, and everything about it is tailored for their target market of the medical industry.

As hackers, surely we should be supporting good business, rather than blindly going with the latest fad?

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#124

Post by MarcusVorenus »

dragonwriter wrote: post #116
MarcusVorenus wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delicious unhealthy cheeseburger or a tasteless but healthy goop in a can? I guess you're right, it's a no-brainer either for people with self-discipline and for those without.

> Delicious unhealthy cheeseburger or a tasteless but healthy goop in a can? I choose -- false dichotomy. Plenty of healthy and not tasteless quick meal replacements that already exist.

Such option was not presented in the hypothetical scenario. It'd be trivial anyway to make the tasteless goop tasty with some flavorings.

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#125

Post by aianus »

DanBC wrote: post #108
KevinEldon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soylent is a food, like the McDonald's McRib sandwich, the Baconator from Wendy's, the Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast, and the delicious beef tacos from my local Mexican restaurant. Why does Soylent need more scrutiny than any of these or the hundreds of thousands of other food products on the market today?

> Why does Soylent need more scrutiny than any of these or the hundreds of thousands of other food products on the market today? An excellent question. It doesn't, it needs the same scrutiny as those products. Because they're telling the FDA that it's a supplement they get by with lower levels of regulation and inspection.

Their blog post today states "Soylent is designed and regulated as a food, not a supplement."

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#126

Post by aianus »

whyenot wrote: post #91
KevinEldon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soylent is a food, like the McDonald's McRib sandwich, the Baconator from Wendy's, the Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast, and the delicious beef tacos from my local Mexican restaurant. Why does Soylent need more scrutiny than any of these or the hundreds of thousands of other food products on the market today?

> Soylent is a food The company is claiming that it is a dietary supplement and NOT food in order to avoid FDA scrutiny. At least that is what the PandoDaily article that was originally linked to claims.

Their blog post today states "Soylent is designed and regulated as a food, not a supplement."

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#127

Post by toomuchtodo »

bentcorner wrote: post #85
toomuchtodo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's nothing I love more than factory farmed animal protein and excessive, unneeded carbohydrates. Delicious cheeseburger? Have you even eaten at a McDonalds?

Let's recognize the fact that McDonald's food actually tastes good to a large portion of the population, for better or worse. To do otherwise is, IMO, harmful to the discussion of improving what we eat as a society.

Let's also recognize that the American public fails in an epic fashion at nutritional choices:

http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [More than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7%) are obese.]

http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/statistics.htm [Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.]

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#128

Post by Gigablah »

Sargos wrote: post #69
toomuchtodo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would you rather eat on the go? Mcdonalds? Or a Soylent vending machine? I've had enough Mcdonalds for this lifetime. Bring on the Soylent vending machines!

Hmm, delicious cheeseburger or tasteless goop in a can? That's a tough one. Maybe my sarcasm detector is off but I don't see how this is a real question.

Where did you get the idea that it's "tasteless"?

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#129

Post by [deleted] »

OvidNaso wrote: post #90
hawkharris wrote: post #84

Many startups put the word "utilize" in their press releases to sound fancier and more official: "This...prompted us to utilize more robust packaging." You can always say "use" instead of "utilize" to avoid buzzwords and sound more conversational. In fact, there are only a few specific cases (mostly in science writing) where "utilize" is necessary: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/use-versu...

It may be different where you live, but at least in Southern California English, 'utilize' is quite commonly used and would sound conversational in tone to many an ear.

[deleted]

Re: Soylent on the latest Vice piece

#130

Post by lambda »

aianus wrote: post #122
lambda wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was replying to a comment that suggested he was interested in using it merely as a supplement (replacing only lunch). Ensure is perfectly capable of doing that. I'm not sure what "stronger guarantees" Soylent would have. Ensure has been used to replace meals for tons of sick people for 40 years; why do you think that a few computer geeks will be able to suddenly do better than 40 years of industrial research? As fa…

You have to chew rice and beans. It's still easier and faster to gulp down some slop.

Given how much of a problem some people here seem to have with normal food (though it only seems to have happened after seeing the Soylent marketing materials, I didn't know anyone who complained about how much trouble eating was before the Soylent hype), it's hard to tell if you're being sarcastic or serious. I suppose I've just run up against the Silicon Valley Hype Machine version of Poe's Law.

Given how bad the hype has become (Soylent appears to me to be about as useful and likely to be successful as Pets.com), I think it's time to start shoring a bunch of Silicon Valley stock; we appear to have hit the next bubble. The problem is that outside of Twitter and Facebook, no one has really gone public recently, so it's a lot harder to actually short these silly companies.

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