These are what I call "Get me some Press" companies from a VC / YC perspective. Will make the cover of WSJ ... get a ton of attention to the company and investors and eventually be dead in 3-4 years.
The End of Food?
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: The End of Food?
#32> One of Silicon Valley’s cultural exports in the past ten years has been the concept of “lifehacking”: devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing Well, to be frank, I'd rather be eating. What's the point of your life if you don't have time to even eat, let alone enjoy yourself.
I totally agree with this sentiment (love cooking), but I still see the usefulness of Soylent. Many people just aren't very into food, and would benefit from having an (occasional) simple and healthy alternative. Of college friends I've talked to, many have said they might try this for a few meals a week when "real food" is too inconvenient.
From a nutritional perspective, $3 is pretty decent for a balanced meal. Much healthier than fast-food at that price. Obviously you can cook real food on $3 a meal, but some people can't always plan for that.
Re: The End of Food?
#33[deleted]
Re: The End of Food?
#34I love this idea not because I like to replace my meals with this, but the fact that it could improve world hunger problem in a big way. Couldn't it?
Re: The End of Food?
#35It's like saying sex toys will eventually replace having sex because why waste time dating, courting and then having sex :) when you could just use a toy + redtube and get it over with in 10 minutes.
Re: The End of Food?
#36I find it annoying that whenever Soylent is discussed, people always take such an extreme view of it. Why do so many people frame the discussion with "you will replace all meals with it".
It's similar to stories about electric cars. Someone will always comment about how electric cars won't work for people who have to drive 500 km non stop on a daily basis, therefore they are doomed to failure.
Re: The End of Food?
#37> One of Silicon Valley’s cultural exports in the past ten years has been the concept of “lifehacking”: devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing Well, to be frank, I'd rather be eating. What's the point of your life if you don't have time to even eat, let alone enjoy yourself.
I love eating. But there's two problems: I love eating too much, and I don't really enjoy cooking.
I'd love to add something like Soylent to my "arsenal" to make it easier to skip cooking now and again and make calorie control easier. I manage to keep my weight by regularly counting calories, but it's incredibly tedious and easy to slip up with.
I'd rather focus my enjoyment on a smaller set of high quality meals a week.
Re: The End of Food?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose the argument is that you derive some amount of enjoyment from eating due to hunger. If you were never hungry, would you eat for enjoyment? Soylent's premise is that you have time to do other fun or profitable things instead of making time for a meal.
If you were never hungry, would you eat for enjoyment? Absolutely, I would. The range of sensations available through the consumption food is second only to sex in its breadth and power and sensuality. Anyone who would forego that because it's "inconvenient" utterly baffles me.
I think a helpful parallel for this is alcohol consumption. I'm a huge cocktail nerd: I love tinkering with them and admiring them, finding complexity and nuance in slight variances in recipes and ingredients, admiring the deep levels of possibility in preparing a great drink. If anything, the drunkenness is a distraction from the mixology.
And at the same time, there are people who drink only when they want to get drunk -- or who abstain altogether, not liking the bite of alcohol or the consequence it conjures. And that's totally normal.
I think it's more likely than not that at some point in the future, eating food will be the same way -- there will be a pronounced spectrum of interest once it's decoupled from the need for subsistence.
Re: The End of Food?
#39Rhinehart is not a fan of farms, which he refers to as “very inefficient factories.” He believes that farming should become more industrialized, not less. “It’s really the labor that gets me” This seems a little ignorant to me. Farms (at least in Australia) are amazingly industrialized. I visited my cousin's dairy farm recently and one person was working at milking dozens of cows at a time. I walked away with the ima…
This is definitely true, look at the rise of John Deere's GreenStar - GPS controlled tractors and implements which dramatically improve yields. Farmers are like hackers in many ways.
Re: The End of Food?
#40NSFW Whenever discussions of Soylent come up, I always wonder - would the same people who want to take Soylent also agree to taking a people that made their sex drive disappear? It will definitely save time and money to not have to worry about sex, after all. NOTE: This is not a pro- or anti- Soylent sentiment, it's a mind experiment.
Would you consider internet porn a reasonable comparison to Soylent, as a low-effort alternative to sex for some people?