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Soylent Month Three

robrhinehart.com

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Re: Soylent Month Three

#171

Post by oneandoneis2 »

rdouble wrote: post #158
mrb wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 minutes/day? 6.7 minutes per meal? I doubt it. Plus you forgot the time to buy groceries, wash dishes, eat (drinking something like soylent is 5x faster than chewing food), etc. The average adult probably spends 45min-1h per day doing something necessary for preparing food. The guy has a point: Soylent does save time: "I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat ou…

I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner It seems strange that it would take him 2 hours to cook a combination of eggs, a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger. These are foods that only take a few minutes to cook. Cooking either eggs or a quesadilla takes less than 1 minute. If cooked longer, they are ru…

..how are you cooking eggs that they're done in under a minute? The only way I can think of that stands any chance is by frying, which is hardly the healthiest option. Soft-boiling an egg takes me six minutes, plus the time to heat the water. About quarter of an hour all in, at a guess.

As for a burger, when I cook one of those it's an absolute minimum of half an hour start to finish - peeling & chopping the onions & garlic, dicing the bacon, mixing it all together with the beef, cooking it properly.. I can easily take up an hour.

You seem to be confusing "Microwave crap from a packet" with preparation of decent food.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#172

Post by nakedrobot2 »

from the article: "No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated."

And, I presume, no one in the world is poor. Nobody struggles. There is no murder or injustice anymore.

Just which planet is this fellow living on?

Re: Soylent Month Three

#173

Post by 6d0debc071 »

nbdbvcrea wrote: post #116
hesdeadjim wrote: post #69

I'm concerned less with the long term health effects of this diet as it relates to missing nutrients, and much more concerned about quality control of the individual ingredients themselves. Who's actually checking that, say, the vitamin A palmitate coming from a supplier actually contains the dose requested, and additionally that it contains no other contaminates? The supplement world is like the wild west as far as…

I would be most concerned about overdosing some vitamin or mineral powder, taken in miligram range. Just one pinch can cause serious and painful injury. Will it always be mixed evenly?

Apparently this was one of his concerns in not releasing precisely what he was using.

"Several individuals experienced in chemistry have already figured out how to make it on their own. I'd like to keep it this way for now, as I trust them to measure the ingredients properly."

- http://robrhinehart.com/?p=474

Re: Soylent Month Three

#174

Post by arethuza »

XorNot wrote: post #122
adambard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage you to research what a croissant is and then find and devour one. This comment makes me feel like you're missing out on that.

A croissant is also about the most amount of butter you can possibly fit into a pastry.

I think that dubious honour probably belongs to the "buttery" from North East Scotland:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttery_%28bread%29

They are basically lumps of butter and salt held together with a trace amount of flour. The versions available from mainstream stores (e.g. M&S) or from recipes online are fairly tame - for the real effect they need to be purchased from a small local baker in some remote fishing village.

Best butteries I've ever had were actually on a trawler in the North Sea - where they were served hot awash in molten salted butter.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#175

Post by ricardobeat »

oneandoneis2 wrote: post #171
rdouble wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner It seems strange that it would take him 2 hours to cook a combination of eggs, a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger. These are foods that only take a few minutes to cook. Cooking either eggs or a quesadilla takes less than 1 minute. If cooked longer, they are ru…

..how are you cooking eggs that they're done in under a minute? The only way I can think of that stands any chance is by frying, which is hardly the healthiest option. Soft-boiling an egg takes me six minutes, plus the time to heat the water. About quarter of an hour all in, at a guess. As for a burger, when I cook one of those it's an absolute minimum of half an hour start to finish - peeling & chopping the onions &…

Frying is totally fine if you use no (or little) oil and a non-stick pan.

I wouldn't consider making burgers a fast-prep food, but you can chop up an onion and clean the board in under two minutes. Skip the bacon. Actually, skip the onion too, just slice it up and brown a little for use as a topping, the best burgers are pure meat. Grilling, browning the bun and assembly takes another 10 minutes. A good titanium pan is clean in 30 seconds. Freeze a dozen patties and you can have a lot of instant meals.

I do cook a lot so am used to doing things reasonably fast, but I can't really see the argument for soylent saving time. You need breaks from work/activities anyway; besides, cooking can be relaxing, and is a great time to catch up on a podcast/video you've been saving for when you have the time, so it doesn't have to be completely "wasted".

Re: Soylent Month Three

#176

Post by 6d0debc071 »

TheCapn wrote: post #22

"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally." This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck. We've seen his po…

> This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients.

It seems mostly to assume that health follows rules that you can discover and which aren't particularly unstable.

To believe that you have a decent chance of hitting on it assumes that we have a broad understanding of what's in what we normally eat I suppose.

But, you know, this is why people mess around with this sort of stuff. If it goes great then fantastic, and if it doesn't then we only lose a couple of people here and there. The risk-reward is almost certainly going to work out in its favour. It probably sucks for him if he gets it wrong but, well, that's his look out isn't it? It's not like anyone's taking advantage of him.

I suppose to be strictly ethical you'd go and feed it to starving kids and feed the others your best natural diet, so everyone seems likely to get a bit of a win out of it even if eventually it turns out to give them cancer or something. But that seems a bit beyond DIY studies.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#177

Post by cLeEOGPw »

Those who say that this is wrong because humans should eat like our ancestors because we evolved to eat in this way are on the same level with people that say only man and woman should have sex because nature made it this way. Naturalists are wrong from the very root because of assumption nature makes everything on purpose and in the only right way possible. This soylent thing exposes all the ignorance of the people in this regard.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#179

Post by 6d0debc071 »

oneandoneis2 wrote: post #171
rdouble wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner It seems strange that it would take him 2 hours to cook a combination of eggs, a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger. These are foods that only take a few minutes to cook. Cooking either eggs or a quesadilla takes less than 1 minute. If cooked longer, they are ru…

..how are you cooking eggs that they're done in under a minute? The only way I can think of that stands any chance is by frying, which is hardly the healthiest option. Soft-boiling an egg takes me six minutes, plus the time to heat the water. About quarter of an hour all in, at a guess. As for a burger, when I cook one of those it's an absolute minimum of half an hour start to finish - peeling & chopping the onions &…

> ..how are you cooking eggs that they're done in under a minute? The only way I can think of that stands any chance is by frying, which is hardly the healthiest option. Soft-boiling an egg takes me six minutes, plus the time to heat

I've got ~5 minutes here:

Boil water in kettle ~2 minutes

Place in pan on hot ring on hob with eggs, comes to boil ~.5 minutes

Boil until cooked ~3 minutes

- add a minute or two if you prefer hard boiled

And it doesn't require you to be standing over it so if you take away the time you can be absent that's going to take you down to more like 3 minutes.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#180

Post by shubb »

uberalex wrote: post #168
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #166

He missed the sixth most abundant element in the human body, and, now that it's there, he is sure everything is OK? I can only say, "Wow". I really believe that if an actual scientific study[1] was done on this, it would rank right next to a pure fast food diet. It's not that it isn't theoretically possible to make something that is "perfect" nutrition, it's that we don't know enough today to say definitively whether…

I have to agree with you, but I wonder will it ever be feasible to really understand that in a way that helps individuals? There's an amazing amount of hidden complexity. For me this experiment is a testament to the variety of human individuality, and the resilience of the human organism. I can't imagine wanting to replace most of my food with a powder shake, and I drink them fairly regularly post-gym. Beyond that, I…

Anyone who ate this every meal for ever based on the current level of evidence is nuts sure.

But this is awesome research. He is trying to do something awesome, at great personal risk.

He has shown some integrity in not providing the recipe until it has been verified, and has stated that he will proceed to large scale trials before commercializing.

I'm not saying I don't expect him to damage himself (and anyone else who eats this full time), but I don't really understand all the heat he's getting for trying.

If this yields something cheap we can eat ~80% of meals in the long term, then that's a really great thing. There are people who eat an unhealthy and monotonous diet due to cost, even in the west. If that could be partly replaced with something a bit more healthy, that would be very socially valuable.

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