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The End of Food?

newyorker.com

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: The End of Food?

#61
I hope people do understand that this is short term solution only. Replacing your all food indefinitely with this is most certainly going to damage you in a ways you can't know or imagine. Just by looking at the content I can see that the mix is seriously lacking essential fats, is using very low doses of some vitamins, particularly C and probably contains substitutes to others like retinol (beta carotene).

The idea is great in specific context. People have been living on single food item in multiple occasions so far. CBB to find references for all now, its easy if you need them but there are known cases of

1. Potato only for 6 months (http://goo.gl/XqxMx)

2. Bananas only for months (i.e. extreme '30 bananas a day' diet)

3. Meat only for a year (Vilhjalmur Stefansson)

4. Water only for > year (in extreme obese case).

5. Protein powder only (i.e. Last chance diet, case to the point of what could get wrong. )

6. Synthetics only (I am sure Kurzweill probably experimented with this with his 200++ pills per day).

7. MC Donalds for a month

... and so on

Its important to note that inventors are young people. Young people are very resilient - they also have full reserves of stem cells that are used to repair damage. Soylent might speed up this process because it certainly doesn't contain 'everything body needs' (because we don't know this at the current technological level) in which case one theory is that body will use its triage system (Ames) to redirect resources to the systems that are most important and shut down or reduce output in less important systems for immediate survival (such as reproduction). More appropriate would be to say 'everything body tolerates for a period'. Its certainly far better move then eating only pasta or rice for entire day.

One may hope that whatever is the eventual damage that could be done to you by use of this food surrogate is going to be fixed by the future medicinal, yet to be discovered, techniques.

Re: The End of Food?

#63
post #36

I 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.

If you read the article, you'll find out that that is precisely what differentiates Soylent from all the many other Liquid Meal replacements. The entire dream of soylent is to free people from recreational food as a requirement.

Re: The End of Food?

#64
post #36

I 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.

Because it was launched by a bloke replacing all his food with it, and with a bunch of people saying they wanted to replace all their food with it.

Re: The End of Food?

#65

I 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?

No.

The world food programme already have a wide range of supplements that are produced in developing nations and are much cheaper than Soylent.

Note that Soylent requires clean water to mix, and a large proportion of the world don't have clean water.

Re: The End of Food?

#66
post #8

> 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 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?

Eating tasty, whole some food is one of the biggest joys of life.

>>Soylent's premise is that you have time to do other fun or profitable things instead of making time for a meal.

Your productivity problems will come due many other factors than breaking for a meal. If anything breaking for a meal will ensure you will come back and work with a lot more focus.

Re: The End of Food?

#67

I hope people do understand that this is short term solution only. Replacing your all food indefinitely with this is most certainly going to damage you in a ways you can't know or imagine. Just by looking at the content I can see that the mix is seriously lacking essential fats, is using very low doses of some vitamins, particularly C and probably contains substitutes to others like retinol (beta carotene). The idea…

Also: he ate fastfood for some time, started with 'healthy' Soylent and noticed he felt better. So I think he got the wrong reference. But ofcourse there is also a lot of sweet marketing talk in the article.

Re: The End of Food?

#68
post #53
post #13

NSFW 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.

Why did you flag this as NSFW? I really hope that reading the word "sex" in a [thoroughly unsexy] hacker news comment wouldn't get anyone fired.

I'm unsure, I figured I'd warn people that this might open a discussion on sex. My standards are not everyone else's standards, so it's up to them to choose.

Re: The End of Food?

#69
post #13

NSFW 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?

I suppose in some ways, but it's not really that close in terms of what Soylent could potentially do.

Re: The End of Food?

#70
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people eat nothing but unhealthy crap for years and still stay relatively healthy. Human body is really good at metabolising even a limited variety of food into many different chemicals it needs. Well-balanced diet hasn't really been a thing in human history until recently. Mix of nutrients designed to our best knowledge can't be any worse than eating pizza/fries/burgers/soda 24/7.

You're reasoning that eating fast food isn't all that bad for you, and for that Soylent can't be worse? Because there are countless clinical trials and scientific researches that prove a correlation between fast food and heart disease, cancer et al. All I'm saying is that for a product like Soylent the long term effects haven't been studied yet. To be clear: I'm not biased against Soylent. If it's indeed just as heal…

You know how something gets studied? People try it. There are no "clinical trials" proving eating grapefruit is safe. Or hot dogs. Or bread. Or any specific cracker you find in the cracker aisle. Soylent is food. People eat food; if they like it they sometimes eat more and if they crave something else they eat something else. This is a non-problem.

> I mean, it's made by a 25 year old electrical engineer who failed a cheap cellphone tower startup. In an apartment in The Tenderloin. If you want to put your life in his hands by all means go ahead

When you buy a burrito at Chipotle you're eating something that's made by a 19-year-old who's probably failed at something too, but it'd be weird to call eating that burrito "putting your life in his hands".

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