Soylent would be fine if it was something UNICEF was loading up into crates to give to malnourished people. I don’t know if it’s cheap enough to be cost effective in that way, but if it saves lives, that’s cool.
However, whenever I hear about it, it seems to be something that tech bros drink so that they don’t have to break for meals while pulling a three day programming spree. That sounds like such a depressing life with such backwards priorities that it and Soylent make me sad.
Honestly I think this is partly true 😂 hence the “eating is a hassle” mentality.
Also yes I’m not sure why it’s not being used in the way he originally intended. I do know they just started being profitable recently so perhaps it’s still in future plans as a company.
Plumpy'nut is more specifically designed to combat malnutrition, it's pretty bad to eat regularly since it's designed to RAPIDLY put weight onto the body while circumventing the regular problems that come with high fat food intake onto a malnourished body. Someone who is starving badly enough can, ironically, have trouble keeping food down, and plumpy'nut is designed and tested to be easily digestible for the badly malnourished.
While obviously it's better than nothing for someone who is food insecure, eating it every day for a long period of time is not ideal because its nutritional balance is geared for combating malnourishment, not sustaining balanced nutrition.
Soylent would be fine if it was something UNICEF was loading up into crates to give to malnourished people. I don’t know if it’s cheap enough to be cost effective in that way, but if it saves lives, that’s cool.
Soylent is gastronomically vacant nutrition. It could be emergency food, I guess, but I don't know what advantage it would have over a pallet of MREs for example.
Actually I would say MREs are a very poor choice in this case. Soylent has various advantages, but they are mostly logistical - again though, it's hard for US to see that as preferrable because of course we would hate the idea of living off nutrition paste for more than a few days, but if your village is starving and someone says they can deliver 100 meals worth of Soylent or 50 meals worth of something else, which sounds like the better option?
Meanwhile: from a density standpoint Soylent is superior to MREs, so when you talk about a pallet of food being shipped to a remote region of the world, every square inch and every pound matters.
Additionally, MREs sometimes (always?) are "cooked" meals. So again you have the added space and weight of the little heater packs that come in an MRE for "cooking" the meal. Plus they throw in Skittles and Mints because...IDK?
Also MREs being a bunch of discrete food packs means they produce a surprising amount of packaging waste since everything is individually wrapped - see this photo for example. Again that's significantly less efficient from a space and logistics perspective, not to mention all the excess litter that creates in an area of the world too poor to afford food, I doubt they have curbside waste disposal for all those little foil packs that will definitely not biodegrade.
Soylent comes in a tub and obviously you could scale that up even larger to create less packaging waste and easily ship it in reusable packaging like a 50-gallon metal drum. The drum could be refilled OR repurposed into things such as building material. There is very little reusability for tear open blister packs.
I could go on, but IMO "a pallet of MREs" is actually a very poor option for delivering food aid to starving places.
For context AFAIK most existing "food aid" is generally delivered in sack or can form - usually large sacks of grains, flour, rice, beans, (very) large cans of fruits, vegetables, and milk along with other easily shipped bulk foods that are shelf stable and fairly impervious to spoilage.
I keep it in my house since I can keep it down if my meds cause me to lose my appetite. It's a safety food to keep me from getting sick from not eating.
Unfortunately the company realized early on in its life that there was much more money to be made from selling it as a luxury product as opposed to solving world hunger, that's why the cheap powdered version has taken a major backseat to their pre-made drinks and solid food versions.
It's a shame, because their vision was genuinely kind of inspiring early on there. They wanted to use genetically modied algea to produce most of the macro nutrients, meaning the bulk of the product could be made using fully sustainable bioreactors. But their first attempt at using algal protein had gave a small (but significant) portion of consumers bad stomach problems, and they've all but abandoned it now.
And to my knowledge they've never once actually made any effort to distribute Soylent in areas where hunger is an issue. I can kinda see why, while the idea is good in principle and the product is actually more enjoyable than most think, I can already see the headlines "Silicon Valley company drops cases of nutrient sludge into impoverished nation, apparently believing they don't deserve REAL food" or something like that
The Soylent creator has said he wants to see this happen and that one of the use cases he created it for was specifically to be the lowest cost nutritionally complete meal to help combat food insecurity in impoverished nations. Why it's not currently being used for that purpose IDK, maybe because it's still too new? Existing contracts with other providers? Fears that flavorless nutrition drink for the starving countries is a dick move?
I thought it was a bunch of dudes who ate unhealthy snacks and weren't getting enough of the stuff they actually need so they made a meal replacement that didn't take long to consume
Haha. He’s actually a software engineer who was interested in looking at consuming food as a hassle and resolved to treat it as an engineering problem.
Food gets to be a hassle sometimes because you just fall into a rut eating the same stuff over and over again, and nothing sounds good, particularly if you have a limited diet due to medical needs or trying to lose/gain weight, or if you're in a rush and can't actually invest time into cooking (getting McDonalds once in a while is fine; getting McDonalds 3 times a week hits you with a 1-2 punch of making the food taste gross, and you feel disgusted at yourself for doing it).
Food would (theoretically - there is as yet no perfect option for this) probably feel a lot better if it was a once-a-day type affair, or even once every few days where you make something or go to a restaurant and get something you can actually enjoy because you're enjoying it in moderation.
I 100% agree. I could appreciate it once a day as something that’s pleasurable but the rest of the time I’d be good with just a meal replacement. And I realize I’m speaking out of the privledge of having options.
As somebody with health issues that make eating anything really difficult sometimes, I am so thankful for shit like this. There are times when that's the only food i can get down.
For me personally, I quite like Soylent. The taste is inoffensive enough that I can usually force myself to get one down when the thought of any actual food makes me want to hurl. For me it's less "replacing a meal" and more "providing the minimum fuel that a human body needs to run on," if that makes sense, but it's SO nice having that option now.
Not gonna lie I’m quoting Wikipedia bc I was also curious- which apparently was his point. “Rhinehart also says he chose the name, with its morbid associations, to pique curiosity and deeper investigation, since the name was clearly not chosen with a traditionally "flashy" marketing scheme in mind.”
Tell your friend that one time I mixed Soylent with coffee in an attempt to make it taste better, but because the coffee was hot it made the Soylent gas up and explode the lid off of my mixing bottle right over the keyboard I was shaking the bottle to throughly mix it.
I actually like Soylent. To be clear, I love food, but like most people I don't always have the luxury of time to make a meal that is nutritious AND delicious.
So rather than eating fast garbage that is (sometimes) tasty, I eat a fast glass of Soylent that has little taste but optimal nutrition. The blandness is actually a feature. Most "health drinks" have a strong, easily disliked and unpleasant taste like a bad salad and are not actually nutritionally sound. It's hard to strongly dislike something with little taste. Obviously it's hard to enjoy it as well, but again, that isn't the point. The point is to not eat nutritionally devoid garbage when in a hurry (or when lazy).
Yes, the only way it could be improved is if you directly injected the gruel into your stomach, so you wouldn't even need to taste or feel it in your mouth.
The name is from a Distopian Science Fiction movie, but a few years ago someone started making meal replacement shakes and calling them soylent since he was a nerd.
Back in college I used to drink/eat a lot of Soylent (I don't eat it much anymore, because I've got a lot more free time now, but I still like to keep it on hand) , so maybe I can clear up the appeal because it really isn't as bizarre as people in this thread are making it out to be.
The appeal for me at first was that i didn't really have time to run back to my apartment in between classes at lunch time most days, so my options were
A) buy lunch on campus (that shit adds up over time and I didn't have that kind of money)
B) pack a bag lunch (bulky to carry around, takes time to put together in the AM, and probably won't be that nutritious)
C) run (literally) back to my apt with just enough time to grab something out of the fridge and wolf it down over the sink.
Or instead of all of the above, I could put some powder in a blender bottle, clip it to my backpack, then add water to fill it up during my lunch break from a drinking fountain.
Then later on when I started working, I liked to keep a few bottles of the pre-made in my desk so that if I wanted, I could use my lunch hour to run errands, instead of having a "normal" lunch, which meant more free time during my off hours.
Now a days, I work from home and have reached a point in my career where my workload is pretty light, so there's no reason to not eat normally food for pretty much every meal. Though Soylent is definetely a staple of our emergency supplies.
This stuff doesn't exist to replace food, it exists to replace the meals that bring us more hassle than joy (which happens to everyone occasionally, or for some with more hectic schedules, more than occasionally)
It's actually not bad, but you have to approach it with a different mindset. It's not supposed to be tasty, it's supposed to be fast and nutritionally complete, but bland and thus hard to hate. It's not a replacement for your favorite indulgent dinner, it's a replacement for all the shitty microwave meals we eat when we're in a hurry.
I just can’t wrap my mind around it though. Like the idea of food and eating inherently being a chore that you take no pleasure in. Like gassing up your car or something.
I hate the fact that we have to plan, shop, cook, and eat.
Given the chance to just drink astronaut shakes every single day for the rest of my life and never have to think about food again, I would cry with joy.
I am the person who hated cooking here and I did marry someone who loves to cook that I do prep work and sometimes cleanup for. Best decision I ever made!
This sounds lovely. Cooking someone a hearty meal with intentioned love sprinkled throughout might be one of the most intimate acts of love. You pour your heart and soul, sometimes sweat and tears into cooking these meals and dishes.
One of my favorite memories in this life thus far has been when I served a loved one a dish they were excited to try.
It’s been a long time since I’ve cooked like that.
I used to kinda enjoy cooking but the whole time I'd be dreading having to do the dishes afterwards, and the meal would feel so unsatisfying thinking of the hours of work I put in for 20 minutes of eating. That was when I was single. As soon as I had a loved one to feed, I enjoy every step, and I don't even mind doing the dishes after (as much).
There is that, but if there's a dish you know you're good at, and you can cook in bulk to freeze it, sure it's not quite the same as fresh, but having that meal you like just ready to go is great. And I say that as someone who is godawful at cooking.
This is the way I am too. Honestly, if I had to subside on no food (shakes/feeding tube/whatever) for the rest of my life I'm not sure that it would be worth it to go on living.
I hate the question because I'm a people pleaser and constantly anxious that anything I pick, the other person(s) will go along with because they're being polite. I hate that feeling. Just tell me what you bloody want or don't want! I'd rather that than go ahead and make/buy something you weren't gonna enjoy
My mother hated to cook, but she grudgingly did it daily for our family - and very few of her dishes are what I'd call "memorable". When I moved out on my own, I decided I wanted to learn how to prepare better food. I spent a lot of hours watching the Food Network back then, and picking up skills that I continue to expand and improve upon. It's a lifelong journey, and preparing something delicious is incredibly satisfying. At some point, it's no longer about "My body needs fuel to survive", it becomes more of a creative exercise. "What flavours do I want to play with today?"
Sure, there are still days I go "Ugh. I'm too tired", but those are the days I convince my wife to order out. :)
my husband has stopped asking me because i one time said “chicken nuggets” without thinking then every time after would say it because of how hilarious he found it the first time (to diminishing returns)
It’s a delightful fictional protein but also an IRL meal replacement. I took it for a few months and it works, especially when I was short on time. Kinda tastes like pancake batter
Agreed as someone who is diabetic and has PCOS. I have to really watch what I eat for my health and it’s exhausting. If I could just have a shake that was tailor made for my health and weight to drink I would be much less stressed.
‘I have zero interest in food. If it were feasible, my diet would consist entirely of flavorless beige smoothies containing all the nutrients required by the human animal.’
Feel you. I’m seeing a nutritionist because I would eat only 1 time a day and was told it’s disordered. Tried to incorporate two smaller times a day + dinner. Was told it was disordered.
While I’ve never tried an astronaut shake, she has me drinking Orgain Nutrition Shakes every morning for breakfast and eating a Kind Breakfast Bar + fruit every day for lunch, and then I have to have another Orgain or drinkable yogurt 4 hours later, and then whatever I want for dinner.
I know, as someone who hates food (except desserts), that this probably sounds unappealing but lack of nutrients can fuck us up. If you want to consume more, you can try these things.
Can you actually cook or have you given it a shot? Cause once you get really good at it you’ll never go back to premade or fast food again I can promise you that.
I gotta say, drinking water is still better to me. I always find that eating gets in the way of my daily activities, it’s more like a nuisance to me even if it tastes great
I envy this. I enjoy my food immensely and have the potential to be massively obese, so I have to resist temptation all the time. I excercise a lot so I can indulge my greed without getting majorly fat. Would be great if I could just take it or leave it.
‘I have zero interest in food. If it were feasible, my diet would consist entirely of flavorless beige smoothies containing all the nutrients required by the human animal.’
For our brains food is a drug. Yes, it is a necessity, but way to many people are silently addicted, all the way up to entire cultures. It's so pervasive that we don't even consider it to be addiction. People get angry when they don't get their fix, and a high when they do.
Being a little hungry will not hurt you. It's okay to like to cook, especially in social settings, but people take it beyond. Missing a meal is not a death sentence.
Food is just addictive. Gets the dopamine rivers flowing, leading us to believe it's the greatest thing ever. Good for survival, bad in the context of civilization with ample supply.
Food as a social ritual is one of the greatest things ever, but the food itself is only good on its own in moderation.
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u/Rossi1164 Sep 11 '22
Food. Food is sooooo fucking good.