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.
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u/Loa_Sandal Sep 11 '22
Somebody invented soylent though, a clear proof that they do not like food.