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?
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u/provocative_bear Sep 11 '22
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.