[cisstrd]

I will comment on Soylent as a product, not the 1.6 update specifically, sorry, just want to make a few points (I think some of you are in for a tough ride, just passionate, not my intention to attack anyone personally):

-) psychological value: eating has a great psychological value, it's pleasure (if not, you should eat better food)

-) social value: you probably won't go out with friends to have a glass of Soylent, would you?

-) Arguments about "increased productivity" because of less food preparation are ridiculous... if you can work all day long without needing a break, congratulations, you are everything common sense and science tells me is not possible. We need breaks, regularly, and why not use that to cook something. And cooking doesn't take hours a day.

-) Health: Because the supplement industry is such a thoroughly regulated and well behaving industry? If you believe that, do your research. I want to know what I am eating, and I don't when buying this mix of various powders they most likely buy in themselves. Would you give this crap to your children? Do you think we already have unlocked the key towards the perfect nutrition? (spoiler: no, we haven't, studying this is hard)

-) You can't cook: It's not hard, have you ever really tried? You don't need a Michelin star to cook solid and good food.

-) Unhappy with your current diet? Then change it, why ditch food altogether?

-) Cost, so it's not about productivity or health now, but about saving a few bucks? I doubt you save much if anything at all, it's not that expensive to buy good food, and isn't this mainly marketed towards high income people to begin with? You can afford it.

-) Soylent is revolutionary: It's not, 100% food replacements have been used in medicine for decades (just no one was crazy enough to ditch real food for it if not needed) - you can even buy it, it's far more expensive though than this, and of course I am still not for it as a food replacement for healthy adults.

-) Trust your body: Every body is different, the reason we have cravings for food is because the body tells us what it needs. This can fail us, for example when we eat too much sugar and our blood sugar levels are creating massive cravings for more down the line (I am not making a case for Coca-Cola here though), but all in all, it's an incredibly accurate and needed thermostat. If you eat more, you will ditch your blanket at night subconsciously to burn more calories by cooling down, if you eat less you will feel more cold and not do so. It's downright arrogant to think that some individual having read some studies and reports knows what is absolutely best (besides commonplace arguments like "sugar is bad", "being overweight is incredibly unhealthy", no proper doctor would ever make such bold and arrogant claims)

My opinion: This is part of a not well regulated industry, a repackaged and cleverly marketed mix of food supplements that have been available for decades, sold with incredibly high profit margins. They buy in their stuff, they mix it, prep it up with some nice fancy talk, sell it, and see dollar signs in their eyes.

Everyone should be able to do whatever he wants to as long as he is not harming others. If you think Soylent is great, then by all means, I won't stop you, I am passionate about food and am disgusted just looking at this. If someone thinks this is healthy (spare me your cherry-picked study citations), then - with all due respect - you are delusional

[thatswrong0]

Every time I see a comment like this, I'm amazed at the commenters inability to not take everything to the extreme. YOU CAN EAT SOYLENT AND STILL EAT FOOD. If you don't have much time on your hands, and you want a quick meal, it works really well and is better than, say, McDonalds.

1) Eating isn't pleasure for me 2 to 3 times a day. I eat lunch because I'm hungry. I'll go out and eat a nice meal once or twice a week. You can drink Soylent and still eat food. Everyone is different.

2) You can drink Soylent and still eat food. And I only eat socially a couple times a week anyways.

3) Cooking takes time to prepare, time to fetch ingredients, and time to cleanup. This is a non-negligible amount of time. I'd rather spend 10 minutes total on a meal than 30+ mins.

4) Do you know if everything that goes into every processed food you eat? Do you have verification?

5) You can eat Soylent and still eat food.

6) This clearly isn't about cost.

7) Soylent is evolutionary in the sense that it's one of the first food replacement marketed to consumers that doesn't have a load of sugar in it.

8) Doesn't every company have dollar signs in their eyes? How is that a fault? They're providing a product that people want at a price point people are willing to pay. There isn't much to complain about there.

[cisstrd]

I am going by how they market it, not by how you use it. If company makes market claim "x", which is ridiculous and I criticize that claim, someone then saying that he personally hasn't bought it because of claim "x" does not make my point invalid at all.

1) We differ there, I can well get all of my calories from normal food without being annoyed by eating.

2) But it's marketed as complete food replacement, not as a simple nutritional supplement. Though I don't fancy the supplement industry either.

3) I think it's stupid to consider this time as waste instead of time well spent.

I had rice with fresh salmon today: Wash rice, put it in the rice cooker with 1 1/2 parts of water and some salt - wait 15 minutes (you can do whatever you want there) - use a non-stick pan, some olive oil, fry the salmon, use some spices, in between you can start cleaning up whatever kitchen equipment you have used - 5 minutes later rice is cooked, salmon finished, arrange it on a plate, some soy sauce and Wasabi on the side. Total time of work maybe... 8 minutes? Total time to clean up... 2? Total time to eat (quick eater)... 5?! And that's a pretty decent dish I think, I have my go to foods too, when I really can't be bothered. I can easily have a banana, an apple, eat some peanuts (100 grams have 620 calories, important and healthy fats, 25 grams of protein), can make some hard boiled eggs (can make them in the morning, eat them during the day), I can just take some bread, butter, tomatoes, and salt, sit in front of the computer watching something and eat during that. Takes no time really, and in the end you don't have much to clean. Food allows for creativity, be creative.

Have we all forgotten how to deal with real food?!

I hate to go to the store to buy, what I can I buy in bulk, sometimes I buy things frozen (it's often incredibly healthy food, when immediately frozen the nutritional value is great) and when I really can't avoid making an effort, it's not a waste considering what I get out of it.

4) Standards for food production are higher, I can touch it, I can see it, I can ask where it's from. Not sure where you have been buying your food. A banana I eat is not the product of a badly regulated industry, where hobbyists create mixtures of their liking.

5) It's the same point you made with 2)

6) It's an argument I have encountered multiple times, and it's also something I remember from the early days of Soylent. "It only costs x dollars a day and is all you need" (see my intro)

7) You mean "revolutionary"? It's not revolutionary by any means, if you mean it's revolutionary because it has taken something previously not used as mainstream food and marketed it as such, then yes maybe. I don't think that's a great achievement.

8) You are only addressing part of my ending here, talking about the high profit margins and that I think they are acting in bad faith was part of the larger point, that what they are doing is fundamentally easy and a lot of it is simply improvised, they don't really know themselves, but they claim to know. They buy it in, they mix it, dress it up, and market it. Anyone can do it, I can't however raise cattle, grow tasty bananas, peanuts, and catch delicious fish every day. So talking about profit margins, I think their profit margins are quite higher than people realize, their expertise is lower than what people think, their claims are 100% marketing, what they do is easier than people give them credit for.

[Retra]

Food is not that important to everyone. I care about food about as much as I care about baseball or ballet; if I never had to eat again, I'd be a happy person. Same with sleep. I want to spend my life doing what I enjoy.

So what is your problem? "I should eat better food?" "I should learn to cook?" "My friends won't like me if I eat product X?" You don't know me. You don't know my friends. You don't need to provide a synopsis of what you ate today; that's not interesting. It'd be like if I said I was passionate and went to a football forum and pointed out all the ways that football was a pointless waste of time.

No. Padding your judgmental crap with "I believe in truth justice fairness and freedom" doesn't make it a good point. Sounds more like you're bordering on irrational hatred. Call it 'passionate' if you want. Let's say that's your right and that your real problem is with branding. That's not hypocrisy at all.

[Malician]

I can cook! I've made Chicken Cordon Bleu!

But cooking is never as easy as what you're saying. I get home, just thinking to figure out what to make is a pain and sometimes leads to not eating at all. I have to thaw the meat I want to use, takes far too long. Cooking sometimes takes long. Need ingredients I thought I had but don't. Go to buy the ingredient, get the wrong thing, now I've got two of what I don't need and none of what I do.

I don't consider myself inept but with cooking it's really hard to make it happen when I need to eat.

edit as regards a previous post: Alternative hospital shakes and such tend to be extremely high in sugar, and low calorie. If you calculate how much sugar you'd end up getting in for 2500 or 3000 calories a day, it's terrifying.

I don't use Soylent. I eat a ton of nuts to supplement my caloric intake of regular meals. But it looks amazing and I don't understand why people seem almost offended it exists.

[GrumpyYoungMan]

>Have we all forgotten how to deal with real food?!

Apparently, yes.

"The dream of all these companies is to capture the all-powerful and elusive millennial eater, who just isn’t all that into cereal for breakfast. It’s just too much work, for one thing. Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/dining/breakfast-cereal.ht...

The Washington Post also has an analysis of the trend:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/23/this-...

[xiaoma]

Wow... and I thought cereal was the lazy option.

[oopsies49]

Soylent powder isn't that clean anyway. It's much easier to wash a bowl than to clean your counter and scoop after making a Soylent meal.

[reddytowns]

But what's left on your rag after you do so becomes a free meal!

[whorleater]

>2) But it's marketed as complete food replacement, not as a simple nutritional supplement. Though I don't fancy the supplement industry either.

I'm not sure where you got this idea, the Soylent guide they send you when you get your first shipment even tells you that it's not necessary to go 100% Soylent. And, as far as I can tell, the website never says that you should eat only Soylent.

>3) I think it's stupid to consider this time as waste instead of time well spent.

Is the 10 minutes of making breakfast sausages really time well spent every day? That 10 minutes where I'm still somewhat sleepy, somewhat groggy, and pretty grumpy? I'd much rather have a serving of Soylent for breakfast, takes me 30 seconds to pour out a cup and spend an extra 10 minutes running in the morning, reading a newspaper, etc.

>4) Standards for food production are higher, I can touch it, I can see it, I can ask where it's from. Not sure where you have been buying your food. A banana I eat is not the product of a badly regulated industry, where hobbyists create mixtures of their liking.

As for the health of Soylent, you can find every ingredient and amount [1] for every iteration of it. While there's definitely less regulation in this industry, Soylent themselves have done a decent job of publishing the nutrition facts [2] and ingredients, is this that far removed from another traditional food? Can you really verify what pesticides were used in the production of that banana that you're eating?

[1]: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/211343763-1-6-Form...

[2]: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/200789315-Nutritio...

[cisstrd]

I remember when the Soylent-Creator was on the Colbert Report, and he clearly marketed it as a 100% food replacement. Saying that you don't have to replace food with it completely is smart, it opens up additional customers, makes sense. Their Soylent promotional video however makes the claim that 1) it can replace any meal 2) while not having to replace every meal, it certainly insinuates it can (which is way different from other supplements).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPt1W9IAx0I

I also do remember the piece by motherboard on Soylent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg

Fair, they were a small operation back then, but even if it might not tell you how they work now, it certainly shows you how low the standards are. Their facilities don't even have to be inspected, ... at all.

So you are too tired to cook, but fit enough to run? And usually I have to get dressed, have to shower, pack up my things, work over my schedule, read some mails, activities where I can have something on the stove at the same time. If something needs 10 minutes to cook I am not staring into the pot for the duration.

The composition of the ingredients does not tell me how they know, where they buy, anything in beyond. I rather see food, touch it, smell it, know where it's from, I don't really bother about whether the fish I just bought has 1 gram fat more or less, that's not the "quality" in food I am looking for.

[whorleater]

> 1) it can replace any meal 2) while not having to replace every meal, it certainly insinuates it can..

So...your beef with Soylent is that they insinuate that every meal can be replaced? You're free to enjoy food however you want, but you do realize just because they insinuate it, you don't have to follow that right?

> So you are to tired to cook, but fit enough to run? And usually I have to get dressed, have to shower, back up my things, work over my schedule, activities where I can have something on the stove at the same time. If something needs 10 minutes to cook I am not staring into the pot for the duration.

Not wanting to cook doesn't translate into an inability to cook. I'd much rather not spend the time in the morning if I don't need to, and Soylent allows more freedom in my schedule.

[DanBC]

> your beef with Soylent is that they insinuate that every meal can be replaced

Their kick starter didn't insinuate this, it explicitly said you could use it as a 100% meal replacement.

Here's what happens in Soylent threads:

Someone says how great this new thing is, this new total meal replacement

Someone else says that liquid meal replacements are not new

Some people will say that they're not marketed as 100% liquid meal replacements (they are, to medical professionals)

Other people point out the problems of Soylent marketing ("puts everyone in perfect health"!!) and the problems with 100% liquid feeds (the risks are acceptable in ill people, but probably not in well people)

People then say that of course it's not a 100% meal replacement, and no-one would ever use it like that.

Soylent isn't new; the early marketing was amazingly irresponsible; and the early creation was irresponsible. They've pulled back from many of their earlier claims, and most people have stopped saying that it's a 100% meal replacement. So now we're left with a dull product that has no differentiation from all the other products on the market that have existed for many years.

[mjklin]

To me the appeal of Soylent is this: most men are problem solvers. There is a problem that comes up several times a day called "What do I do about hunger?". There are dozens of ways you might solve that problem, but if you are just not interested then having a bottle of Soylent on hand solves it for you handily.

[jvkgc]

100% agree. Saddest thing ever.

Real food is one of the great joys of life. I can't imagine the state of mind anyone has to be in to not want food. Depressing.

[Malician]

I get the feeling that you have absolutely no idea how low depression can go. "Don't care at all about real food and can't eat" is decently common in the less painful stages.