[plus]

>Do you use it as the occasional convenient meal replacement or how far do you go into replacing all real food?

I replace the majority of my meals with Soylent, but the point isn't to replace all meals...

>I suspect there is both, but what I am getting at is how much Soylent's long-term success depends on people seeing eating as a nuisance that should be optimized away versus something that should be savoured and enjoyed.

In my opinion, eating real food is an indulgence, not a nuisance. People who are very busy frequently cannot find the time to prepare nutritious, healthy meals from the bare ingredients, and purchasing ready-made food that is nutritious and healthy can be prohibitively expensive for some people.

Soylent is meant to replace a fast food burrito or a McDonalds breakfast sandwich, not a home-cooked steak dinner or a meal at a restaurant with friends and family. In my view, Soylent is not about minimizing the amount of time spent on preparing and eating food, it's about providing a convenient, nutritious, and (relatively, compared to fast food) cheap source of nutrition for those times that I don't have social obligations and I don't want to/don't have time to cook something for myself.

[dlisboa]

I know this doesn't help people who already have that notion that everything should be fast and simple, but why is it that some people just "can't find the time" to feed themselves? It's a basic premise in life. It's like not finding the time to shower, to sleep, to have sex, to brush your teeth. You make the time.

Cooking doesn't take long. At all. You can prep an entire week worth of meals in 1 hour. Refrigerate them, freeze them. We have thousands of years worth of food preparation and preservation technology. Cook on Sunday, eat until Saturday.

As for being expensive: again, it isn't. If cooking at home was expensive the world population would be 2 billion tops. Poor people cook at home because it's the only way they can survive. If a woman in Paraguay working two jobs can do it and feed her family, so can you.

> it's about providing a convenient, nutritious, and (relatively, compared to fast food) cheap source of nutrition for those times that I don't have social obligations and I don't want to/don't have time to cook something for myself

You can fix yourself a sandwich using good products that is just as nutritious. Most people don't even need to eat so much. It's very easy to have good 1500-2000 kcal a day with regular food that you prepared quickly.

Soylent, to me, is simply about people who want to "hack" their bodies and be on the futurist side of things. There's nothing nutritiously advantageous about it, nor is it cheaper than cooking for yourself. But somehow people make the assumption that it's either that or eating the very worst food known to man (McDonald's or whatever). It isn't.

[ufmace]

> You can prep an entire week worth of meals in 1 hour.

I have a feeling this is leaving a lot of things out. Maybe you can do the literal cooking in 1 hour. In order to be able to do that, how much time do you need to spend shopping for ingredients and transporting them, making sure they're still fresh and haven't gone bad, washing dishes and otherwise cleaning, and getting enough experience in cooking that you can actually do everything that fast.

And once you do all that, you have a week's worth of eating the same thing for every meal you do this for, and reheated and not as fresh as when you just made it. This is starting to sound not that much better than Soylent.

It's like that great Ars article on why many people don't cook. Maybe you or I can also install Linux and build an app from source. Could your grandmother do that, or would she be so hopelessly lost as to not even know where to start? That's what the idea of cooking is like for a lot of people. You aren't helping those people by insisting that it's possible to cook a week's worth of food in an hour, if you're already an experienced cook and know what ingredients to get, where to get them from, how long they stay good for, what to do if you can't find the ones you wanted, how to actually make everything in the most efficient way. It may take an hour to do the actual cooking, but it may also take a decade of experience in cooking to be able to do it in an hour and get a week's worth of food.

[plus]

To be clear, I never said cooking was expensive. What I said was that if you want to eat "real food", you have the option between cooking it yourself from inexpensive ingredients or buying it premade at a premium.

>Cooking doesn't take long. At all. You can prep an entire week worth of meals in 1 hour. Refrigerate them, freeze them.

If I don't know how to cook, then I have to spend a decent amount of time learning. I also have to learn what ingredients are worth buying, and how much to buy such that it doesn't go bad before I get around to using it. I also need a way to source and transport the food -- what if I don't have a car, and there's no grocery store within walking distance?

My point isn't that it would be impossible for me to cook my own food. My point is that it's more effort than you are letting on, especially for people who genuinely do not know how to cook because they never learned, and I feel that there is no impetus for me to learn now that I can just eat Soylent.

>Soylent, to me, is simply about people who want to "hack" their bodies and be on the futurist side of things.

You can believe what you want, but this doesn't describe how I view Soylent in the slightest. Soylent is convenient and is healthier and/or cheaper than other convenient (relative to cooking yourself) alternatives.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

Learning to cook isn't hard. What do you feel like eating that seems easy to make? Youtube it or google it. 10 mins later you're on your way. It has a 15 ingredients? Cut it down to the main ones and skip the bay leaves, thyme, etc. You can also order food online for delivery. Honestly, this is really not that hard. Check out the meal prep community. I spent 3 hours this saturday and made lunches for 25 workdays and they're all extremely healthy (today is lentils, splitpeas, a chicken leg & thigh, veggies and a banana I grabbed on the way out the door.)

[TarpitCarnivore]

> People who are very busy frequently cannot find the time to prepare nutritious, healthy meals from the bare ingredients, and purchasing ready-made food that is nutritious and healthy can be prohibitively expensive for some people

I'm sorry, but I'm getting really tired of reading people use this as a justification for soylent; I'm not saying there is a convenience to it, but phrasing it this way is kind of sad. It does not take a lot of ingredients, or time, to make a set of meals for the week.

[wellboy]

It's not only a question of time,it's also a question of energy and focus.

Soylent is not for everyone, but imagine you are a college grad, who just got a good job that finally pays and you want to make sure you build a good career.

Many college grads also need to focus on friends, dating, finally trying to find good exercise to become healthy, everything while working 60+h a week.

Not everyone has their stuff figured out, many young professionals are struggling, due to little money, social anxiety, job troubles and many of them can't cook.

Now tell them they should cook something every couple of days and that they should learn cooling for that when they can't even get their problems straight by themselves right now.

Soylent is not for everyone, but it is a big help for young college grads who are barely scraping by and who don't know how to cook. It's better than McDonalds.

[plus]

It does require forethought, planning, a knowledge of how to cook food, and the ability to source and store ingredients, however. All of which sounds like too much of a hassle for me, to be perfectly honest. Rob Rhinehart, the creator of Soylent, doesn't even own a refrigerator (not that I'm suggesting people should be more like Rob...). While you may find it sad that others don't have the time or patience to cook, for a lot of people it's just one of those things they'd rather not have to deal with -- and for those people, Soylent isn't an alternative to cooking real healthy food, but rather to buying a burger at McDonalds.

[TarpitCarnivore]

> and for those people, Soylent isn't an alternative to cooking real healthy food, but rather to buying a burger at McDonalds.

I'm aware of food deserts and the issue of meal costs for low-income families, but then advocate for soylent in that manner and how it can improve downstream.

[TallGuyShort]

Why do you see it as people having to "justify" Soylent? It's just a sales pitch, like any other sales pitch. And it happens to be the way a lot of people feel. I used to make meals on very little money with very little time, and I liked Soylent better. Yeah I could do it, but I can use even less time and fewer ingredients and end up with something that I'm just really in the mood for sometimes. No one's making you buy it. THAT would need justification. This is something somebody sells.