[Xenmen]

[For a purported breakthrough with such grand plans for reshaping the food industry, I found Soylent to be a punishingly boring, joyless product. From the plain white packaging to the purposefully bland, barely sweet flavor to the motel-carpet beige hue of the drink itself, everything about Soylent screams function, not fun. It may offer complete nourishment, but only at the expense of the aesthetic and emotional pleasures many of us crave in food.] [It suggests that Soylent’s creators have forgotten a basic ingredient found in successful tech products, not to mention in most good foods. That ingredient is delight.]

Christ, it's as if he's willfully ignored everything; that's the POINT of Soylent, to give the option of a functional meal not for pleasure, so that you actually have a choice whether. Right now you don't, you have non-nutritious meals that don't take preparation time and are cheap, and nutritious meals that take vast amounts of time to prepare and/or are generally more expensive to acquire/prepare.

Now you have a third choice, complete nutrition at cost, minus the pleasure associated with the above two choices.

[Aqueous]

Right - Soylent will be successful based on how it defines its mission, not as a replacement for traditional food but as a better second choice. However, if I remember correctly some of the first publicity I saw about Soylent pitched it like it was somehow a replacement for food - and that's what I think this writer was reacting to. I agree with the author that I still would be reluctant to sacrifice the pleasures of eating even a non-nutritious meal for complete, ready-to-go nutrition (if that's even what Soylent is) more than a few times.

Soylent strikes me as a food not unlike MREs for the military or some of the dehydrated food that astronauts take up to space. That is, it could be the kind of nutrition that targets people in extreme circumstances, who might desperately need nutrition and energy but, because they're in the middle of a war zone, or in a space suit hovering above Earth, cannot get to it.

[XorNot]

"I just had a 1 hour lecture and have a 2 hour lab class coming up. By hour 1 of that lab I'm going to be lightheaded. What do I eat?"

Currently the answer for me is subway on campus. It's not a good answer. The dilemma of "I need food right now" is severely understated in our current society, and probably a not insignificant causative of obesity (just about everything you can get quickly is terrible for you).

[derekp7]

There's also this thing that people are accustomed to eating 3 times a day, on schedule. And if you miss a scheduled meal, bad things happen to your blood sugar. But is this just an artifact of our current abundance? If you look at nature, many carnivores may go several days or more without a meal. Is this also the natural state for humans, and we are just spoiled? Or are humans really in need of getting nutrition every 4 - 6 hours?

[montecarl]

I find that my need to eat frequently is very well correlated with the percentage of calories that I receive from carbohydrates. I used to eat 4-5 times a day to avoid that low blood sugar feeling (light headed and weak). I have switched to a ketogenic diet and get most of my calories from fat. This has had an enormous impact on when I have to eat. I can now, if I have to, skip a meal and not feel like I might pass out.

[ceejayoz]

We, like the other primates, aren't carnivores. Herbivores have to spend tremendous amounts of time grazing. We omnivores land somewhere in the middle.

[eropple]

What's wrong with Subway? Get a salad.

[gfodor]

seriously, Soylent could really market itself as the Subway replacement. If you find yourself eating Subway, you probably give somewhat of a damn about eating healthy, but are pressed for time.

[malyk]

Bring a sandwich, eat it during the lab.

[jonnybgood]

Is Soylent even proven or has any indication to provide sufficient nutrition and energy for extreme circumstances? Almost everyone I see drinking Soylent are individuals who in all likelihood sit in front of a computer hours at a time.

[ryukafalz]

It could also be useful in developing nations where access to food isn't as prevalent as it is in first-world countries.

Pleasurable or not, Soylent does offer huge value in these situations simply in that it's a way to not die.

[stormbrew]

I have serious doubts that soylent will ever be a viable tool for this. It keeps getting brought up, but soylent is actually an extremely expensive way to feed poor people, and if they don't have access to clean water it's probably actually an expensive way to poison them, a-la baby formula [1].

Just because it's cheap for people in the first world doesn't mean it's cheap for people in the third world. It's really important to remember that.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/nestles-infant-formula-scanda...

[gfodor]

Prices change. Economies of scale.

Also if they don't have access to clean water they have bigger problems than access to food.

[stormbrew]

I replied to you on economies of scale elsewhere. I don't see how they could ever be in favour of soylent vs. soy or rice.

And yes, they do have bigger problems. And yet access to food is still one of their problems. And giving them food that needs water added doesn't help them.

[aianus]

They must be getting water (dirty or otherwise) from somewhere or they'd already be dead. I fail to see how mixing that water with Soylent leaves them worse off.

Furthermore, there's no reason Soylent can't be baked into a solid form and distributed/eaten that way.

[gamblor956]

People in developing nations can eat for an entire week or more on $3. Soylent's got a long way to go before it's anything more than an overpriced meal replacement shake.

It's not even a disruptive product--there have been similar meal replacement shakes available at Whole Foods for many years now, at similarly outrageous prices. Soylent's innovation is its marketing--especially in identifying and chasing its target market.

[mrobert]

>People in developing nations can eat for an entire week or more on $3.

I live in a third world country and I buy from the market at really low prices. At first this $3 figure seemed off the mark, but upon further consideration it's true, you could live on that much for a while at market prices.

But it means a couple of bowls of rice and a small quantity of nutrient-unknown vegetables, with a few bites of some D-grade, fatty bony meat to live on less than $0.50 a day of food. Obviously, this is going to lead to malnourishment and an early death if they can't supplement with something else.

Lots of people keep small farm animals for an easy boost. A neighbor of mine had a 2-year old dog that started to eat her own chickens. After trying to correct the dog's behavior, it didn't work, so they killed the dog, cooked it and offered me some (I didn't bite, but it was considerate of them.)

Perspective.

[gfodor]

What other meal replacement products? There are plenty of supplements but are there other products that claim to give you 100% of your necessary nutrition with 3 daily servings?

[gamblor956]

Garden of Life and Shakeology are the two big ones I remember off the top of my head. There are more. Google is your friend. (https://www.google.com/search?q=vegan+meal+replacement+shake)

[ceejayoz]

Yes, there are. My daughter required a nasal feeding tube for about a year and subsisted primarily on Pediasure. Plenty of sick adults receive nutrition in a similar manner.

[DanBC]

This question has been asked, and answered, in every Soylent thread.

Here is one manufacturer. http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands

[DanBC]

Someone always mentions developing world.

Soylent needs clean water and currently costs a couple of hundred dollars per month.

20% of the world's population live on less than $1.25 per day. About one billion people lack access to clean water.

http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/index.htm...

The World Food Programme already has a range of products to use for develping nations. See their information, especially the pricing, here.

https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition

http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...

https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products

"Fights world hunger" is just another claim made by Soylent in apparent ignorance of what already exists.

[dragonwriter]

No, it doesn't. Soylent doesn't solve the social problems of distribution, which are the real problems in developing nations.

[ceejayoz]

People in developing nations can not-die for a lot less than $3/serving.

[ekianjo]

Oh, come on. Mass starvation is really something of the past. And developing nations are not going to want something like that, the more traditional the culture, the more they value real food. Plus, with real food you actually force people to spend time on making vegetables and growing them, Soylent just makes you a consumer and nothing else.

[DanBC]

Hunger and malnutrition are not in the past. Soylent won't help those, but the World Food Programme has extensive schemes to supply fortified foods.

http://wfp.org/our-work

http://wfp.org/hunger

[ekianjo]

I was not talking about hunger. I specifically said "mass starvation". Don't tell me there has not been any progress since the 80s, because there certainly was a lot happening since then and it's very rare to hear about mass starvation these days (except when they are created by conflicts).

[pjc50]

Mass starvation is nearly always the result of conflict or political issues that prevent food being routed to the area of starvation (see Amartya Sen on the subject).

The famous Ethiopian famine was the direct result of a war.

[rsl7]

No I think you missed the point, or at least, the rest of the article where he goes on to state what you just offered up as a defense, and then disagree with it.

> It’s true that people sometimes eat meals that are mainly for sustenance (cheap frozen dinners, dried ramen, corn dogs) and other times we’re looking mostly for pleasure (72-hour short ribs). But I suspect that most of the time, for most meals, we want both sustenance and pleasure.

There you go. By the way, there are plenty of "third choices" as you state it, and have been for years. Soylent is nothing new, just YC startup noise.

[baddox]

Let's say we take every possible food (restaurant, home cooked, Soylent, etc.) and plot cost against benefit, where both of these data are an overall quantification of disutility and utility, so cost includes money and time spent, benefit includes health and pleasure, etc.

It's possible that, for some people, Soylent (and similar products) is the only place where benefit exceeds cost. Perhaps the only foods you enjoy are extremely unhealthy. Or perhaps you don't have the time or money to buy and prepare fresh food for yourself.

[platz]

Doesn't Ensure provide these same options? If so, is it fair to really call it a revolution, or it is just providing something like Ensure at a lower price point?

[baddox]

From what I can tell, Ensure is pretty much the same thing. I certainly don't consider Soylent to be a revolution, beyond perhaps a marketing revolution in the tech community.

[taylorwc]

Ensure does provide an option, but it's relatively expensive, lacking the full range of nutrients found in Soylent, and pretty high in sugar (though I think they have just reduced sugar slightly).

[gamblor956]

Ensure is cheaper, but it's not a full-fledged meal replacement product. It's intended to be a supplemental product to an otherwise normal diet.

[dragonwriter]

"Ensure" is a whole line of different products with different roles. Ensure Complete seems to be at least as much of a meal replacement as Soylent.

[cwzwarich]

I fed my brother Ensure through a tube in his nose for 2 months before an intestinal surgery. The doctors considered it as good of a meal replacement as any for that amount of time.