[shaunol]

The eventual goal is not just as a meal replacement but a full diet replacement that eventually won't need to leverage crops, for areas with no arable land.

Most meal replacement shakes I've seen (not including those used in the medical industry) aren't suitable to replace your entire diet with and are generally very expensive per meal because of this. Most also warn against using the product to replace every meal with.

I think it's very good to have a mainstream product like this that attempts to cover 100% of the suggested daily intake, simply to bring into debate what the daily intake should really consist of? And if we can achieve it in countries that are too far from supply of actual crops.

[oblique63]

> Most meal replacement shakes I've seen (not including those used in the medical industry) aren't suitable to replace your entire diet with

We literally do not know that. Similarly, we cannot know that about soylent either. Because we simply do not know enough about human nutrition to be making these kinds of statements yet. The government's "Recommended Daily Intake" system is just a veneer over our relatively primitive understanding of nutrition to help give us some very basic possible guidelines (which are still quite susceptible to being wrong). The unfortunate part is that people take these 'recommendations' to mean that we virtually know all there is to know about nutrition when that is truly far from reality...

I'm confident that we'll get there eventually, but first the quality of nutritional research will have to improve significantly, and it'll be far more work than any one meal-replacement company can hope to realistically invest in. So as much as I am for soylent 'pushing the boundaries' in that area, it's gonna take a lot more than that to get us a full-diet-replacement figured out for sure.

[Turing_Machine]

Maybe when it comes to adults, but we do have a good idea for babies. Lots of them eat nothing but formula and do okay (though not as well as on as human milk, let me hasten to add).

There was a case a number of years ago where one of the formula makers didn't add enough chlorides, resulting in cases of chloride deficiency (previously unknown -- salt is everywhere in a normal diet, and is present in human milk).

So... while maybe we can't say that we have a maximally healthy artificial diet, we do have multiple instances of artificial diets that are good enough to survive on.

[001sky]

"a full diet replacement that eventually won't need to leverage crops, for areas with no arable land."

How will they make soylent? there are plenty of foods with 100kcal per/0z. that are shelf stable and natural (and healthy). Shipping in powder X vs other food Y is a false differentiation. Its neither more healthy nor, nor less bulky, nor cheaper to ship.

Lastly, you will need to ship in water which is 4-5x the weight of food per day.

[digitalpacman]

You ship them soylent... watch the videos if you are interested. The problem to solve world hunger is not growing the food, it's logistics.

[freyrs3]

The problem to solve world hunger is to be able to distribute staple crops more efficiently to places which don't have access to existing markets. There's no conceivable way that some highly refined meal-replacement product for the first world can be more economical than access to bulk amounts of grains. Even Soylent as an emergency food is an order of magnitude less economical than the existing solutions for famine relief, which are themselves extremely expensive in bulk.