7 ms·

>Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the

>Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these. >It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will roll by their side. Well Soylent do exist so that's not far fetched either.

ceejayoz 5y ago
The “lunch will be a pill” stuff is always funny to me. There’s a major volume issue unless you’re gonna have me eat chunks of uranium or neutron star or something.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  I thought it was goofy until I remembered that some people eat pills for lunch.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  There's Soylent and similar meal replacements, but that's a diet shake for people who try to min-max their life for some reason.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    I was excited about the kickstarter because while a recovering alcoholic can completely stop using alcohol, a food addict always has to eat a little. Something bland, and quick I didn't think about was a plus. But afyer the Kickstarter they replaced the fish oil with polyunsaturated vegetable oil in powder form and dropped the rice protein content for more carbs. My triglycerides shot through the roof after the first few months of that recipe.
    - krupan 5y ago
      You could try keto chow. They started with the Soylent recipe and made it carb free (if you don't count fiber as carbs). https://www.ketochow.xyz/ https://www.ketochow.xyz/
      - galangalalgol 5y ago
        I'm not against carbs, I just like macro ratios more like the earlier versions. Lots of carbs and polyunsaturated oils are in the literature as triglyceride boosters. If they offered a version with the fish oil back in and the old protein ratios I'd be interested, especially if the replaced the rice protein with the collagen or fish meal from the bait fish the oil came from. At least as sustainable as giant fields of rice and safflower and probably lower in heavy metals too. Rice sucks up the cadmium.
        krupan 5y ago
        There are several other Soylent mods out there. Super Body Fuel, Huel, and Tsogo are a few others I tried. Not a drink, but Meal Squares and Greenbelly Meals are a similar idea too. No idea if any of them meet your needs. I think there was a website that had a huge list of meal replacements. (Edit typo fix)
    - 2snakes 5y ago
      Just replacing one meal like breakfast with Soylent is probably preferred over replacing 3-4.
- krono 5y ago
  Thinking outside the box, that pill could be part of a more involved system where it triggers the release of nutrition that was consumed earlier. It doesn't have to be a completely self-contained solution.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    I love where your head's at. Project: Chipmunk. Stuff those cheeks :)
- mc32 5y ago
  If NASA[1] could have this, they would do this. They'd prefer it if they could give their *nauts pill-like nutrition delivery systems. [1] Also armed forced with deployed troops would love this too as it makes food logistics much easier.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    The closest we can get volume-wise is a cup of olive oil for about 2k calories. Stuffing any more calories into the same volume would require using materials we can't currently digest. (NASA does not like the side-effects of an all-oil diet on space toilets, I suspect.)
- awhitby 5y ago
  This was my initial reaction too: it doesn't seem to pass basic conservation of mass. But actually how much mass must you necessarily lose to stay alive each day? Most of it is probably water, so if we allow "four pills plus as much water" at a meal then it's harder to rule out the pill diet. Maybe a better way to bound it: apparently we exhale around 1 kg of CO2 each day, which has 370g of carbon in it so unless we can radically reengineer our metabolism I guess you need a minimum of 370g daily to maintain carbon levels. 370g / 3 meals / 4 pills = 30g per pill. Even with the density of diamond that would be (picking a convenient rough number) 8 cm3 or 2x2x2cm. Which is... a hard pill to swallow. Maybe not impossible though.
  - Eduard 5y ago
    370g of carbon required per day? That can't be. Even with a pure fat-based diet, 370g of fat (9 kcal/g) equals 3330 kcal daily - way too high for the sedentary HN requirement of 2000 kcal. With 2000 kcal, three meals with four pills equals twelve lard pills, each in a squishy 2.7cm cube format, easy to swallow. ;-)
mstade 5y ago
> This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these. Anecdata – I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, Sweden, and almost any hour of the day I'm able to either order in or go out and buy a meal. I don't even recall last time I cooked at home. Last time anyone cooked at my place was when a friend of mine who's also a chef stopped by for a visit. My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to which I shop for groceries. But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, I cook every single day. I think it's a combination of necessity (you have to buy groceries and anything else back on the mainland, and it's a trek) and the fact that usually I'm not alone in the summer house, my brother is usually there too so I have someone to cook for. I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it and I don't even mind the tedious tasks like peeling potatoes or chopping onions and other things. I just never do it at home, for myself. Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all. It's odd, but for me it really is very location dependent. It was the same when I lived in London, I don't think I cooked at home even once during those years.
- sailingparrot 5y ago
  > Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? Because > I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it ? Also if you are even just an average/mediocre cook, you can usually cook more tasty and interesting food than what you typically find on Uber eats, unless you order from a different high end restaurant every single day.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    I enjoy cooking, but I enjoy other things more, and time is not infinite. I notice that when my wife and I go on vacation we cook much more and try out new recipes because at the airbnb there are fewer competing tasks or activities. And while I can cook and bake decently, there are some dishes I don't always want to put the time in for, or I haven't quite gotten right yet, or require fresh ingredients that I can't buy within a 30min drive. But the thai restaurant a few blocks away will have fresh keffir lime leaves and lemongrass brought in in bulk every day.
KineticLensman 5y ago
> I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. I think there is a distinction here between people who buy meals-and-snacks as opposed to people who buy ingredients. When my partner and I shop, apart from the fruit and similar, there are very few things that you would directly eat. When my niece and her partner shop, there are numerous packets of biscuits and other snacks as well as prepared ready meals that can be microwaved / oven heated with no other effort required. They generate a lot more plastic waste, as well.
teatree 5y ago
As a person who has been exclusively on something similar to soylent for entire 2021, it is certainly possible today albeit not via 4 pills.
- seafoam 5y ago
  Ok I will bite, what are you on ?
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    the marketing team
    - Ancapistani 5y ago
      I know that "funny quips" are generally discouraged on HN, but this is quality content that made me chuckle. Thanks :)
  - aembleton 5y ago
    Probably Huel
  - teatree 5y ago
    Isosource 1.5
- alex_duf 5y ago
  Out of complete curiosity: any particular reason to avoid traditional food?
  - beeboop 5y ago
    It is tremendously difficult to eat a balanced, healthy diet for people who lack the motivation or desire to cook and eat subjectively boring foods. I know this will probably strike a nerve in some people that perfectly enjoy salads, chicken, and brown rice. But not every feels the same about those foods.
  - 5y ago
Karawebnetwork 5y ago
It's important to remember that 77 percent of U.S. adults take dietary supplements. We all eat "corned beef hash and pumpkin pie" yet the majority of people already use supplements as pill as needed. Living in the north, everyone I know uses Vitamin D pills. This is a must to survive the winter and I can't imagine how it would be if that wasn't as available.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- smcl 5y ago
  Interesting, I didn’t imagine there would be such a noticeable effect. Can I ask what sort of difference do you see if you don’t take it?
  - Karawebnetwork 5y ago
    I go to work while the sun has yet to rise and when I come back home the sun is already away (at the peak of the winter, the sun is gone around 4pm). If I do go out for a walk, it's behind a heavy coat, scarf and hat. Often with sunglasses to protect against snow blindness and the wind. This means that for about half of the year, my body does not see the sun. Glass windows will prevent vitamin D production so sitting by a window during the day will not help. Between 70% and 97% of Canadians demonstrate vitamin D insufficiency. It's also important to highlight that people with darker skin need even more sun exposure to produce vitamin D as skin pigmentation negatively influences vitamin D synthesis. Contrary to popular belief, vitamin D is a hormone. It impacts calcium absorption, which is the most known side effect. But it's way more than that. Many of the body's process simply cannot happen properly without vitamin D and the only way to get it naturally is from the sun. One relevant symptoms these days is a weakening of the immune system. Many studies already show that vitamin D deficiency is one of the main factor behind the severity of covid infections. Other symptoms are bone density loss, muscle pains, cancer risks, heart disease, nerve issues, blood pressure. Another very important issue related to vitamin D is Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is similar (but different) to clinical depression. --- Edit: I was wondering when Vitamin D supplements and enriched milk came around, since the current conversation in the context of this 1992 event. There's a nice goldmine of information here: https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_vitamin_D https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_vitamin_D "1930 - Drug launch: Vitamin D prodrug dihydrotachysterol is developed as a method of stabilizing the triene structure of one of the photoisomers of vitamin D. This represents the oldest vitamin D analog." "1952 - Product launch: Synthetic vitamin D2 and D3 compounds start being produced."
paxys 5y ago
The idea of communal kitchens is nothing new. Young unmarried professionals weren't cooking their own meals a hundred years ago either. In urban areas you'd have landladies providing supper, food carts, delivery boys, even subscription meal plans. So not much has changed in that regard.
wuliwong 5y ago
I think that a powdered shake is pretty similar to the pill idea. Protein or meal replacement shakes are widespread in use in 2022.
pessimizer 5y ago
> This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these. Isn't that just having servants?

ceejayoz 5y ago

The “lunch will be a pill” stuff is always funny to me. There’s a major volume issue unless you’re gonna have me eat chunks of uranium or neutron star or something.

datavirtue 5y ago
I thought it was goofy until I remembered that some people eat pills for lunch.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
There's Soylent and similar meal replacements, but that's a diet shake for people who try to min-max their life for some reason.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  I was excited about the kickstarter because while a recovering alcoholic can completely stop using alcohol, a food addict always has to eat a little. Something bland, and quick I didn't think about was a plus. But afyer the Kickstarter they replaced the fish oil with polyunsaturated vegetable oil in powder form and dropped the rice protein content for more carbs. My triglycerides shot through the roof after the first few months of that recipe.
  - krupan 5y ago
    You could try keto chow. They started with the Soylent recipe and made it carb free (if you don't count fiber as carbs). https://www.ketochow.xyz/ https://www.ketochow.xyz/
    - galangalalgol 5y ago
      I'm not against carbs, I just like macro ratios more like the earlier versions. Lots of carbs and polyunsaturated oils are in the literature as triglyceride boosters. If they offered a version with the fish oil back in and the old protein ratios I'd be interested, especially if the replaced the rice protein with the collagen or fish meal from the bait fish the oil came from. At least as sustainable as giant fields of rice and safflower and probably lower in heavy metals too. Rice sucks up the cadmium.
      - krupan 5y ago
        There are several other Soylent mods out there. Super Body Fuel, Huel, and Tsogo are a few others I tried. Not a drink, but Meal Squares and Greenbelly Meals are a similar idea too. No idea if any of them meet your needs. I think there was a website that had a huge list of meal replacements. (Edit typo fix)
  - 2snakes 5y ago
    Just replacing one meal like breakfast with Soylent is probably preferred over replacing 3-4.
krono 5y ago
Thinking outside the box, that pill could be part of a more involved system where it triggers the release of nutrition that was consumed earlier. It doesn't have to be a completely self-contained solution.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  I love where your head's at. Project: Chipmunk. Stuff those cheeks :)
mc32 5y ago
If NASA[1] could have this, they would do this. They'd prefer it if they could give their *nauts pill-like nutrition delivery systems. [1] Also armed forced with deployed troops would love this too as it makes food logistics much easier.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  The closest we can get volume-wise is a cup of olive oil for about 2k calories. Stuffing any more calories into the same volume would require using materials we can't currently digest. (NASA does not like the side-effects of an all-oil diet on space toilets, I suspect.)
awhitby 5y ago
This was my initial reaction too: it doesn't seem to pass basic conservation of mass. But actually how much mass must you necessarily lose to stay alive each day? Most of it is probably water, so if we allow "four pills plus as much water" at a meal then it's harder to rule out the pill diet. Maybe a better way to bound it: apparently we exhale around 1 kg of CO2 each day, which has 370g of carbon in it so unless we can radically reengineer our metabolism I guess you need a minimum of 370g daily to maintain carbon levels. 370g / 3 meals / 4 pills = 30g per pill. Even with the density of diamond that would be (picking a convenient rough number) 8 cm3 or 2x2x2cm. Which is... a hard pill to swallow. Maybe not impossible though.
- Eduard 5y ago
  370g of carbon required per day? That can't be. Even with a pure fat-based diet, 370g of fat (9 kcal/g) equals 3330 kcal daily - way too high for the sedentary HN requirement of 2000 kcal. With 2000 kcal, three meals with four pills equals twelve lard pills, each in a squishy 2.7cm cube format, easy to swallow. ;-)

mstade 5y ago

> This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these. Anecdata – I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, Sweden, and almost any hour of the day I'm able to either order in or go out and buy a meal. I don't even recall last time I cooked at home. Last time anyone cooked at my place was when a friend of mine who's also a chef stopped by for a visit. My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to which I shop for groceries. But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, I cook every single day. I think it's a combination of necessity (you have to buy groceries and anything else back on the mainland, and it's a trek) and the fact that usually I'm not alone in the summer house, my brother is usually there too so I have someone to cook for. I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it and I don't even mind the tedious tasks like peeling potatoes or chopping onions and other things. I just never do it at home, for myself. Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all. It's odd, but for me it really is very location dependent. It was the same when I lived in London, I don't think I cooked at home even once during those years.

sailingparrot 5y ago
> Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? Because > I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it ? Also if you are even just an average/mediocre cook, you can usually cook more tasty and interesting food than what you typically find on Uber eats, unless you order from a different high end restaurant every single day.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  I enjoy cooking, but I enjoy other things more, and time is not infinite. I notice that when my wife and I go on vacation we cook much more and try out new recipes because at the airbnb there are fewer competing tasks or activities. And while I can cook and bake decently, there are some dishes I don't always want to put the time in for, or I haven't quite gotten right yet, or require fresh ingredients that I can't buy within a 30min drive. But the thai restaurant a few blocks away will have fresh keffir lime leaves and lemongrass brought in in bulk every day.

KineticLensman 5y ago

> I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. I think there is a distinction here between people who buy meals-and-snacks as opposed to people who buy ingredients. When my partner and I shop, apart from the fruit and similar, there are very few things that you would directly eat. When my niece and her partner shop, there are numerous packets of biscuits and other snacks as well as prepared ready meals that can be microwaved / oven heated with no other effort required. They generate a lot more plastic waste, as well.

teatree 5y ago

As a person who has been exclusively on something similar to soylent for entire 2021, it is certainly possible today albeit not via 4 pills.

seafoam 5y ago
Ok I will bite, what are you on ?
- bagacrap 5y ago
  the marketing team
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    I know that "funny quips" are generally discouraged on HN, but this is quality content that made me chuckle. Thanks :)
- aembleton 5y ago
  Probably Huel
- teatree 5y ago
  Isosource 1.5
alex_duf 5y ago
Out of complete curiosity: any particular reason to avoid traditional food?
- beeboop 5y ago
  It is tremendously difficult to eat a balanced, healthy diet for people who lack the motivation or desire to cook and eat subjectively boring foods. I know this will probably strike a nerve in some people that perfectly enjoy salads, chicken, and brown rice. But not every feels the same about those foods.
- 5y ago

Karawebnetwork 5y ago

It's important to remember that 77 percent of U.S. adults take dietary supplements. We all eat "corned beef hash and pumpkin pie" yet the majority of people already use supplements as pill as needed. Living in the north, everyone I know uses Vitamin D pills. This is a must to survive the winter and I can't imagine how it would be if that wasn't as available.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smcl 5y ago
Interesting, I didn’t imagine there would be such a noticeable effect. Can I ask what sort of difference do you see if you don’t take it?
- Karawebnetwork 5y ago
  I go to work while the sun has yet to rise and when I come back home the sun is already away (at the peak of the winter, the sun is gone around 4pm). If I do go out for a walk, it's behind a heavy coat, scarf and hat. Often with sunglasses to protect against snow blindness and the wind. This means that for about half of the year, my body does not see the sun. Glass windows will prevent vitamin D production so sitting by a window during the day will not help. Between 70% and 97% of Canadians demonstrate vitamin D insufficiency. It's also important to highlight that people with darker skin need even more sun exposure to produce vitamin D as skin pigmentation negatively influences vitamin D synthesis. Contrary to popular belief, vitamin D is a hormone. It impacts calcium absorption, which is the most known side effect. But it's way more than that. Many of the body's process simply cannot happen properly without vitamin D and the only way to get it naturally is from the sun. One relevant symptoms these days is a weakening of the immune system. Many studies already show that vitamin D deficiency is one of the main factor behind the severity of covid infections. Other symptoms are bone density loss, muscle pains, cancer risks, heart disease, nerve issues, blood pressure. Another very important issue related to vitamin D is Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is similar (but different) to clinical depression. --- Edit: I was wondering when Vitamin D supplements and enriched milk came around, since the current conversation in the context of this 1992 event. There's a nice goldmine of information here: https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_vitamin_D https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_vitamin_D "1930 - Drug launch: Vitamin D prodrug dihydrotachysterol is developed as a method of stabilizing the triene structure of one of the photoisomers of vitamin D. This represents the oldest vitamin D analog." "1952 - Product launch: Synthetic vitamin D2 and D3 compounds start being produced."

paxys 5y ago

The idea of communal kitchens is nothing new. Young unmarried professionals weren't cooking their own meals a hundred years ago either. In urban areas you'd have landladies providing supper, food carts, delivery boys, even subscription meal plans. So not much has changed in that regard.

wuliwong 5y ago

I think that a powdered shake is pretty similar to the pill idea. Protein or meal replacement shakes are widespread in use in 2022.

pessimizer 5y ago