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No, it's more like if you were forced to have sex three times a day every single day, and most of those times it was with someone you weren't attracted to. Ever
by nbouscal 13y ago
No, it's more like if you were forced to have sex three times a day every single day, and most of those times it was with someone you weren't attracted to. Every time I eat fast food or takeout because I'm either too tired from work to cook or don't have enough time to, I feel terrible, I spend too much money, and I damage my body. If I can replace that experience with something reasonably healthful, affordable, and fast, that's a huge win for me. Yes, home-cooked healthful meals are fantastic, and I enjoy cooking and eating them. But be honest, how many people do you know that eat home-cooked healthful meals for every one of their meals? How about for even half of their meals? Some people have that privilege, but I'm not one of them. Soylent is a fantastic alternative.
- jacques_chester 13y ago> Soylent is a fantastic alternative. This is where you lose me. Extending my analogy, you're replacing sex thrice daily with anorgasmic sex, thrice daily. I'm not seeing the upside.
- nbouscal 13y agoNot at all. Say, for example, that I'm replacing fast food. In that scenario Soylent costs less money, takes less time (don't have to go to the fast food place, less time actually eating), is almost certainly healthier, and won't make me feel like crap afterwards. At this point I can't think of any way to continue extending the sex analogy that doesn't get a bit too off-color.
- jacques_chester 13y agoApart from being calorically dense and salty, fast food is still food. Ordinary food, even fast food, contains an abundance of complex nutrients, some of which are only poorly understood. Companies with actual dietitians and biologists and millions of dollars and labs and decades of lead time haven't been able to create a total replacement for food. There are too many variations in what different people need, too many as-yet unknown conditionally-essential nutrients. That's why all the existing replacement formulae are marketed as being for temporary use only.
- vidarh 13y ago> haven't been able to create a total replacement for food. Haven't they? I've seen this claim repeatedly in debates about Soylent, but I've never seen it substantiated other than by pointing to marketing claims on related meal replacement products, which may be motivated very much in part by there not being any real benefits to claiming it is a full food replacement, coupled with a lot of potential downsides such as the risk of lawsuits, increased scrutiny by the FDA, etc. Maybe they haven't been able to. Or maybe they haven't tried (as opposed to try to make something "close enough" for suitability for medical use or occasional meal replacement). Or maybe they have been able to, but there's simply not enough additional revenue potential compared to the potential costs and risks of making the claim.
- jacques_chester 13y agoLet's not kid ourselves. The original hook was replacing food.
- nbouscal 13y agoI think you misunderstood vidarh's post. His/her second paragraph was referencing existing providers, not Soylent.
- guizzy 13y agoThis is an absurd claim. We've had dry dog food for a long while now; we totally understand enough about nutrition to create complete diet replacements. Humans are more complex, but not orders of magnitude so. The only reason there isn't any such product in the consumer market is because there's little incentive for it: too commoditized, lots of liability.
- jacques_chester 13y agoDogs are not highly intelligent omnivores with average lives of 60+ years.
- jacques_chester 13y ago