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The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable
- Xenmen 12y ago[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 12y agoRight - 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.
- ryukafalz 12y agoIt 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.
- ceejayoz 12y agoPeople in developing nations can not-die for a lot less than $3/serving.
- ekianjo 12y agoOh, 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 12y agoHunger 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/our-work http://wfp.org/hunger http://wfp.org/hunger
- ekianjo 12y agoI 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 12y agoMass 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.
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- baddox 12y agoLet'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 12y agoDoesn'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?
- gamblor956 12y agoEnsure 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 12y ago"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.
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- cwzwarich 12y agoI 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.
- taylorwc 12y agoEnsure 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).
- rsl7 12y agoNo 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.
- glifchits 12y agoThis reads like the opinion of one who is scared of the future.
- krapp 12y agoIt reads to me like someone who was unimpressed by a product after having tried it.
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- tunesmith 12y agoMore like unimpressed by the product before having tried it. He could have written most of that review before he had even received the product in the mail.
- tremols 12y agoBecause dystopic ideas are the new cool, with self driving cars and astronaut food... seems that the future is designed by startrek fans that did never read 1984.
- glifchits 12y agoI just don't think that saying Soylent lacks soul is constructive enough when Rhinehart says that it elevates the status of real food to leisure. If the future involves making life more "functional" then bring it on... its only dystopic once the soul gets eradicated.
- XorNot 12y agoAn 1984 wasn't really an accurate depiction of the future to start with: http://www.thecitrusreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/PastedGraphic-1.jpg http://www.thecitrusreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Pa...
- tragicAndCruel 12y agocosts about $3 per serving Too fucking expensive for a cleverly named bachelor chow.
- baddox 12y agoBut probably considerably cheaper than what every person who has ordered Soylent was previously paying per serving.
- stormbrew 12y agoWhich is largely because every person who has ordered Soylent can afford more than $3/meal.
- baddox 12y agoThat's obviously true. What's your point?
- tragicAndCruel 12y agoNo way. I can scrape by on ramen, potato chips, soda, hot dogs, orange juice concentrate, cereal and milk, and come out ahead (YMMV). GNC quality protein shakes be damned. This stuff has to hit the 25 cent mark, per glass, to qualify for it's target market: the unwed and unloved who have no one to cook them decent meals while toiling away at shit jobs.
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- gfodor 12y agoi have to imagine that if Soylent manages to scale up their business this is going to get much, much cheaper.
- stormbrew 12y agoI don't think it can get any cheaper than any practical cheap-food alternatives. It's using basically the same things as source material, often with much more processing done to them to get them into this powdered form. Less work (economically) goes into making Kraft Dinner than Soylent could ever hope to get to, I would think. Never mind stuff like soy and rice, which are probably (well, obviously in soy's case) the basic inputs that end up in soylent, and already have massive economies of scale working in their favour.
- baddox 12y agoThat's actually one of the fairer reviews I've seen. I think the author misses the appeal of Soylent for a lot of people, which is that for these people, food itself is primarily a hassle rather than a source of joy. These people would rather just scarf down a boring drink for a few seconds per day to keep themselves alive than deal with the problem of deciding on, buying, and preparing traditional food.
- psychometry 12y agoI don't think he misses the appeal. In fact, he is quite clear in stating his understanding that one shouldn't necessarily consume Soylent for every single meal (or even more often than one would prefer). Unfortunately, he then immediately forgets that maxim and devotes the last 75% of the article to how unpleasant it would be to eat it for almost every meal. Asinine.
- bignaj 12y agoI think it speaks to some other problem if people think eating is a hassle. Eating is super important to live, determines a lot of your health and most people here have missed that it is also a very important social interaction. Maybe this is the HN bubble but eating is not just about sustenance. Could you get someone who is not a workaholic tech employee to eat this willingly? Somehow I doubt it.
- sp332 12y agoTons of people grab breakfast or lunch "on the go". It's not just workaholics. And for the 20 minutes some people get to talk over lunch, soylent would work just as well as a tub of yogurt and an apple.
- mikeloeb 12y agoSpeaking of the tech bubble, how come no one has mentioned products like this [0] which have been around for decades? [0] http://www.amazon.com/Carnation-Breakfast-Essentials-Chocolate-17-7-Ounce/dp/B001EQ4ICA http://www.amazon.com/Carnation-Breakfast-Essentials-Chocola...
- gfodor 12y agoIt's telling that even though this individual claims to dislike Soylent, he continued to drink it for 90% of his meals on some days. Unless artificially forcing himself to drink Soylent was part of the experiment, his actions say he prefers convenience over taste. The fact that so many commentators seem terrified of the addition of another option for food, without removing the ones we have today, tells me Soylent is going to be truly disruptive. The skepticism of Soylent in the mainstream media has been very much "I don't know why, but it just seems wrong to me." Appeal to tradition 101.
- Aqueous 12y agoI think he was on assignment - that's why he consumed only Soylent for a week. It's just like the Forbes writer who forced herself to live only on BitCoin for a week. In her case, even though her first experience was uneven and a huge hassle, she eventually repeated her experiment, and found her experience was vastly improved. Unfortunately for Soylent, I think it's going to taste exactly the same in a year.
- gfodor 12y agoBut he says that he didn't only consume Soylent for a week, that he still ate regular meals. And then went on to say that there were times when he drank Soylent he would have preferred a regular meal. It makes no sense, why not just drink Soylent when the lack of taste was less important than the efficiency? This would have been a fairer test. If by the end of the week the guy was no longer drinking Soylent for any meals, then I'd buy that Soylent was doomed, but that's not what the experiment was.
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- bignaj 12y agoIt was his job to do that for the trial period... he didn't choose to.
- bignaj 12y agoI don't know why there is so much hype about this product still. Maybe there's a niche market for people who are so busy they forget to eat (another problem in and of itself) but for everyone else it completely misses all that is good about eating: taste, social interaction, texture, experience, temperature, variety. Be right back, asking my girlfriend if she wants to sit and chug Soylent tonight instead of going out for Thai.
- gfodor 12y agofalse dilemma. nobody says you can't go out for Thai. but if you find yourself regularly scarfing down a Subway sandwich for lunch and losing an hour of time in the process, Soylent might be a healthier, more efficient alternative.
- bignaj 12y agoExcept I'm never doing that, so I will never buy this product. I want to lose an hour eating because I can spend time with my friends or take a break or talk to people. Subway isn't that bad either, and is certainly more enjoyable to eat than Soylent.
- gfodor 12y agoThere are literally millions upon millions of people who spend at least one meal a day just consuming food and not socializing. If you've ever worked in a traditional office environment people regularly take lunch at their desk if they are too busy to socialize. It's not hard to understand the appeal of Soylent if you step just slightly outside your own personal experience.
- bignaj 12y agoI do work in a traditional office environment. The problem is being too busy, not eating. Eating is not a problem that needs to be solved. Being too busy is the problem that needs to be solved.
- sp332 12y agoCompared to what, the TV-dinner and fast-food revolution?
- peter-row 12y agoIt sounds like the Soylent Revolution will be pleasurable. If you have Soylent for one or two meals a day, then you'll really enjoy everything else. The mechanics of pleasure are well understood - you enjoy things more when you don't get them so often. And it's cheap(ish), and apparently not too unhealthy.
- ekianjo 12y ago> And it's cheap(ish), and apparently not too unhealthy. That's really too early to say.
- bbwharris 12y agoI personally just don't like this concept that food is a "nuisance". Or healthy food rather. Food and meals are the one thing that brings people together and offers up conversation, laughter, and emotion. Food is something that a lot of people enjoy and look forward too. Are we really supposed to just take soylent as a healthy alternative for sustenance so we can continue to work? Just buy a juicer and keep it natural then. But really, take the break and eat a meal with a human being. You've got one life. Live it.
- bignaj 12y agoCompletely agreed. A lot of commenters on HN are completely missing the social function of eating.
- psychometry 12y agoSo you eat 3 communal meals/day 365 days/year? I doubt that. We're talking about replacing the meals people eat alone when they only care about eating something and minimizing the hassle of cooking.
- XorNot 12y agoJuice is about one of the most unhealthy things you can have. It's essentially pure sugar.
- bbwharris 12y ago
- jnks 12y ago"actually Farthard was in my original lede, was wisely cut" - Farhad Manjoo, the author of the piece [1] [1] https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/471825996174217216 https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/471825996174217216
- ianstallings 12y agoFrom the related video on that page: "if this was all we had to survive, then what would be the point of living"? That basically sums it up. I've ate field meals before in the Army and although they are okay too, I take the preparation of good food seriously. It's one of the relatively inexpensive luxuries of modern first world society. Taking the time to enjoy a meal gives my spirit a rise. And honestly, when the world seems to be moving towards whole foods, organic meals, and avoiding processed foods, this seems to be going in the opposite direction. Not saying it has bad ingredients, but that the appearance of being processed will dissuade people.
- mpetrov 12y agoWouldn't Soylent eventually add some flavouring to make it less utilitarian/boring? It's still the first version of the product and it seems that the author doesn't even consider the possibility that there would be variations of the powder for variety and different taste preferences in the future. Does anyone know if they ever stated anywhere that the taste won't change?
- yew 12y agoDoes the author not understand that significant numbers of people already don't often get the opportunity to eat food that could be described as enjoyable? He seems to dismiss the idea without justification. Given the choice between unhealthy almost-but-not-quite zero-variety food and healthy actually zero-variety food, the latter strikes me as the better option - and if you don't happen to live near a source of good food (no bakeries, butchers, delis, fresh fruit vendors, etc . . .), being low on time or money means making that choice (or not having one to make). Speaking for myself, the cheap and ultra-quick food I usually ate during my years at school was just the same thing over and over - it didn't taste very good to begin with and certainly didn't improve with time. I couldn't fix something myself, or wait for someone else to fix something, or spend time socializing (that's what weekends were for!), or go somewhere else. I can say that I honestly would have preferred something like Soylent on grounds of both convenience and taste.
- JumpCrisscross 12y agoThere is a false all-or-nothing mentality being forced on Soylent. Part of this is Soylent's original marketing as a "food replacement". Part is their present refusal to make their product taste better. But part is our cultural unfamiliarity with separating utility from luxury eating. I'm a foodie. I delight in trying new dishes, restaurants and cuisines. I'm also a marked extrovert. I constantly seek out social settings and experiences. Combined with my ineptitude at cooking and address in Manhattan, we have why I eat one to three meals out a day. I manage the healthfulness of my diet with simple rules. Salads for lunch, finish all the greens on your plate before moving to other things, defaulting to seafood over red meat, etc. But this comes at a cost, both in dollars and in time. Many times, a meal will go half eaten, because I have to rush out for a call. Other times, dinner gets pushed out so late that the only options aren't healthy. Yes, I could schedule meals into the day, but sometimes I prefer doing other things. And it's not just work! I feel starved during film festivals, too, between full schedules and my refusal to feed on solely popcorn and tapas for two weeks. I don't think too many people will ever seriously replace a majority of their meals with something like Soylent. But even shifting my weekday lunches and late-night snacks from salads, paninis and starving to something cheap, healthy, and available would be welcome. A prerequisite to this would be Soylent not tasting like pancake batter. Utility doesn't have to be unpleasant. But there is a place for this amongst people who love food, love people, and aren't necessarily workaholics.
- niels_olson 12y agoI would recommend against getting too many calories for too long from something like Soylent. One issue people are missing is Wolf's law: bone grows into stress. You want strong knees and ankles? Run. If you don't chew you will end up with a glass jaw and no teeth. This is a common problem in the elderly: they start loosing a couple teeth and they're quickly all gone because they modify their eating choices to avoid foods that have become difficult to chew.
- spitz 12y agoI wouldn't be surprised to see the Soylent guys come out with a solid food version for this and other reasons.
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- gfodor 12y agoA. Cheap. B. Healthy. C. Pleasurable. D. Fast/Easy Pick three. ABC = Homecooked meals, ACD = fast food, BCD = eating out, ABD = Soylent. Not complicated. Soylent provides a specific set of design tradeoffs that suit certain situations better than the alternatives.
- neurobro 12y agoAt this point I'm skeptical that Soylent fulfills B, as healthy diets include a lot more than 30-40 ingredients in the form of enzymes and nutrients that aren't "essential" but aid metabolism. But I appreciate the fact that they're aiming for ABD and hope they can achieve it as the data rolls in over time. If it tastes like gritty pancake batter, it can't be any worse than a diet of brussels sprouts, turnips, rutabagas, radicchio, eggplant, etc.
- ezyang 12y agoI don't know what you are talking about, but all of those vegetables are delicious if cooked properly.
- neurobro 12y agoApparently I've never cooked any of those properly! Anyway, I'm sure everyone has a few least-favorite veggies that would clear up that sentence (unless they really dislike pancake batter).
- ktrgardiner 12y agoAlmost any vegetable tastes amazing sautéed in butter with shallots and garlic. You can also add plain breadcrumbs once done. I say this having just made brussel sprouts that way for dinner. Very simple and very delicious. And I used to hate brussel sprouts.
- corprew 12y agoBrussel sprouts used to be more bitter than they are; farmers have actively been breeding better tasting brussels sprouts. Lots of people who used to hate them and didn't eat them for a number of years find them more pleasant when trying them now.
- webnrrd2k 12y agoSoylent strikes me as too similar to multivitamins, which haven't fared well in many studies, even though they contain a bunch of the stuff your body needs. There is a lot we don't understand about how food and human nutrition works, and I'd be nervous about relying on a heavily engineered food as more than an occasional addition to my diet.
- vixin 12y agoYes, 'There is a lot we don't understand about how food and human nutrition works' pretty much sums it up. Worth noting that in some reports, multivitamin preparations have been associated with adverse health outcomes. Popping pills of whatever kind can be dicey.
- pyre 12y agoIf this is truly all the body needs, then how do they deal with uptake issues? There are several things that compete for uptake in the body in the same way that oxygen and carbon monoxide compete when binding to the hemoglobin in your blood. E.g.: - Omega-6 fatty acids will push out the much better Omega-3 fatty acids. IIRC, the recommended ratio is 2:1 (Omega-3 to Omega-6)[1]. - Absorption of iron is inhibited by calcium. [1] FYI, most oils have a ton of Omega-6, and not much Omega-3. One exception here is coconut oil, which has little of either.
- shirro 12y agoThe only thing missing that will stop Soylent making heaps of money is salt and msg. People will eat anything if you add salt and msg even some oatmeal goop with added vitamins. People who think nobody will eat Soylent because it isn't a pleasurable home cooked product have missed the mountain of products on sale that are nothing much more more than starch and oil with salt and msg added. Take something soylent-like and add a flavour pouch that will make it taste like instant ramen. Then you just have to work out how to make it 99c a meal and you will clean up.
- papa_bear 12y agoI wrote this comment on an earlier soylent thread that got buried, but I think it could find a big market in people who care A LOT about eating specific nutrient proportions. I'm working on the website Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com http://www.eatthismuch.com) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).
- ultimatedelman 12y agothis site is pretty cool. i'd do it if it didn't cost almost 3x as much as pandora per year.
- chipsy 12y agoHere's what my on-the-street perspective is telling me: Over time the shelf space for ready-to-go protein shakes at the local convenience store chains(Walgreens, CVS, etc.) has gradually crept up. Some of these shakes still do the "joke's on you, this 'healthy' shake has as much sugar as Coca-Cola" thing. But there is a generation of them, led primarily by the Muscle Milk brand, which has stuck pretty strictly to pulling in good nutritional-facts numbers and working on taste second. I'm a buyer of these shakes because for me, the consumption experience is mediated by before-and-after aspects as well as what the product tastes like. "Will I feel good an hour after I have this?" I tell myself. And while I have to pay a little more for the privilege of that, it's worth it for me. Will it be a fad? I don't know. The trend has been upward so far and I think Soylent could easily ride it.
- Zigurd 12y agoObesity and diabetes imply that a lot of Americans have an absolutely crap diet that probably isn't delivering much pleasure, either. If Soylent becomes a popular alternative for people who can't feed themselves properly, it could shave billions off health care costs.
- DanBC 12y agoI'd be interssted to see how many people will chose Soylent over fast food. Many people on HN have said they would. I suspect most people wouldn't.
- Jsarokin 12y agoStill waiting for someone to invent Soylent Ramen... I bought all the ingredients and made DIY soylent from one of the hacks someone posted... The taste was a serious problem. I wanted to drink it for a week, but there was a 0% chance of that happening the way it tasted. Then I tried making Soylent Pasta, but boiled out all the nutrients and the water turned piss yellow (http://juliansarokin.com/soylent-for-science-pasta-bad-decision/ http://juliansarokin.com/soylent-for-science-pasta-bad-decis...)... But if there was a way to not mess that up, I think that could be really interesting. Still waiting on my official Soylent, hopefully it tastes better than my catastrophe.
- AllenKids 12y agoI have nothing constructive to add. Just as a Chinese who frequently hosts dinner party for friends and coworkers, the idea of someone voluntarily using soylent as meal substitute is utter crazy and I feel personally insulted by the mere existence of such horrific product.
- Rudism 12y agoThe main appeal of Soylent for me (I've been taking somewhere between 50%-75% of my calories from a DIY Soylent recipe for about three months now) is the ability to very precisely control how many calories I am consuming on a daily/weekly basis. I had been trying to lose weight for a while before switching to Soylent, but found it difficult to always know exactly how many calories were in something (especially when eating out or cooking something using a wide variety of ingredients). The frustrations stemming from this made progress difficult. With Soylent, I know exactly how many calories I'm eating. I can increase or decrease very easily to make room for "cheat meals" on evenings and weekends which I enjoy much more frequently and with less guilt than I did when I was trying to control my calorie intake with regular food. My weight loss progress has resumed to exactly the rate it should based on the number of calories I'm eating, which is possibly further proof that my estimation skills on a non-Soylent diet were not very good. Soylent is a preferable solution to this problem over something like Slim-fast or Ensure mainly due to cost, but also taste. The meal replacement shakes marketed for calorie-control/weight loss are generally very sugary or sweet tasting which is not something I could do for 2-3 meals a day for 5 days a week. Something more bland and flavorless like Soylent is much easier to handle as a staple meal long-term.