Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals.
I order a box of Soylent bottles every few weeks—they come in handy while working or for a quick breakfast or if I have little time and am hungry. I also cook meals with my girlfriend a few times a week and go out to dinner every weekend. Both things can exist at the same time.
It's just a nutritious drink you can drink at any time if you need to. If you want to make it most of our meals, sure go ahead. But no one says you must.
> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need
This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.
Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eating enough (bulking). Serious weightlifters go through cycles of both but most people struggle more with one side or another.
Bulking isn't a struggle for me -- I can clear 5,000 kcal/day without a sweat. I've trained myself to eat pretty healthy but I'd always prefer steak and eggs for breakfast. On the other hand, a friend of mine complains about all the pizza he has to eat to meet his targets. Soylent makes a lot of sense for him (quick calories) but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".
Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction.
The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep. A meal is really disruptive during those times, because I just want my head fully integrated into the problems I'm working on.
"Good morning," said the little prince.
"Good morning," said the merchant.
This was a merchant who sold pills that had been
invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one
pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to
drink.
"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.
"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said
the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts.
With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every
week."
"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"
"Anything you like..."
"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I
had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should
walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."
"New technology usurps romanticization of older technology" is not a new and surprising concept. One could replace "pill" and "spring of fresh water" with any technological advancement which took over some earlier activity that a subset of the population found and still finds enjoyable to do. Typewriters and computers, bicycles and cars, making a fire using sticks verses using a stove to cook food even.
In my experience no one who treats that idea as novel ever seems to offer a litmus test to tell if the value of technology trumps the potential enjoyment in doing something manually. Does rimantas use stone or metal tools to cook? But the feeling of spinning the tree branch in your hands against the kindling! How greatly rimantas has lost in their fervor for convenience...
It's not about the food. It's about slowing down and taking your time. When you start taking tablets to save time drinking, o soylent, to save time eating, you for sure do not slow down.
Why it is important to slow down and unplug is another big topic, but that is absolutely essential.
I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then. It works well for menial programming tasks where time is the limiting factor. Incidently, those are the problems where you can for the most part jump out and right back in without too much overhead. But when facing a hard problem, getting up and away from the computer, and cooking a meal always mean I'll solve the problem faster and better. Simply because I let the problem alone for a while. I even use non tech coworkers for sparing, explaning the problem, and answering their questions means I'll have to think about the problem in a significantly different way - often revealing insight in the process. YMMW
A thousand times this. I remember staying up late to finish programming problems when I was young (and stupid). Now I find the most effective way of solving hard programming problems is to spend an afternoon attacking it and then go to sleep at a normal hour. Magically, an elegant solution - usually quite different from work in progress - appears in my brain while I'm showering.
I do my best work while sleeping, I just need to figure out how to bill for it.
Agreed - for really hard problems I've never found that pounding away directly is effective. I load up on the required information and then intentionally go and do something else (ironically cooking seem to does it for me but overnight and in shower also works) and out of nowhere a solution will appear.
I'm working on decentralization, which I think is a very socially important goal. The cloud is not my ultimate objective, but it's one of the very few short term use cases I see where a decentralized system seems to have the potential to utterly dominate a centralized one.
Decentralized tech is very new. It's very hopium, and it's very poorly understood, both by zealots and by non-believers. I think that decentralization is going to change a lot of things in fundamental ways, and I think I can move the field forward faster by building a tangible, provably working, provably superior use case for decentralized tech.
Cloud storage is not as glamorous as starting a new world order, but the most important engineering is often the most mundane. People probably felt similarly about the Internet back before the world wide web was invented.
What are you specifically working on decentralizing? Do you have an end goal in mind for what a perfectly decentralized world would look like? Eg. a SBC in every home & office running a mailserver, webserver, etc
Edit: I think decentralization is great (like say IPFS), but I would not risk health or put off others to dedicate all my time to working on it, social interaction is an everyday need!
Ultimately I would like to see that people are allowed to maintain full control over their access to money and information. As tech improves, those things are getting more important, and right now the trend is to increasingly outsource the control (especially for information) to centralized entities that likely don't have your well-being as their primary objective.
There are a vast number of things that fit under the umbrella of tech that needs to be decentralized to give you full control over your money and information.
What part of that stack are you working on? Blockchain currency, low level networking, distributed filesystems, p2p websites, ...
> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep
In all seriousness, this is tremendously unhealthy. Get up and go for a walk, a light jog, something. The health consequences of even just being sedentary for that long are terrible (to say nothing of the psychological consequences of deceiving yourself into thinking that work is the only thing of value in life).
When I'm really sucked into a problem is one of the few times that I feel fully alive. It's like being in a flow state for multiple days, pushing every cognitive resource I have to reach a solution.
I think it happens less than once a month, and almost always lasts less than a week.
I do wish that I went hiking more often, camping more often, and I wish that I had more social interactions that were free of social and business undertones.
You sound like me 25 years ago. I assume you are still young (20-30?) but I would urge you to take a look at your lifestyle and habits now, with a view to changing it to incorporate more of your hiking and camping and social interactions that you mention.
I once felt that living like you currently are was sustainable and that I would be impervious to the long term effects, but now that I have hit the half century mark, I am finding I suffer from all sorts of back and shoulder pain from sitting for extended programming sessions lasting days. I also have rapidly degrading eyesight, and high risk of glaucoma from staring at screens all day every day, and I have other health and digestive issues from not eating regular healthy meals, or drinking enough water back in the day.
It is highly likely that the lifestyle you are accustomed to will turn around and bite you one day. Make changes now so that you don't end up the same as this old programmer. :)
Mathematicians get a similar mental state from the release of dopamine that rewards working on and successfully solving ever more complex problems. I've also seen engineers comment similarly about it, and it sounded quite like what my great grandfather described when working on a complex math problem over a span of time.
That being said, make time for yourself, all consuming projects will make you discontent with life in general.
I wondered if maybe I was missing out at some point, but after pushing myself to do other stuff, what I quickly realised was that I do what I do because it is what I enjoy.
It is not necessarily less "living life", just different choices.
Of course, that assumes you do it because you're working on things that excite you and interest you because you enjoy them.
I have two young kids and a startup. The idea that I should view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed is honestly a pipe dream right now. I enjoy as many of my meals as I can with my family. But when the kids are sick or I'm running behind and have a meeting, I grab a soylent and I feel like it's a lot healthier than picking up sugary junk or other alternatives.
I have one kid, and no startup, and sometimes the only meal I get to enjoy is lunch at the office.
When going out to eat, I would hold my son in my left hand, as I shoveled food into my mouth with my right hand, taking a break to apologize to whomever was dining with me for having such bad manners.
> But when the kids are sick or I'm running behind and have a meeting, I grab a soylent and I feel like it's a lot healthier than picking up sugary junk or other alternatives.
It's not about general meals. It's those situations where you aren't able to make a real meal and have to settle on either nothing, or something fast and convenient. A muffin can be grabbed and eaten immediately. I'm not really sure how you expect them to grill a steak and vegetables.
I average about 30g of carbohydrate and under 5g sugar for an entire day when I'm losing or maintaining my weight. 9g for a small meal (and Soylent is a small meal, it's 400 calories a bottle) is a lot, especially given that it's 34g of non-fiber carbohydrates in the bottle besides jst the sugar count..
You are eating an extremely low-carb diet that is far from the norm. The average carbohydrate consumption for a normal 2,000-calorie diet is almost ten times as much as what you're eating. So sure, I guess Soylent isn't useful for outlier diets, but it's fine for people with normal diets.
Think of something you have to do every day that you don't like to do. Like flossing maybe? Some people really enjoy flossing. Some people don't. If there were a device I could put in my mouth and in 30 seconds everything were flossed, I would totally do that. But some people would think, man how can you do that and take all the enjoyment out of flossing?
Sometimes when I'm working, I run to the fridge, grab whatever is in it and eat it while I keep working. It usually doesn't taste like anything because I don't even bother heating it.
Soylent lets me do that but it's a lot healthier than whatever leftovers I might grab out of the fridge.
Either way I'm not enjoying the food nor the company (I'm at my desk at home alone). I'm also only spending 10 minutes.
It's one of those things you have to try for yourself, I think. The evidence in my case is very much apparent when I'm in the chair getting poked by my hygienist. The waterflosser is more effective at maintaining my gum health than floss ever was, with a p-value amounting to a floating-point denormal.
I have a feeling that if the truth were to come out, the effectiveness of flossing would turn out to be entirely dependent on tooth spacing or some other individual characteristic. If so, that may be true for the waterjet gadgets as well. But it seems less likely.
Some people's teeth are so messed up that flossing is a puzzle. "Right angle there, diagonal between those two teeth, curve a bit there, go backward there"...
I can't attest to whether it helps prevent cavities or gum disease or whatever, given regular dental visits. I can say though that I used to rarely floss, and since I started flossing daily a few years ago, my teeth remain noticeably smoother and cleaner feeling between dentist visits, and require considerably less scraping when I'm there.
I don't know about you but I can tell how important flossing is by the amount of blood that comes out of my mouth the longer I take a break from flossing
Food, to me, represents more than replenishment of nutrition. It represents meeting and understanding my coworkers. Learning more about my significant other or unwinding with this person to talk about our week. Even when it's not a social situation, for me it's a treat. I completed some work and now I should treat myself by revitalizing my body with a substance that tastes good. It's a great motivator.
It's such a fundamental part of being a human being I can't at all relate to seeing it as a mechanical process such as flossing. I can't think of a worse comparison: when you're flossing, you're alone, and if anything anti social. Eating couldn't be any more be the opposite. It's something that all humans can relate to and bond over no matter what your opinions are.
Flossing isn't a part of our culture. Food is a part of every culture.
That we can all relate to it and bond over it doesn't mean that all of us want to. If I feel like being social, fine. But most of the time I don't feel like being social. Often that's the case even when I want to relax and enjoy food - I'd say maybe 3/4 of the time I go to restaurants I go alone by choice.
But just like I can, and occasionally do, enjoy social interactions but usually prefer solitude, while I can, and do often, greatly enjoy food there are still plenty of time when hunger is just an annoying disruption.
All of the stuff that you have built up around food can exist just fine separate from it. You connecting socialising and bonding with food is just habit. That's fine, but it isn't universal.
> Eating couldn't be any more be the opposite. It's something that all humans can relate to and bond over no matter what your opinions are.
I generally don't like food. Sometimes I crave something specific, or want to eat at a nice place. But 6 out of 7 days out of the week, food just isn't appealing to me, and is a chore to eat. It's basically like flossing.
Ever since a time when I was a teen and had to fast because of an esophagus problem, I haven't really felt hunger the same way. It's possible for me to go a few days without eating and not notice it or feel hungry. I can tell when I'm very hungry because I get lightheaded and weak around day 3. (Note, I don't do this intentionally and it isn't often I go days without eating).
So Soylent (or equivalent) is really helpful in making sure I get some food everyday.
> It's such a fundamental part of being a human being I can't at all relate to seeing it as a mechanical process such as flossing
I mean, I agree with you and everything but you're saying "this thing is so important to me I cannot understand other people". There are a reasonably large number of people who would be very happy if they only ever ate a bowl of cereal and a banana for breakfast every single day for the rest of their life. I don't understand it, and I wouldn't like it, but I don't want to prevent them the comfort they get from that.
From people on the other side: sometimes I'm like "ugh, even drinking smth seems too much distraction, don't wanna loose this focus now, an IV-cathether port that could just pump the right stuff into my veins, triggered automatically by sensors knowing my dietary intake history and pooling blood concentrations of things from me, would be so awesome now" :)
Also, deciding what to eat is a huge chore and mental energy drain for me... especially since I like constant diversity and novelty even in food. If I could afford to have a personal chef that would be trained to "always surprise me" and occasionally I could just tell him smth like "uhm, that salad looks delicious, but I'm too lazy to eat it, grind it up into a shake please so I can slurp it on my way to place X or while coding" it would rock!
Though I'd argue the healthier alternative would be to take a break and go walk to a nice restaurant somewhere, but alas I also fall into situations where you just need to keep on task.
yup. when went from working 14h/day (with almost no breaks) to working 7~8h (with breaks to eat, drink water, walk around), my productivity increased a lot.
Also your sandwich is predominantly going to be made up of bread, even the healthiest of which isn't all that healthy, and likely deli meat, which you probably don't want to much of either.
That's a problem of empathy. You can't understand how other people would have this specific feeling or practice. Obviously though many people do have it.
There seems to be something very unsettling to people like you about the idea of "meal replacement". To me it appears to be a kind of cultural conservatism, like it's an attack on "family values".
It's not about empathy. The original poster was asking why people don't understand Soylent, and my answer is that it's solving a problem that they never even considered could be a problem.
> This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.
Different people, different concepts :). I used a Soylent clone in the past to replace breakfast/lunch and I liked it. I feel I might be unique at that among my coworkers, but I e.g. really prefer eating at my desk - I can parallelize it with work, or reading a book, or reading HN, which is infinitely more interesting to me than eating out with most people.
> but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".
My mother was on a diet plan once, where they suggested two options for meals each day, and if you really didn't feel like eating that, you could replace it with a protein shake. There were days when that shake really was the best alternative, and it allowed her to stick to the plan instead of giving up.
Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?
Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day (recently Marissa Mayer and Bill Gates and someone else from the US said in interviews they have every minute of every day planned; sounds like pure hell but he) seems very American. This Soylent thing fits in there.
Why would someone want to work that much unless you want to become a billionaire which, again, seems a drive in media coming from the US?
Maybe it is just the media I read though, but here there is no vibe like that and when I meet (very successful/rich) entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately so they do not give of that vibe either. Again the press distorts but posts here on HN and a thing like Soylent support that press.
> Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?
I think there is more acceptance in certain cultures, for example, to skip lunch because it's a busy day. Having worked globally and in multiple industries, I don't believe it's an American only thing although probably more common there. I see it as more of an industry thing, and each industry seems to have it's own use case for a product like Soylent. i.e. the programmer 'in the zone' and not wanting to stop for dinner or the investment banker running on a few hours of sleep due to an upcoming pitch.
> Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day
I'm not sure how that was implied, but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.
> entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately
I would be surprised to hear these types of individuals don't deal with skipped meals or lack of time based on what's going on in there life/work like their counterparts in other countries do.
People here imply that people consume Soylent either because they cannot get enough calories in with normal food to not lose weight (what a luxury that must be), or, in most cases and as the direct parent writes, that they do not have time to eat 'normally'. That seems to mesh with the whole culture of fast food and minute day planning; I for one could not tell you if I have time for an elaborate meal or a quick meal at lunch today and I would not want to know if I do either. I'll see what happens when I get hungry.
> but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.
Not typical workforce; I'm citing some famous and very rich US business people. Just noting that these people seem proud of it while I don't hear the same stories (in the press) from anywhere else. And others (especially on HN) seem desperate to copy it (which is, I assume, were Soylent came from in the first place); people who cite this (time-hacking/life-hacking/whatever-hacking it is called) as a great feat are all from (=living in currently) the US when I check their profiles.
Particularly when you are inundated in valley slave culture, being busy all the time is a sign of your importance - you're busy disrupting the market getting ready to IPO, and if you have 10 spare minutes a day in which to regain some semblance of health or sanity, clearly you aren't a 10x developer. It's absolute hogwash and sadly a good number of brilliant young engineers are going to burn out, suffer health consequences, quit the field, etc. over it.
But having employees willing to sacrifice their actual wellbeing for the pipe-dream of getting "rich" is quite beneficial if you're say, a VC, so of course they foster this culture. "Look at how busy you are, you must be doing such important work!"
It's an old tradition, too: there are accounts from the early days of the United States talking about how reading is treated as labor rather than the enjoyable affairs which visitors from England, France, etc. were accustomed to.
2400 calories per gallon, well balanced between protein, fat, and carbs (you might say that it is ideally formulated to feed large mammals :P). The best part is that it is readily available every where and super cheap (< $3 per gallon).
It is, but it's still significant. 13% for whites in the US but rising to near 90% for some ethnic groups.
Europe varies greatly, with by far the highest level of tolerance in Northern Europe (I'm Norwegian, and I didn't even know about lactose intolerance until I was in the 20's - it just wasn't something that became a subject until we were exposed to more immigrants as while it existed in Norway before that it was <5%), with lactose intolerance increasing to well above 20% in many other European countris.
In any case the advice to down vast quantities as milk isn't universally applicable anywhere.
That is not a careful reading of the statistics given.
The full quote:
"Approximately 65 percent of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy. Lactose intolerance in adulthood is most prevalent in people of East Asian descent, affecting more than 90 percent of adults in some of these communities. Lactose intolerance is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek, and Italian descent."
I've dropped the idea that IGF response is something I need in my life. Milk is ideally formulated to feed babies that need to grow into gigantic beasts.
It is also a very inferior product made with zero genetic engineering. Just silly crossbreeding until the cow has big enough milk gains.
Don't see how it's, from a nutritional or health perspective, superior to Soylent.
Milk is also super cheap because it's heavily subsidized through taxes. I'm not saving idiot entrepreneurs by buying their unsustainable products.
So you prefer a diet engineered by humans (who, with our rather limited understanding of nutrition, can't even decide on whether carbs are a good thing) to a diet engineered and field tested by evolution over millions of years? Not the bet I would make, but to each their own, I guess.
Several other points:
1. The OP was remarking that they had a hard time maintaining weight. Anybody who has done GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) can tell you that large quantities of milk will head off the possibility of weight loss.
2. Is there any reason to believe that the agricultural inputs to something like Soylent aren't just as heavily subsidized as you claim milk to be?
Never said I consider a Soylent only diet proper. I have no opinion on that.
Milk is in our diet for several thousand years, not millions.
1. There's also a lot of people who ate balanced meals and kept weight. Drinking that much milk has some unwanted stuff in it - like IGF-I - which can cause cancer in those huge amounts.
2. Maybe soy, but that's a side-effect of the dairy that uses it not for the sake of human consumption. But it's highly likely the soy used is the one for human consumption, which would remove the necessary subsidies.
Not everybody is the same. Maybe it's not for you, but for people to busy with something else to think about what to eat, soylent is a lot better than fast food, a bar, whatever random crap you have lying around, or skipping a meal.
That's not _the_ problem, it just means Soylent isn't for you. Which is cool. I love Soylent 2.0. I'm very happy that I can get a decent chunk of my calories from a vegan source with little effort and lots of convenience.
Maybe it's the way Soylent markets itself, but I don't understand why people are so _personally_ offended by it. Just... don't eat it.
You could also take pride in cleaning and maintaining your tools. It's rather fast if you don't burn your food and if you use proper cleaning agents like "Barkeepers Friend" when soap isn't appropriate.
Right, I do understand that! That's the whole point. Your experience is completely foreign to me which is why I didn't understand Soylent's purpose when it first came out. It's like trying to sell an umbrella to a nomad in the Sahara.
Who said anything about that? Of course I have things to do, but grabbing a sandwich from the deli on my block is almost as fast as soylent and much more enjoyable.
Although from this thread I'm starting to think the real reason many people dislike Soylent is the holier-than-thou attitude many of it's supporters seem to sport :)
You are clearly not French or have you lived there. A great meal should absolutely be one of the highlights of a day. Food can be (and should be) the catalyst of great conversations, great ideas or even meditative self-reflection.
Soylent seems to me to be a hipster Ultra Slim Fast and consumed for the exact same reasons legions of working women have that stuff in office refrigerators.
I can respect that people have different priorities than a great meal each day, but I can also pity them.
It depends a little on what you choose to eat. Hitting my calorie goals would be easy if I ate fast food, but I'm trying to bulk while avoiding refined carbs and keeping my fruit & vegetable intake up.
There's a volume challenge - 5,000kcal is only 1.5lb of butter, but 32lb of broccoli.
There's also a mechanical challenge- chewing constantly (e.g. when eating lots of vegetables) is emotionally exhausting.
I do acknowledge it's possible there are people out there for whom there is simply no greater joy than eating, who would eat nonstop with joy. But, not everyone is like that.
> This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included).
When I arrive home to an empty apartment at 9PM, I sure as hell don't feel like cooking. Sure, I cook great meals during the weekend and the days I come home early. But cooking when you got back from a big day of work + an infernal commute is cooking nothing but a chore.
Edit: That being said, I'll drink a regular liquid meal and only if all the other alternatives can't be done (no food in the fridge, I am not home, I need to eat in the car, etc.) I don't see the need to get Soylent either.
How can you eat 5,000 kcal a day and not be a huge fat pig? How many miles a day do you need to run to burn that off?
On the days when I lift weights I eat close to 5K calories, sometimes even a little more, depending on the commute. All of my daily commute is by bike, including taking my kid to and from the kindergarten, and later to some extra activities (welcome to Denmark), which can be anywhere between 20 and 35 km total for the day.
Thats quite a bit of cycling. Don't you think all that cycling is getting into your lifting? I used to cycle about 10km a day and found that it was already hampering leg training at the gym.
I actually changed my approach to lifting a little and now following the principles described by Greg Nuckols in his article about increasing work capacity
So essentially every week I'm doing just a little bit more volume in every exercise, either by adding a little weight, or an extra rep. So far I'm able to do it consistently for a few months so I guess I'm recovering well.
Then of course there is all that "getting used to it" thing where you do something long enough and get into it gradually and increase little by little and you're fine.
I worked originally about 5 km from home and it felt like it was enough cycling there and back. Then I changed my job and now I was 11 km from home so I started combining bike + train for a while because that felt like too much to cycle. Then one sunny day I cycled all the way home. I realized two things: 1) I'm not that tired and 2) I cut 10 minutes off my train + bike commute. So now I bike all the way and save time and money at the same time! Win-win!
Thats one hell of a boost to your TDEE. Im impressed.
I lift 5x, walk every where and swim LISS 3x a week. 173cm about 82kg. TDEE is ~3250 kcal. Currently shoot for 3500 a day. However, I only see my son on weekends. I bet my TDEE would be higher if had him every day.
Exactly. Twice this week I've been in meetings that ran long and left me with no time for lunch.
I keep a box of soylent under my desk specifically for days like this. Without food I get "hangry" and can't concentrate.
I can chug a bottle of soylent in a minute or two between meetings, or sip from it instead of from a water glass, without being even as disruptive as an energy bar would be. (Plus I can't stand how sugary those things are.)
It's a terrible substitute for a salad but there's every reason to believe it's better for you than a slice of pizza or a bag of chips. Like any other food, it has a place in a healthy diet as long as it's in moderation.
That's probably just me but a lifestyle where you have no time to take a break (or meet friends/colleagues) and eat doesn't sound very healthy and not very desirable either. I understand the desire to optimise eating times and life overall, and sometimes there's a lot of work that seems important, but at the point where you drink a supplement rather than eat it seems there's no life left in what should be more than just a person working and sleeping (or napping if you're in the sleep optimiser boat..) .
Probably it's all not that black and white, you like the convenience etc, but damn it just sounds sad. I also used to try to optimise my life to have impact etc, until i realised that i don't want to miss out on also living it.
What if you usually break for lunch with colleagues but just have some days when you don't get a chance to take a break - you're not planning a life without breaks, but the database server crashes and shit happens?
What if you schedule your workday too tightly to break for lunch specifically so that you can leave the office earlier and spend time with the people you love?
What if you'd rather spend an extra hour a couple times a week hiking with your friends / family rather than chopping vegetables and scrubbing pots?
What if spending less time on food ENABLES you to live your life instead of missing out?
What about a lifestyle where you have time to take a break, but you don't want to spend that break preparing, eating, and cleaning up after food? You'd rather spend it, say, reading a great book, working on an interesting side project, playing a tabletop game with friends you invited over, or just laying in a hammock reflecting on life?
Due to how cultural values vary, I'm not surprised that many HN readers are repulsed to some degree by the idea of not preparing and consuming a traditional meal. It's just a kind of conservatism, a recognition of traditional values that help us find another way to enjoy life.
In my own time growing up, my family had traditionally prepared meals almost every day together, and yet even as a child I had little patience for it. I was endlessly curious, wanted to explore the world, play with dad, tinker with my computer, read something, write something, draw something, make something. My life was incredibly full of worth and value to me, and I enjoyed it immensely -- and yet, meals were only ever a distraction, merely one of the lesser chores I had to take care of to keep enjoying the rest of my life.
This sentiment is still largely with me today. Today, meals either serve as a mechanism for me to guarantee people I want to spend time with will be in the same place at the same time, or else I'm alone, in which case I simply see no point in all the bother. There are still many things much more interesting and spiritually fulfilling to me than preparing, consuming, and cleaning up after a traditional meal. Gladly would I accept a solution that successfully meets all of my nutritional needs while also allowing me to do any of those other things instead.
don't worry, you're not alone. unfortunately i do have to skip meals occasionally but i always try to get something reasonable. eating an avocado with some seasoning, or other fruit like a banana, or some cheese, or some turkey slices, or a small bag of carrots, or hell even skipping a meal so i can eat a little more at dinner without blowing my calorie budget -- sounds infinitely more appetizing than drinking some lab-made slop that comes in a bottle. the possibilities are literally endless.
i've known since high school that there are some people out there that view eating as a nuisance but i didn't know there were so many that were in the tech industry. everyone i've ever known in tech loved eating/cooking/meals out/whatever (obviously i've been self-selecting my social group!)
Why is this getting downvoted? It is incredibly sad when meals need 'replacing.' I understand once in awhile, but it seems like people are habitually making meal replacement a viable lifestyle choice.
It's not that people are too stupid to understand, they just did a really bad job telling us, but it kind of was their PR strategy. Look how many articles there are "I ate Soylent only for X days".
Let's see how long it takes them to lose that image of a complete food replacement.
True that, it helped them get the funding and the interest so it was a great marketing strategy. But now that people understand the theory (ie you can supply someone with all the nutrition they need from the one product) they are going a bit more on a sane sort of image.
Soylent makes perfect sense in the context of a meal replacer for busy or lazy people. But even the original creator stopped eating it at all times because he missed the "social aspect of eating".
>> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need
Thanks god for creating apples and bananas and thanks the grocery stores for selling them all the year round. And thanks the Germans for putting a bakery on every corner.
Not all of your meals has to be "nutritionally complete".
You can store apples during the whole winter if you have below 0 degrees outside. We did it when I was young.
Quality of life does not starts with a 6 digit salary and ends with working on the next Uber for X. Living in the right country/city with the right people can case you a lot of happiness. I know because I was born behind the iron curtain.
> Not all of your meals has to be "nutritionally complete".
But is that really a reason to argue against nutritionally complete meals? Healthy is still better than unhealthy. I suppose the choice becomes healthy or tasty at some point.
I am saying that "nutritionally complete meals" try to solve a problem you do not actually have. Please feel free to consider this as an argument against Soylent.
Why is that not an existing problem? Is all nutrition bogus? Or does everybody magically end up with balanced nutrition without trying?
I think a lot of people eat very unhealthy, especially people who have no time to cook a proper meal. Something that helps them eat more nutritionally balanced food could do them a lot of good.
Nutritionally complete meals and nutritionally complete diet are not the same. You can have a balanced, nutritionally complete diet without nutritionally complete meals if you mix them well. Unfortunatelly this is not an 100 M$ idea.
>> people who have no time to cook a proper meal
Are we talking about the same people they spend daily 4+ hours wathing TV?
Not exactly. Insted of drinking Soylent go to a nearby shop and by some apples and rye bread. If there are any shops... you maybe just found a market gap. Opening one you could make your city to a better place for living.
If it's not a single source food, you don't need it to be complete. An occasional gap filler can be substantially unbalanced on its own without affecting overall balance much.
I think you're right -- Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need, and it's marketed with a message that appeals to men, unlike SlimFast. You gotta admit that all the folks responding who are talking about how Soylent feeds their programming mania feel way cooler & smarter drinking Soylent, the techy solution, as opposed to SlimFast, the 1970s ladies' drink, or EAS Myoplex Ketogenic Meal Replacement, the bodybuilder's choice! Only one of these companies is venture-backed!
Its a more fundamental misunderstanding. You don't have time to eat, that is why you use this product. A lot of the other commenters cannot conceive of that world view as a regular state. Along with myself, if I don't have time to eat something that is fine. If this happens more than once a week/month, I am going to change my life as obviously something is very wrong with the way I am living it. To me, food is part of the reason for living. It's social, tasty, visceral, primal, fun, enjoyable, etc. It makes me who I am and is a part of my identity. For you, that is not necessarily true, as far as I can read about you in a single comment. Like, if I am dashing out the door and don't have time to cook a breakfast, then fine, Soylent is ok. If I have done this more than once in my week, I am going to wake up much earlier and go to bed earlier too in order to make that breakfast and prep my lunches that are tasty and good for me. If I have to work late, fine, Soylent. If that happens a lot in my life, I am going to start quickly looking for another job that lets me see my wife and kids and eat dinners with them and have fun making the food too and doing the dishes. A habit of missing meals is not on the table for me. I will never order a box of soylent, as I will never need it. If I ever go through that much, something is very very wrong with my life and needs immediate change. I know this is not true of you and many of Soylent's customers, and I don't mean to disparage you. I just want to explain the misunderstanding. They obviously have a customer base, yourself included, but for many of us, using Soylent habitually is impossible to understand.
"Soylent is an open source meal REPLACEMENT[emph added], advertised as a "staple meal", available in liquid and powdered forms as a beverage, and as a solid-form meal bar. Its creators state that Soylent meets all nutritional requirements for an average adult."
If something is advertised as a "meal replacement", it seems likely that people will use it to ... replace their meals - for those inclined, that would mean "all meals".
Also, they originally advertised it with copy like "A full day of balanced nutrition prepared in 3 minutes for $3/meal" and "What if you never have to worry about food again?"
Well yeah, you don't eat one meal your whole life. You have multiple meals in a day.
But regardless, they went for that angle in the early days because it got them the advertising and funding. It got the attention, it's good marketing.
Nowadays they bill it as a meal replacer, in the respect of you CAN replace whatever meal you want with it without having to worry about the effort or time it takes to prepare/research a good balanced meal.
All that said, I don't personally use the stuff but would like to try it out.
So, Soylent push it as a sole source of nutrition, and some people use it as such, but then when there are problems people say "but you shouldn't do that", even though most of the people experiencing the problems aren't doing that and even though it's something pushed as possible by Soylent.
If you can use Soylent as a sole source of nutrition there shouldn't be anyone in this thread saying that Soylent is never meant to be used as a sole source of nutrition.
If you can't use it as such then Soylent have been irresponsible in their marketing (although they have toned it down a bit).
I was on a liquid diet for a while for medical reasons. Ensure (and other drinks in that space) are horrifyingly sugary, and even their "diabetic" formula is disgustingly sweet and high in simple processed carbs that are a half step up from sucrose. They're also extremely low in fiber.
Additionally, though the vitamins and minerals are balanced for consuming four per day, you'd have to drink 8-10 of them daily to fill the caloric needs of a healthy and not particularly active adult. Sugar is a surprisingly inefficient source of calories on the scale of an adult's daily metabolic needs.
Soylent has a very neutral flavor that can be seasoned for a sweet or savory effect, and a bottle has roughly the right amount of calories for a meal for an adult. If you're moderately active and eating nothing else, around 5 per day will suffice.
Even on a liquid diet, I ate other things besides soylent, and I struggled to consume enough calories to meet my basal metabolic rate - below which your body will start consuming itself for energy. (Forget maintaining your original weight on a liquid diet at all.) Whole milk, you say? I was forbidden to consume significant amounts of lactose.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of options were either extremely sweet or would fill your stomach without providing meaningful nutrition (a cup of chicken broth has 10 calories!) Despite usually being a chocolate hound, after two weeks of that I would gag at the thought of a m&m. Soylent at least was neutral and would keep me feeling full for a little while.
It seems like the answer to this and similar questions on here, which is Soylent's true "innovation" in my estimation, is that Soylent is the first meal replacement with young men as a target market. Meal replacements are pretty convenient, but if you're an 18-25 y.o. man I have a feeling there's a nonzero level of stigma (real or just feared) associated with drinking SlimFast ("women's drink") or Ensure ("old people drink") all the time. Before now all there was for young people were protein shakes + multivitamin, which is also possibly too associated with bodybuilding/gym rats for comfort for some people.
But if you're a young man drinking Soylent, this hip new VC-backed tech fuel drink, it occupies a similar mental association space to Red Bull. I can't help just seeing it as a marketing thing.
That's what I don't get. Most people have difficulties keeping their weight in check rather than vice versa, and you can get all kind of snacks, ranging from healthy to extremely unhealthy, practically everywhere. Streets and shops and cafés are plastered with food, the abundance is mind-boggling if you think about it (or come from some really poor country).
How is mixing & drinking a glass of Soylent easier or less time consuming than eating a sandwich with cheese & lettuce? Or an apple?
For me it's the storage. Lettuce goes bad, fruits rot, bread gets moldy, all within a short timeframe.
I buy some Soylent and it will be good there for a while. So when I'm hungry and we are out of bread, now it's a 30 second meal vs a 30 minutes or more to run to the store.
... Which as far as I or anyone else knows has nothing to do with it's shelf-life.
Regardless, I'm hoping you realize that I was being general and using "Soylent" as the example there because that was the topic of conversation.
Also your comment is especially funny to me as I've never purchased Soylent the product. I have things similar to it, but I've never bought any Soylent. Once they get this figured out, I might try their bars, but they seem a bit expensive for me which is why I'm always apprehensive to pull the trigger.
Right, but where's the tech innovation? I mean check it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met-Rx - meal replacement powders/shakes have been around for a looooong time, and you can order online too...
"Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals."
Problem already solved, MRE [0] and discussed [1].
It's simple, really: The closer your are to nature, the better you feel (because the healthier you are). Our body is happier when we spend our time in nature instead of artificial environment (there are studies on that subject) and we are less cancerous when we eat natural food (as opposed to processed food).
Every time we step away from our nature, we sabotage ourselves.
Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals.
I order a box of Soylent bottles every few weeks—they come in handy while working or for a quick breakfast or if I have little time and am hungry. I also cook meals with my girlfriend a few times a week and go out to dinner every weekend. Both things can exist at the same time.
It's just a nutritious drink you can drink at any time if you need to. If you want to make it most of our meals, sure go ahead. But no one says you must.