Soylent- Free Your Body!

I usually listen to NPR on my way into work and recently heard an interview with the founder of Soylent, a maker of a complete nutritional replacement shake. It's intended to become a person's staple source of nutrition- not their sole source of nutrition per se, but something to make any other eating "recreational." What I found really interesting is how he pitched the idea not from a nutritional or health standpoint but purely efficiency. He didn't get any pleasure from cooking and saw it all as wasted labor so he wanted to eliminate the need for that to feed himself. "Each serving of Soylent provides maximum nutrition with minimum effort," says the website.

I was thinking it could be useful in emergency and preparedness situations too, or to supplement freeze dried foods on expeditions, etc, but this mindset that cooking is purely a chore is new to me. Of course some nights when I come home from work and am feeling dog tired I can be lazy in the kitchen and will put in minimal effort to avoid starving, but I also do things like spend two evenings last week dedicated just to making a few pounds of smoked meat- and I savored the entire process. It's very rewarding to me when others are wowed by something I produced in the kitchen, which makes the prep work and sweat for it all worthwhile.

Focus: Do you enjoy preparing and cooking meals, or is it purely a chore for you? If it is, would you give Soylent a try?

Alt-Focus: The world population is always increasing but space and land isn't. How in the fuck are we going to feed everyone? What other alternatives to our typical food sources are interesting to you?

 

I remember seeing an interview with him a year ago and beyond thinking it was kind of cool from a biohack sort of perspective, I remember thinking he had a sociopath vibe to him. He was very mechanical in his thinking.

I'm constantly poked fun at by my friends and coworkers for being a "healthy eater", but I LOVE food. I cook a ton at home, but buy at work almost all the time both for ease and variety. I get where he's coming from in a very limited sense. Sometimes after a hard workout, especially at night, I don't always feel like cooking so I end up making dense, complex smoothies to get calories/protein but fast and easy. So I could see it in that sense. But it would never replace it for me. I love food, I like cooking. Despite being almost 30, girls are still impressed that I can cook anything interesting or complex, which is fun. I'm not gonna give that up other than a limited set of situations.

 

I love cooking. I find it really relaxing, a great way to reduce stress, and I get to make delicious things to eat. Making bread or pasta is one of my favourite things to do. Add flour, yeast, water, fat, beat the crap out of it, let it rise, beat it down some more, bake, and you get pure awesomeness.

 

I could see something like this being useful for times when I am too busy to cook, but I sincerely enjoy cooking dinner. A breakfast shake downed alongside coffee in the morning might not be a bad thing.

Regarding the food question, it's complicated. We waste an obscene amount of food as it is and we will have almost no problem converting over to a Mondragon (Spanish cooperative) system of greenhouse farming year-round. We can grow enough food for all 7 billion of us and then some, but the economics and distribution make it scarce. A Japanese company (I want to say Mitsubishi) started a completely indoor farm.

If potheads can grow weed inside of Compton, we can grow enough food it just won't be cheap.

 

Focus: I don't much care for cooking in general. If I'm preparing something for a semi-large group of people then I enjoy it as I'm having a few drinks and chatting while I'm doing it, but spending an hour or two in the kitchen by myself isn't my thing. I'll properly cook about twice a week and then half ass it another 2-3 times with the rest being full on stuff it in a microwave lazy.

Alt Focus: How about not rewarding idiots who are dirt poor and have 8 kids? Ok, that's not quite what our system does, but every time I meet some idiot who makes $14 an hour or less and have shit out 6 spawns it pisses me off. You don't have the time, money, or stable partner for this, but yet you're just too fucking stupid to keep using birth control. You would think someone would learn after the first four times. Now that I work in a plant I meet a lot of these morons and every time I get a pay check I get reminded a chunk is going to them.

It's not that I'm so against losing some of my wages on principle, but the premise behind Idiocracy really is true. Idiots are out breeding intelligent people at remarkable speed.

Also, with regards to the food question, I don't think it has to be expensive. That is, it depends on how far the government wants to take food safety regulations. I work in the meat industry, and they're currently pushing really hard on a lot of items that are purchased raw. I'm still not sure if the costs actually match the benefits, but a lot of the crack downs are fairly recent and obviously could get much cheaper in the long run.

Edit: Regarding the soylent idea the approach of doing it because you don't like regular food is beyond weird to me. On the other hand eating really healthy is a lot of work. When I was taking Paleo seriously I spent an absurd amount of time preparing food. All those claims about how little work it is are full of shit. From that perspective it makes sense, but doing it because you don't care much for quality well cooked cuisine makes you sound like an alien.

 

I used to barely be able to make toast, now I am enjoying cooking more and more largely due to rhe cooking tutorial thread in this very site.

I never got why people like eating out all the time. My mother-in-law who lives with us every May is that way. Yuck. I get wanting the restaurant experience now and then, but all the time? How does that not make you sick and bored? I think the satisfaction of cooking and eating something delectable you prepared personally is a high all on its own. Food, glorious food.

I don't have mad culinary skills yet, but if you made Souvlaki as good as I did you would get laid. Eight times. At once.

At-Focus:

The answer is simple. Let's decimate our population via Thunderdome. I have heard that while two enter, only one may leave. Your guess is as good as mine as to what happens to the other dude.

 

I agree with this. I had an internship at a county hospital, and I would regularly eval people on Medicaid who were in their mid-20s with 4+ kids. I will never forget this gem of a woman who was 26 and had 4 kids. She mentioned that she and her new boyfriend were thinking about having a kid of their own. I had to bite my tongue. Lady, you're on Medicaid and have more kids than teeth (she seriously had 2 visible teeth). Maybe it's time to slow down on the baby making and work on creating a better life for the kids you already have.

And that's why I'm not appropriate for county healthcare.

Focus: The concept is interesting enough, but I like the mouth feel of food and the social event. Nobody wants to swallow a pill or drink a shake for every single meal. That's boring and completely void of pleasure.

 

I just wish Winterbike was still here to condescendingly break down the nutrition of this product as well as not so subtly slip in references to how great his sex life is.

 

I like cooking. Wouldn't say I'm any better than average, but I have a couple dishes that continually impress. I would hate cooking every night though, ESPECIALLY Fridays after work, whether I have something going on or just wanna nap. My system is that when I make pasta, I make enough for eight meals and freeze six. That way, if I don't have leftovers from earlier in the week I can just thaw one out and have a delicious meal with no effort. Plus I eat at my parent's at least a couple times per month. Brilliant, really.

Following Crown's mother-in-law example, I'm really lucky when it comes to eating healthy: First, I'm naturally skinny with a metabolism that hasn't slowed, even a few years into my thirties. I wouldn't say my mom is a health freak, but we grew up with a home cooked meal (including a salad) every single night. Lightly-buttered popcorn and maybe a can of coke was the majority of the junk food in our house. Going to a restaurant was for special occasions and McDonald's was an after-early-morning-hockey-practice type thing -- whatever calories we didn't burn at hockey, we burned in the ball pit. I ate fast-food through high school but quickly grew out of it. Nowadays, I cook 90% of my dinners/leftovers (with salad) and if I eat fast-food for lunch three times in a week I feel gross. It gets expensive and I only like maybe three or four chains anyways. Even if I was rich I'd bring a lunch half the time.

Don't have any sources handy but it seems every time I come across an article or report on global hunger, the one thing experts agree on is that we have way more than enough to easily feed everyone, but the will and money isn't there. Soylent could surely save lives, but teaching growing techniques, where possible, is probably a more sustainable plan.

 

Sometimes I enjoy preparing food, sometimes it is a chore. But in either case the pleasure of eating is important enough that Soylent would not be an option I would ever take unless there really was no other option. I always try to make sure that whatever I eat is enjoyable, even when I'm in a hurry or have other things on my mind. If I don't derive even a small amount of pleasure from what I eat, it actually depresses me.

 

Right? What a terrible name for a meal replacement/supplement. The first thing anyone with any culture is going to think is Soylent Green, which is *spoiler alert* made of people.