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[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
by 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- 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.
- 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.