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.
There 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.
Never said you weren't human or that champions of soylent aren't human. Simply that eating doesn't seem like a problem that needs a solution to me. I imagine soylent being used when you are too busy to eat. The problem is that you are too busy, not the eating part.
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.
> 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.
> * your statement equating eating soylent to making food and drink a footnote in life sounds at least presumptuous if not judgemental.*
But that was a core part Rob Rhinehart's original proposition.
I totally get that it's not why or how everyone consumes Soylent, but these were the words used to introduce it to the world:
In my own life I resented the time, money, and effort the purchase, preparation, consumption, and clean-up of food was consuming
I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. ... Now I spend about 5 minutes in the evening preparing for the next day, and every meal takes a few seconds.
Food can be art, comfort, science, celebration, romance, or a reason to meet with friends. Most of the time it’s just a hassle, though.
The food is eating us. I don’t know how to change peoples’ behavior, but now that I’ve discovered Soylent, I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, have more freedom with my time and money, and never have to worry about the stuff.
I don't see how equating statements like "I resented the time", "it's just a hassle" and "never have to worry about the stuff" with "a footnote in life" can be called presumptuous.
> Isn't this product supposed to be the end-all and be-all of meal replacements?
I don't know why so many people think this is the case and then hate on the product.
Taking too much of any one thing is bad for you. People were doing only-soylent as an experiment. But for the most part 90% of the time I've read people only using it for a single meal each day, or on days they dont have time to cook, and eating regular food otherwise. Which sounds entirely reasonable to me, especially given how often people substituted those moments with junk food.
I feel like i'm in the opposite camp. Every time i see a Soylent post in any non-Soylent corner of the web (HN, non-Soylent Subreddits, etc), there's always 1 (x100) posts of:
"Why would you do this!?"
I feel like i need someone to describe this to me. Why is it so hard to grasp? "Fast food" makes its living off of ease and price. You could argue taste, but many (most?) people feel that a good homecooked meal tastes a lot better than a McBurger - so i'm going to ignore taste.
We have isles and isles of meal replacements and frozen foods. All with the purpose of giving you food on the Go, and food on the quick.
We also have people constantly skipping meals, for reasons other than diet. I myself often skip breakfast or lunch because i'm busy, and eventually 9am turns into 10am turns into 11am turns into "Welp, i may as well just eat lunch".
So it seems blatantly obvious that meal speed, ease and even price is an issue for many, many, many people. So why is it so confusing to see a liquid form of this that aims to be an even healthier meal replacement than existing meal replacements?
We already have meal replacements. We have had them for ages. They're just incredibly unhealthy. .. I just guess i can't fathom why so many people (not you specifically) are so confused at Soylents existence.
>Do you use it as the occasional convenient meal replacement or how far do you go into replacing all real food?
I replace the majority of my meals with Soylent, but the point isn't to replace all meals...
>I suspect there is both, but what I am getting at is how much Soylent's long-term success depends on people seeing eating as a nuisance that should be optimized away versus something that should be savoured and enjoyed.
In my opinion, eating real food is an indulgence, not a nuisance. People who are very busy frequently cannot find the time to prepare nutritious, healthy meals from the bare ingredients, and purchasing ready-made food that is nutritious and healthy can be prohibitively expensive for some people.
Soylent is meant to replace a fast food burrito or a McDonalds breakfast sandwich, not a home-cooked steak dinner or a meal at a restaurant with friends and family. In my view, Soylent is not about minimizing the amount of time spent on preparing and eating food, it's about providing a convenient, nutritious, and (relatively, compared to fast food) cheap source of nutrition for those times that I don't have social obligations and I don't want to/don't have time to cook something for myself.
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 :)
>2) But it's marketed as complete food replacement, not as a simple nutritional supplement. Though I don't fancy the supplement industry either.
I'm not sure where you got this idea, the Soylent guide they send you when you get your first shipment even tells you that it's not necessary to go 100% Soylent. And, as far as I can tell, the website never says that you should eat only Soylent.
>3) I think it's stupid to consider this time as waste instead of time well spent.
Is the 10 minutes of making breakfast sausages really time well spent every day? That 10 minutes where I'm still somewhat sleepy, somewhat groggy, and pretty grumpy? I'd much rather have a serving of Soylent for breakfast, takes me 30 seconds to pour out a cup and spend an extra 10 minutes running in the morning, reading a newspaper, etc.
>4) Standards for food production are higher, I can touch it, I can see it, I can ask where it's from. Not sure where you have been buying your food. A banana I eat is not the product of a badly regulated industry, where hobbyists create mixtures of their liking.
As for the health of Soylent, you can find every ingredient and amount [1] for every iteration of it. While there's definitely less regulation in this industry, Soylent themselves have done a decent job of publishing the nutrition facts [2] and ingredients, is this that far removed from another traditional food? Can you really verify what pesticides were used in the production of that banana that you're eating?
Soylent exists because people don't want to cook. Don't want the time sliced out of their day. Don't care about variety and flavour. Would be happy to ignore food as an issue.
Telling them to cook really just amounts to ignoring their priorities.
"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 for people that are too busy to cook. Sadly, usually people who are busy working on a startup that will have failed within the next year, hopefully leaving them with time to think about life priorities.
I know this makes me sound excessively negative but food is so many things - not just the flavours, but the skill of cooking, the social experience of sharing a meal... Soylent just screams "misplaced priorities" at me.
So do I. I cooked food for a living for two years, and am planning a dinner party this weekend.
> Why in god's name would I eat powder to save myself the "hassle" of eating food? That's like promoting adoption as a method of avoiding the "hassle" of having sex.
That is a poor analogy. A better one is this:
Imagine you were forced by biology to have sex three times a day. Personally I'm a fan of sex, but anything would get old if you were forced to do it 3x/day, every day. ("Really? Now? I have to go to work, I don't have time for this.")
I love food, and soylent lets me enjoy food on my own terms.
> Soylent is being sold as something that you can eat for every meal. You can argue that most people aren't going to do that, but that's how Soylent are selling it.
I agree with you that they should not be selling it in that way.
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