What you say is wrong, though. We have a pretty good understanding of how food works and what our bodies need. How do you think hospitals feed comatose patients? They do it either via a feeding tube (liquid food), or through an IV (fluids containing glucose, salts, amino acids, lipids and micronutrients).
Here is what Elon Musk said about batteries when asked to give an example of his first-principles thinking:
Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”
With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”
It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”
It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”
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Thinking of batteries as being made of cobalt, nickel, aluminum etc. is EXACTLY THE SAME THING as thinking of food as being made of proteins, fats, carbs, etc. There isn't anything special about a piece of chicken - it's a combination of molecules, some of which are digestible by the human body, i.e. nutrients. Therefore, taking those nutrients and putting them into a meal replacement shake is perfectly fine. And incidentally, just like in Musk's example, treating the nutrients individually and assembling them into a shake results in much cheaper food.
https://www.soylent.com/product/powder/
That's pretty damn cheap, especially compared to the "average diet", which consists of eating out on a regular basis.
And Soylent is at least 40% more expensive than even buying freerange organic food to make your own meals.
Which is insane for the horrible quality it has.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/156416/americans-spend-151-week-f...
Soylent costs $1.93 per meal, which comes down to $5.79 per day. In other words, about a quarter of the average daily spend.
I'm also not sure where you came up with "horrible quality." Care to qualify - or better yet, quantify - that claim?
As for eating out, another survey in 2013 showed that 58% of Americans eat out at least once a week. That's way higher than you claim.
http://m.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/gener...
Which spends on average 225 bucks a month[1] on food. That comes down to 7.50€ a day.
Soylent, including shipping, is actually more expensive than this.
> As for eating out, another survey in 2013 showed that 58% of Americans eat out at least once a week. That's way higher than you claim.
The German statistics for that are below 13%.
> I'm also not sure where you came up with "horrible quality." Care to qualify - or better yet, quantify - that claim?
I’m comparing Soylent, a product with no taste, no texture, which is basically torture, with cheaper, higher quality meals, handmade, with organic ingredients.
Soylent can’t measure up in taste or variety even to public cafeteria food.
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Here is the hard truth: there is no science here on either side. There's a subjective judgement about how complete our knowledge is. I say nutritional science is still in the dark ages and therefore we don't have evidence to conclude a pile of molecules is the same as traditional food, Soylent CEO says nutritional science is "pretty good" and the only thing that matters about food are its measured consituents and there in the absence of evidence we should just assume that eating the exact same thing in liquid form at metered intervals should be perfectly healthy.
For you to suggest he is arguing from first principles is absolutely ridiculous, his argument is chock full of hubris and assumptions. It's very very wrong to hold that up as an example of sound scientific thinking.