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.
Cooking doesn't take long. At all. You can prep an entire week worth of meals in 1 hour. Refrigerate them, freeze them. We have thousands of years worth of food preparation and preservation technology. Cook on Sunday, eat until Saturday.
As for being expensive: again, it isn't. If cooking at home was expensive the world population would be 2 billion tops. Poor people cook at home because it's the only way they can survive. If a woman in Paraguay working two jobs can do it and feed her family, so can you.
> 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
You can fix yourself a sandwich using good products that is just as nutritious. Most people don't even need to eat so much. It's very easy to have good 1500-2000 kcal a day with regular food that you prepared quickly.
Soylent, to me, is simply about people who want to "hack" their bodies and be on the futurist side of things. There's nothing nutritiously advantageous about it, nor is it cheaper than cooking for yourself. But somehow people make the assumption that it's either that or eating the very worst food known to man (McDonald's or whatever). It isn't.
I have a feeling this is leaving a lot of things out. Maybe you can do the literal cooking in 1 hour. In order to be able to do that, how much time do you need to spend shopping for ingredients and transporting them, making sure they're still fresh and haven't gone bad, washing dishes and otherwise cleaning, and getting enough experience in cooking that you can actually do everything that fast.
And once you do all that, you have a week's worth of eating the same thing for every meal you do this for, and reheated and not as fresh as when you just made it. This is starting to sound not that much better than Soylent.
It's like that great Ars article on why many people don't cook. Maybe you or I can also install Linux and build an app from source. Could your grandmother do that, or would she be so hopelessly lost as to not even know where to start? That's what the idea of cooking is like for a lot of people. You aren't helping those people by insisting that it's possible to cook a week's worth of food in an hour, if you're already an experienced cook and know what ingredients to get, where to get them from, how long they stay good for, what to do if you can't find the ones you wanted, how to actually make everything in the most efficient way. It may take an hour to do the actual cooking, but it may also take a decade of experience in cooking to be able to do it in an hour and get a week's worth of food.
>Cooking doesn't take long. At all. You can prep an entire week worth of meals in 1 hour. Refrigerate them, freeze them.
If I don't know how to cook, then I have to spend a decent amount of time learning. I also have to learn what ingredients are worth buying, and how much to buy such that it doesn't go bad before I get around to using it. I also need a way to source and transport the food -- what if I don't have a car, and there's no grocery store within walking distance?
My point isn't that it would be impossible for me to cook my own food. My point is that it's more effort than you are letting on, especially for people who genuinely do not know how to cook because they never learned, and I feel that there is no impetus for me to learn now that I can just eat Soylent.
>Soylent, to me, is simply about people who want to "hack" their bodies and be on the futurist side of things.
You can believe what you want, but this doesn't describe how I view Soylent in the slightest. Soylent is convenient and is healthier and/or cheaper than other convenient (relative to cooking yourself) alternatives.
I'm sorry, but I'm getting really tired of reading people use this as a justification for soylent; I'm not saying there is a convenience to it, but phrasing it this way is kind of sad. It does not take a lot of ingredients, or time, to make a set of meals for the week.
Soylent is not for everyone, but imagine you are a college grad, who just got a good job that finally pays and you want to make sure you build a good career.
Many college grads also need to focus on friends, dating, finally trying to find good exercise to become healthy, everything while working 60+h a week.
Not everyone has their stuff figured out, many young professionals are struggling, due to little money, social anxiety, job troubles and many of them can't cook.
Now tell them they should cook something every couple of days and that they should learn cooling for that when they can't even get their problems straight by themselves right now.
Soylent is not for everyone, but it is a big help for young college grads who are barely scraping by and who don't know how to cook. It's better than McDonalds.
I'm aware of food deserts and the issue of meal costs for low-income families, but then advocate for soylent in that manner and how it can improve downstream.
I love food, but I don't care to make it. I used to make turkey or krakowska (Polish meat) sandwiches for lunch the next day, but I don't care enough about those things to go to the deli every week or two.
Once or twice a week I'll get lunch at a Halal truck or the deli next to my office, but this is much more expensive than just soylent. Bought lunch turns into my "big meal" and I end up having very little for dinner.
For dinner, I'll make some food but it's never elaborate. Very often, my dinners are peanut butter sandwiches. Sometimes I'll make some ramen and throw an egg in there. I'm also really into gourmet burgers so I go out a couple times a month for one.
I suppose the takeaway is that my lifestyle and eating habits didn't change for Soylent. It was just a better solution for me than what I was already doing. I prefer to have a cheap eating routine and Soylent helps prevent me from eating garbage food with basically zero effort. Not to mention that I'm borderline "chocoholic" who cut out buying sweets and the cacao flavor soylent really hits the spot.
When I first started I went 100%, then was one of the first people to get horribly sick of the bars, eventually quitting.
Now I eat Soylent as a replacement for meals in which I usually eat crap foods. If I was going to get a sausage mcmuffin from McDonalds, instead I eat a Cookies and Cream Soylent "shake." I think that Soylent's big play is in a healthy meal replacement that is scientifically formulated to be healthy. They have fought with that and being environmentally friendly, but I think it all comes back to being a healthy food in the end. The 3 people I know who eat it, do exactly the same as me. Most tried 50% for a bit, but eventually it is used as a convenient mildly healthy meal replacement when needed.
Concretely, working at Google, this means a weekday eating schedule of: Soylent breakfast, Google lunch, Google afternoon snack, either Google dinner or Soylent dinner, Soylent before-bed snack. So usually 3-5 bottles (1200-2000 kcals) per day. (Google breakfast ends too early for my night-owl schedule.)
On weekends, it depends on my social schedule. For a day with friends or the girlfriend, most meals will be eating out or delivery, with only 1-3 Soylents in between meals/before bed for extra calories. For a day home alone coding or gaming, I'll eat exclusively Soylent, around 6-10 bottles (2400-4000 kcals) per day depending on how much I can push myself for those gainz.
As someone who doesn't particularly crave the sensation of eating, this seems like maximal utility to me. I get the other benefits of eating (socialization) when I can, and when those aren't forthcoming, I just get a (relatively) cheap, nutritious, fast source of calories. (I do enjoy eating, just not overmuch.)
And it's been a godsend for weight-gain; I have a very hard time stuffing myself with normal food or shakes, but Soylent just goes right down.
This is a false dichotomy. I savor and enjoy food, but not all the food I eat. If every frozen burrito was replaced with Soylent, Soylent would be far more than a niche product, yet society would not have lost it's appreciation for the cultural, social, and culinary aspects of food.
Currently I have a Coffeeist for breakfast 2-3 times a week, and Soylent 2.0 as a work-lunch 4 days a week.
This current trend is coming in as a replacement for what had become some pretty bad eating habits. Stopping at McDonald's or a coffee shop for breakfast 2-3 times a week. Fast food or restaurants with coworkers several times a week, that sort of thing. The social aspect of lunch with coworkers is great, and I try to set aside at least a day in the week to do just that. But that habit is expensive and unhealthy.
I'm a pretty good cook. I tend to eat home-cooked dinners. I'm fine with preparing a big batch of food and freezing/refrigerating it to eat for many days. But I've never found a food that works for this that's great for breakfast or taking to work as a lunch.
Soylent fulfills my exact needs in this regard - and the other meal replacement options don't fit the macro-nutrient profile I strive for. All over this thread there's references to SlimFast (too much sugar in the regular, too few calories in Advanced), Ensure (too much sugar), or protein powders/shakes. I've tried literally all of these.
Protein powders are always a go-to of mine when I'm trying to bulk up. So is plenty of meats and vegetables.
In the end, I just totally have a use for Soylent - and so long as they're the only ones providing what I want in a form I enjoy, they'll continue to have me as a customer.
And yet every time there's a thread about Soylent people say that it's the only sole source of nutrition product. (Even though it isn't).
Why do you make a distinction between Soylent and "real" food? Its ingredients are not terribly different than other stuff I buy at the grocery store.
Do you use it as the occasional convenient meal replacement or how far do you go into replacing all real food?
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.
To me this is in the context of the larger question of personal utility maximisation. In the grand scheme of things, we have just started being able to really monitor and improve all aspects of our lives (in terms of time spent, convenience), and there is the question of how far we (most people/potential customers) ultimately want to go. It has become clear that there is the potential to optimise away friction/time spent in almost all human habits, but it is not yet clear if we really want to keep going down that route.
Will we keep optimizing things like meals just because we can until there are (conceivably) nutrient implants that make eating unnecessary, or will we sort of revert and see that maximising utility of every interaction does not lead to overall greater satisfaction?
In one world, Soylent could eventually dominate, in the other, it will remain a niche product because eating and food is too important too most, also culturally speaking.