I think it’s largely a consequence of not having a respect for food, and that mentality is not welcome in places like Japan, France, Italy, etc. where there is a deep cultural respect for food.
Do you think you could in theory have a discussion around this subject in a more mentally healthy way?
So if any of those weirdos want to, you know, eat a meal, then sure we could have that discussion over one, but this brings us to the second part of my comment, which is that the number of people who are lunatic enough to think that abandoning the eating of meals is a good idea, is vanishingly small. I've never met one in person.
The human race eats meals. The idea that you would optimize meals out of your life is more or less the province of like five antisocial, terminally online dudes. If these five guys decide to withdraw from society, be pariahs and wear hair shirts and all that well it's a free country but don't count me in
And stove less apartments are usually for people that eat out, not people that are trying to replace meals with shakes.
You're seeing the same thing with Soylent. My friends who didn't enjoy cooking much before Soylent just had lots of protein bars, TV dinners, and takeout. Now they do the same thing but also drink lots of Soylent. The meal replacement maximalists are loud online because that's the only space they can create consensus in. It's the same reason most loud, minority opinions are overrepresented online.
If you actually don't enjoy good food, then considering how important culinary arts have been to humans for all of recorded history, I'd say there's something wrong with you.
Nowadays, we also have the stress of a capitalist system to deal with, plus processed food we eat since our childhood, which for a lot of people "break" food for them, since they get used to the sugar rush, and normal food tasted "boring" or "bland".
What I mean is, I know plenty of well adjusted people who don't enjoy "good food", and that's OK.
The people who really have something wrong with them here are those who actually don't enjoy eating any food, and see it strictly as a biologically-necessary chore. Those are the people who seem to be attracted to Soylent. Yes, I really do think there's something wrong with these people.
Maybe if you're only eating Soylent but the vast majority are simply people who don't want to cook for one reason or another. I eat Huel a few times a week and I really like it. I also think it's pretty tasty but most of all it's convenient.
https://jakeseliger.com/2024/02/26/food-and-friends-part-i-f...
The argument is: cooking and eating has been a fundamental human activity for millennia, one that brings people together, transmits culture, language, etc. - and to optimize it away as a problem is to disregard something very important about being a human being.
When I eat I want to do it alone, which is something you highlighted in your original comment, but hearing you now it's all about to the social aspects. I'm not interested in that. If I want to socialize there are far better venues for me personally. I find eating out with other people a lose-lose. The food distracts me from the conversation but the conversation distracts me from the food, and all of a sudden it's gone before I even had the chance to reflect on the taste.
What one values, or does not value, in life is a fundamentally impractical subject. IMO you're asking for the impossible.
Chew carefully. Eat slowly. Sip water. Your digestive system will thank you for it.
1. History and evolution are ongoing things. They aren’t “done” and in the past. Today, right now, people use food as an important part of their culture, whether that be immigrant parents teaching their kids recipes from their home culture, a brother making food for his dying sibling (as in the link), or two friends having dinner.
And that’s only on the consumption side - not to mention the entire production industrial complex that employs millions of people globally to make and prepare food - and has done so for thousands of years. “Food gatherer and preparer" probably has a claim to being the oldest profession. Food is so ingrained in human history and culture it’s basically impossible to imagine civilization without it. Which was my point about it being a human thing.
2. Your mention of religion is actually helpful too, because I think a similar attitude is prevalent when discussing religious beliefs: “That was a historical thing and it doesn’t have much effect on anything today.”
Which is very much not the case; everything in the contemporary world has been shaped by religious beliefs, from the concept of the Self, individualism, the structure of political systems, democracy, universalism, on and on. Modernity is in no way a fresh beginning or clean slate in which the past doesn’t apply. That doesn’t mean you need to believe in XYZ religion today, but to deny that it has any contemporary relevance is just incorrect.
3. On the evolutionary front, the fact is that you evolved to eat in a group - the possibility of someone sitting alone eating a meal made by others basically didn’t exist until a century ago. So it formed who you are today, whether you like it or not.
4. Personally, I like to cook alone. It requires a focused approach that prevents you from scrolling TikTok or being distracted by innumerable other things. I also like to cook foods that remind me of my origins – for example, I like making pierogi, as I'm Polish and from the region where a certain type of pierogi are from. I make them using the rolling pin that was my late Polish grandma's, which also makes it a special experience. Food culture doesn't need to a social thing at all.
I don’t want to assume what your opinion is but it seems to be something like, "None of that matters, all that matters is that it tastes good, comes in ready-to-eat packaging, and can be eaten alone."
Which seems to me like the most depressing, reductive approach possible to something with so much cultural significance and history. Do you think the same thing about art or architecture? Literature? Films?
This being HN; I’m gonna guess you’re a technical person, and so you might gain more of an appreciation for food by watching some YouTube videos on chefs working. The skill and craftsmanship can be truly impressive.
diogenes (maybe buddha also) would disagree.
I don't watch movies and only occasionally read books. Nothing depressing about it whatsoever. In fact, I find your reasoning much more reductive. Imagine reducing life to such mundane things when it has so much more to offer.
One part of it is about directing attention. If you cook for yourself, you pay more attention to what you're putting into your body, and in learning how different flavors come together you learn intuitions about taste and aesthetics. In directing your attention like this, cooking can also serve as a kind of meditation / mindfulness practice.
In knowing how to cook, you become able to cook for others, which is a very common way for people to connect. If a loved one is sick, making soup for them can make them feel loved and cared for, just as it can make you feel good about putting in effort to help them feel better; especially when it comes to things that you just have to wait out, like flu, something like this is an excellent way of maintaining a connection. Conversely, in knowing how much effort it takes to make a good meal you become more appreciative of meals others make for you.
And finally, in cooking with someone else you learn about them and about yourself, about subtle differences that you might not have encountered otherwise. In solving a relatively easy, low-stakes problem together, you gain a sense of closeness without much risk or cost.
Overall, cooking is a practice centered on ideas that are underappreciated by people too engrossed in "hustle culture" etc, so it's important to have it as a tool in today's world. Of course, everything that it provides can be found elsewhere, but these are the reasons it's so deeply ingrained in human culture. I think you would also struggle to find other things that give you all of the above, and more that I didn't go into, for so little investment. It's not that cooking makes you human or something, but cooking does help you to connect with a lot of the deeper parts of yourself that do.
You don't understand that the preparation of food is important to being a human being? Both physiologically and socially? Across every culture on the planet?
>Someone trying to impose that on me is as unconvincing as a religious person trying to convert me. Give me practical arguments.
Nobody is imposing anything on you. Nobody cares to convince you. Go ahead and eat your meals alone.
I can't say why "you" care. That's part of the human element itself, the awareness and ability to reject what may have been thousands of years of evolution. e.g. that cooked meat tastes better to suggest that it's better to cook meat than eat it raw. That salting meat acts a preservative that happens to taste good, while rotting meat smells putrid.
Now as for why "I" care: Culture is identity, and identity is one of the key factors of sentience. Otherwise what makes us different from a beast or a robot?
Food is one of the oldest cultural values and can say a lot about personal, familial, and societal values at that place and time. It gives legacy and a sense of identity. An identity of optimized bland food with all nutrional substenance speaks to a world in ruin, a world with so little leisure that cooking is an extreme luxury, if not a thing of the past for that society.
Unless we're exploring the cosmos, that's not really a message I'd want to send of my time.
I’m not sure which is worse…
But cooking and eating is sort of an umbrella activity for all of those - everyone in the village/tribe/etc. has to eat, and usually they’d come together in one place to do so. Farming or searching for water don’t have the same centralizing social effect.
Pros:
- Feel fucking amazing. Not just digestive, but mind, energy, mood, all over feel great.
- Perfect poops. I'd poop the same ideal poop everyday at the same time. Two wipes and done.
- Cheap-ish. DIY made it much cheaper than commercial products. Allowed fine tuning too. Was something like $7/day.
- Never hungry. I had three shakes a day and was very satiating. I would go months without experiencing the feeling of hunger.
- Lots of water. Each shake had ~500ml of water in it, which made it much easier to stay hydrated.
- Maximized exercise gains. Was tailored for working out, so I didn't leave anything on the table due to nutritional deficits.
Cons:
- The taste and texture. Bad and worse. Wasn't excruciating to get down, but fell into the "It's not good but I'll still have it" camp.
- No variety. Basically the same thing all the time.
- Weak jaw. Your jaw muscles weaken quickly when not being used all the time. It's surprising to eat regular food and find your jaw aching and tired after half a sandwich.
- Planning. Kind of minor but I would need to plan a bit more to make sure I had shakes ready to go. They tasted best if they could sit for an hour or so after mixing, and where chilled.
I gave in eventually because regular food is just so enjoyable and because GNC stopped making the micro nutrient powder that was essential too it.
Your anecdote is interesting, but it seems biased towards, "everything was better and healthier, but I didn't get the joy of food".
I'm skeptical that you were getting optimal nutrition from some powder produced in a factory in Mexico. If everything about this was "better", I assume your original diet was terrible.
Diet and how you feel is highly variable and highly individual dependent. So the shake is excellent for creating a baseline since it is about as plain as you can get food to be.
> getting optimal nutrition
It's implied, otherwise what's the point of his post?
What is someone trying to achieve by drinking entire meals in a shake, if not optimal nutrition? What other benefits are there?
But generally it was carbs (corn flour), protein (whey isolate), fats (oil blend), micronutrient powder, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium. No sugar, gluten, dairy or soy.
For several years I made a daily "meal replacement" smoothie. It was all whole foods, except for whey protein powder, including various greens, spices, nuts, seeds, etc. I varied it a little, including or excluding certain ingredients over the week. It covered my breakfast and lunch every week day. It was simple to make in the morning before work, because it became a habit. I knew that every day I was getting a huge range of healthy, whole food ingredients (albeit pre-chewed). I would additionally have a snack or two at work, and in the evening I'd cook something, but I felt no pressure to ensure that meal was nutritious. I could have pasta, with a bit of garlic and butter for example - which I love, but isn't very nutritionally dense.
I was super, super healthy during this time. In very good shape.
I eventually stopped when we had our first child and I couldn't always use the blender at the appropriate time (sleeping child), and I since just got out of the habit.
It’s more that food, cooking, and eating (alone and with other people) seem like some of the most human things you can do. And so trying to optimize them out of existence feels wrong, a crime against culture. Long after the AIs have replaced entire classes of jobs and hobbies, cooking will still be around.