I'm sorry, but living off of a concoction for a few months and then claiming that it is better for you than X is crazy.

Look, Soylent may not kill you. It might actually be good for you. But until there have been multiple, years-long studies, this just isn't going to fly. Hell, get some actual nutritionists (PhDs) and doctors (MDs) on board and maybe you have a shot at convincing people.

Say what you want about Abbott, but they produce baby-formula. Baby-formula that has been around for decades, so they have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't.

So far we have people selling stuff telling us "it's okay".

I'd be really interested to see what the FDA has to say about Soylent. Have any of the Soylent team got legal advice?

It is just not sufficient to deem the product generally safe as a food substitute for everyone and/or for prolonged use.

Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal

Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.

that isn't really an argument

To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.

No, because "Big _____" is a Progressive catchphrase that is normally used to villify whatever their target is and rationalize taking away some freedom from the marketplace, wheras "mass produced" just means "mass produced."

Of course, some people might use "Big _____" in a useful way, but it's definitely like a code smell but for English.

This all sounds much more ideological to me than the comment to which you are objecting.

It is true that people will often use it as a lazy and fallacious way of vilifying but please note this is not exclusively a progressive phenomenon. Many of these groups lobby for things like govt subsidies, laws which restrict personal freedoms in ways that help their industry, etc...many conservatives aren't thrilled with such behavior.

In a brief non scientific survey of a few subreddits (r/libertarian, r/socialism, etc) phrases like "big oil" appear roughly comparably.

People on both ends of the political spectrum are (perhaps rightly) displeased with some of the actions of such groups and vilify them - they just disagree about what the root cause is and how to prevent such behavior.

The fallacy comes in when people use some particular actions of some players in an industry to invalidate everything that comes out of it. (such as implying that anything produced by a startup is ipso facto healthier than something produced by a large pharmaceutical company)

"Big Food" is a meaningless scare phrase. It literally means nothing in the context of the comment I was replying to. On the other hand, "mass produced" has a very clear and well-established general meaning that I'm pretty sure most HN readers understand (and one that can easily be found online or in a dictionary; when I try Googling "Big Food", I just get a lot of random sites that use it as a buzzword without ever bothering to define clearly what they're fighting against).

> Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.

The question was rhetorical, and the point was to illustrate how absurd the phrase "Big Food" is. My statement about mass produced food was intended to show that I'm not defending major corporations that produce unhealthy food, but pointing out a rhetorical and logical flaw in tlb's post.

> To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.

tlb didn't include any sourced information about Soylent (other than "it's not sweet", which means nothing about its sugar content), so that's irrelevant. My point, again, was that calling anything "Big Food" is a meaningless, bullshit scare tactic and I was calling it as a saw it.

Sure, they are going to want to differentiate from existing Big Food products (so do new Big Food products), but otherwise, the trust factors are pretty much the same.

Say what you will about "big food," but they will be around to be sued in 20 - 50 years. It means they have incentives to actually careful about what they to do people.

Just because I sell something doesn't make me exempt from the legal consequences of my actions prior. If I negligently claim that a product will make you healthier and it cripples you, then you can sue me regardless of whether I still own the product. Similarly, I could be prosecuted for dishonest advertising type offences (which aren't wiped clean simply by selling a business!).

You might be talking about a products liability type claim.

Only an incompetent acquirer would take liability for any latent claims in a target acquiree. Most likely they will get strong warranties from the seller about the existence of claims and rely on their own due diligence to ensure they aren't buying a product which is likely to cripple people in the future.

In 90% of cases the seller will retain liability for incidents which pre-date the sale of their business.

Actually, yes, selling your stake in the corporation that was the legally-responsible actor does mean that you are no longer at any financial risk for the actions of the corporation prior to you selling it, at least not in the main way that you were prior to selling it (that the consequences imposed on the corporation would reduce the value of your equity stake.)

If you manage to sell the corporate entity to a third party without making any warranties about latent claims, you will not be concerned about the corporation's liability. And the purchaser of that corporation is pretty foolish.

However you are still responsible for your own personal liability when you operated the company. Did you breach your directors' duties? Did you commit fraud? Did you sign a guarantee for the obligations of the corporation?

There are three ways to become personally liable off the top of my head. I'm sure there are several more.

However, the enumeration of those other avenues to liability is valuable.

The corporate veil may protect them from liabilities of the company (barring fraud/breach of directors' duties), however in this particular instance we have a founder, Rob Rhinehart, who seems to have done most of his marketing and made most of his claims personally. That is, Rob, not Soylent Nominees Ltd, made the statements.

Therefore, if he has breached laws, civil penalty provisions or acted negligently in doing so, he is personally liable.

Source: I recently acted for a home owner who sued her (incorporated) builder in negligence (for building a house which fell down). The company was unfortunately insolvent. Luckily, the founder/director of the company made a number of claims about the expertise and abilities of the building company on the company website (which he hosted personally). We sued the director personally.

I guess Soylent can say whatever they want in their marketing spiel. Some people may even believe it.