Soylent strikes me as a food not unlike MREs for the military or some of the dehydrated food that astronauts take up to space. That is, it could be the kind of nutrition that targets people in extreme circumstances, who might desperately need nutrition and energy but, because they're in the middle of a war zone, or in a space suit hovering above Earth, cannot get to it.
Currently the answer for me is subway on campus. It's not a good answer. The dilemma of "I need food right now" is severely understated in our current society, and probably a not insignificant causative of obesity (just about everything you can get quickly is terrible for you).
Pleasurable or not, Soylent does offer huge value in these situations simply in that it's a way to not die.
Just because it's cheap for people in the first world doesn't mean it's cheap for people in the third world. It's really important to remember that.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/nestles-infant-formula-scanda...
Also if they don't have access to clean water they have bigger problems than access to food.
And yes, they do have bigger problems. And yet access to food is still one of their problems. And giving them food that needs water added doesn't help them.
Furthermore, there's no reason Soylent can't be baked into a solid form and distributed/eaten that way.
It's not even a disruptive product--there have been similar meal replacement shakes available at Whole Foods for many years now, at similarly outrageous prices. Soylent's innovation is its marketing--especially in identifying and chasing its target market.
I live in a third world country and I buy from the market at really low prices. At first this $3 figure seemed off the mark, but upon further consideration it's true, you could live on that much for a while at market prices.
But it means a couple of bowls of rice and a small quantity of nutrient-unknown vegetables, with a few bites of some D-grade, fatty bony meat to live on less than $0.50 a day of food. Obviously, this is going to lead to malnourishment and an early death if they can't supplement with something else.
Lots of people keep small farm animals for an easy boost. A neighbor of mine had a 2-year old dog that started to eat her own chickens. After trying to correct the dog's behavior, it didn't work, so they killed the dog, cooked it and offered me some (I didn't bite, but it was considerate of them.)
Perspective.
Here is one manufacturer. http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands
Soylent needs clean water and currently costs a couple of hundred dollars per month.
20% of the world's population live on less than $1.25 per day. About one billion people lack access to clean water.
http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/index.htm...
The World Food Programme already has a range of products to use for develping nations. See their information, especially the pricing, here.
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition
http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
"Fights world hunger" is just another claim made by Soylent in apparent ignorance of what already exists.
The famous Ethiopian famine was the direct result of a war.
> It’s true that people sometimes eat meals that are mainly for sustenance (cheap frozen dinners, dried ramen, corn dogs) and other times we’re looking mostly for pleasure (72-hour short ribs). But I suspect that most of the time, for most meals, we want both sustenance and pleasure.
There you go. By the way, there are plenty of "third choices" as you state it, and have been for years. Soylent is nothing new, just YC startup noise.
It's possible that, for some people, Soylent (and similar products) is the only place where benefit exceeds cost. Perhaps the only foods you enjoy are extremely unhealthy. Or perhaps you don't have the time or money to buy and prepare fresh food for yourself.
Christ, it's as if he's willfully ignored everything; that's the POINT of Soylent, to give the option of a functional meal not for pleasure, so that you actually have a choice whether. Right now you don't, you have non-nutritious meals that don't take preparation time and are cheap, and nutritious meals that take vast amounts of time to prepare and/or are generally more expensive to acquire/prepare.
Now you have a third choice, complete nutrition at cost, minus the pleasure associated with the above two choices.