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[Enzo]

Are you saying Soylent is bad because we should all be robots and/or farmers? I don't quite follow your argument.

I'm responding to the sentiment that it's somehow cost-effective, or could help impoverished peoples, or is even ultimately sustainable. I don't mean literally strap solar panels into our bodies. I mean:

Food:
Seeds + Fertilizer / Compost / Topsoil + Sunlight = Food

Pure Maltodextrin:
Corn + Chemical Fertilizer (degraded soil) + Pesticides (to protect the monoculture from attracting pests) + Fossil Fuels (planting and harvesting) + Fossil Fuels (transporting to storage) + Fossil Fuels (tranporting to processing plant) + Fossil Fuels (processing into desired nutrient components) + Fossil Fuels (transporting to distributer / retailer) = Maltodextrin, processed food additive / nutrient slurry component.

Quick-edit: So I guess I am sort of saying we should all be farmers. Or rather, more people need to be involved in food production to deal with the food crisis and industrial nutrient slurry is the exact antithesis of that.

[Lectorog]

I see your point, and I think the creator does too. This Soylent is not the solution, but it may be a step toward it. Current food production does not support this on a large scale, but I think it could; and this does have significant benefits for things like sanitation, not just nutrition.

The food industry is so convoluted that it's not going back.

[Frumple]

Frumple: You can eat for much less per month that this would cost, but can you eat as healthily?

Maybe. I don't, but as I mentioned a vitamin supplement is freaking cheap, and a bit of diversifying (without increasing cost much, which is doable if entailing more effort and perhaps being less viable for higher food cost areas) with a supplement or two to cover whatever you're missing with that diet isn't going to increase the cost much. It'd be easier to give a straight answer if there was a genuine straight answer as to just how healthy this guy's stuff is. My general point was that most people (I've seen and heard about, which is an admittedly limited sample. I'd call it sufficiently representative for my society though.) seem to be utterly terrible at shopping for food, really

And Kin, problem with that list is that most of the things on the pure malodextrin side is going to be on the just food side as well, unless we have an absolutely massively freakish population redistribution (that I'd wager solid money is impossible to manage with our current population) go down. Topsoil alone is a limited resource, and less industrialized farming practices pretty much inevitably produce less per square yard or whathaveyou (which means that scaling back increases the amount of topsoil needed in order to sustain the same population). I'm actually in the air on the subject until I can find some solid numbers on it, but my current inkling is that heavily scaling back into subsistence farming would entail a great deal of deurbanization and population reduction that our societies probably aren't capable of surviving, and would probably entail a degree of loss of life to be viable that it's not a tenable solution to... anything, really. An inevitability, perhaps, but not a solution.

There's efficiencies to scale and automation/industrial techniques, as well, that just aren't possible with sweat of the back labor. 'Course, I doubt you're suggesting to stop industrial style farming entirely any time soon, but I'm personally still very cautious about suggesting we're capable of doing much of it without some incredibly serious drawbacks. Perhaps less drawbacks than letting things continue the course, of course, but likely enough to make widescale implementation a flat out impossibility, due to social backlash if nothing else (and there's probably some something else involved).

[SalmonGod]

Another thing to consider:  as we learn more about the body's pure nutrient requirements, we can set about finding the most efficient sources for those things.  Some of them might not require farming at all.  Or for example, we can start engineering that new vat-grown meat to maximize harvest of whatever it is meat has that we need.

[Enzo]

Alright, I know I'm derailing but food is important, damn it!

And Kin, problem with that list is that most of the things on the pure malodextrin side is going to be on the just food side as well, unless we have an absolutely massively freakish population redistribution (that I'd wager solid money is impossible to manage with our current population) go down. Topsoil alone is a limited resource, and less industrialized farming practices pretty much inevitably produce less per square yard or whathaveyou (which means that scaling back increases the amount of topsoil needed in order to sustain the same population). I'm actually in the air on the subject until I can find some solid numbers on it, but my current inkling is that heavily scaling back into subsistence farming would entail a great deal of deurbanization and population reduction that our societies probably aren't capable of surviving, and would probably entail a degree of loss of life to be viable that it's not a tenable solution to... anything, really. An inevitability, perhaps, but not a solution.

There's efficiencies to scale and automation/industrial techniques, as well, that just aren't possible with sweat of the back labor. 'Course, I doubt you're suggesting to stop industrial style farming entirely any time soon, but I'm personally still very cautious about suggesting we're capable of doing much of it without some incredibly serious drawbacks. Perhaps less drawbacks than letting things continue the course, of course, but likely enough to make widescale implementation a flat out impossibility, due to social backlash if nothing else (and there's probably some something else.involved).

Yeah, most of the time I'm a pessimist and I would tend to agree with you on most of that. However, reducing the monocultures, fossil fuel and chemical inputs in agriculture wouldn't actually make the land less productive in terms of yield-per-acre, it would just require much more manpower to operate. Eliminating monocultures would also make the industrial food chain impossibly convoluted to manage, requiring more local and seasonal distribution. This would require a complete structural overhaul likely requiring deurbanization that, while not technically impossible, I agree is not about to happen anytime soon. Personal responsibility is easier though. There is a lot of untapped, potentially fertile land for individuals to grow their own food outside of outright agriculture. Lawns are a waste of space. But of course, nobody has the time to grow tomatoes anymore

Another thing to consider:  as we learn more about the body's pure nutrient requirements, we can set about finding the most efficient sources for those things.  Some of them might not require farming at all.  Or for example, we can start engineering that new vat-grown meat to maximize harvest of whatever it is meat has that we need.

I'm pretty sure it's vitamin b12, which we can get from fermenting certain things. Like soy.

[SalmonGod]

Lawns are a waste of space. But of course, nobody has the time to grow tomatoes anymore

I would actually love to take up guerrilla gardening, and freeing up time and money might actually allow me to do that.

[frostshotgg]

I had a small vine of tomatoes growing. It died. I'm not cut out to care for plants.

[Scelly9]

Cool. Might as well keep an eye on this.

[Cthulhu]

When I said "tell us how it works" I meant for GlyphGryph to give us his impressions once he gets his supply.

And yeah, I don't see this solving any world problems.  Just because the nutrients aren't part of real food doesn't mean they're coming out of thin air.  It probably wouldn't be so cheap if everyone were drinking Soylent^TM Brand Nutrient Slurry.

[Lectorog]

Wouldn't it be fantastic if they mass-marketed this stuff under a brand name and skimped on some of the ingredients?

[alway]

So, I've reading up on some comments.
The "recipe" he posted is for a whole day apparently, he consumes it over the course of the day, so it's less than $5 for a whole day, he listed the cost as being about $154 a month, which is about 1/4 what the average American spends on food.

Really? The portion he posted is only about 1300 calories, so I'd imagine most people would need more.

Closer to 1800. Fat = 9 calories, the others are 4.

Which is also a big issue with the aforementioned Ramen-only diet. I tried something similar last year. The problem with Ramen is this: 1 serving of Ramen has 200 calories. You need like 4 packs a day to avoid losing weight. Ramen here is about $.75 a pack, or slightly less per for 6 packs. The biggest problem though isn't vitamins (aforementioned supplements fix that), but is taste. If you eat nothing but one thing for months at a time, particularly if it has a bland taste, you will come to hate the taste to an incredible degree. It's why I had to stop the ramen-only meals.

Another really low-cost food similar to Ramen are Animal Crackers. You can find 2 pound bags for about $4 here. And so, as a result, I tried using them as a staple food last year. It went pretty well; you can eat as much as you want without it being expensive.... but the problem was, again, taste. While I loved animal crackers when I started, after about a month and a half of eating very little but those, I just couldn't stand eating them any more. Even today, a year later, I don't want to eat them again, as their flavor now embodies the purest spirit of 'bland.'

I can see that also being an issue with this stuff. Without texture and taste variation, it will get old pretty quickly for most people. While all the other points seem to be in its favor, that one still needs work.

[Frumple]

Taste is fixable. Trust the Frumple on that one. Particularly combining a few different staples at one time (cooking a couple of days worth of food in one go) with limited seasoning (and while seasoning by weight tends toward pretty expensive, by meal it tends towards very much not so. Couple bucks worth of pepper or a bottle of soy sauce will last you a good couple months (60+ meals, or 3-5 cent per meal) and only be like two-three bucks or something) can work a whole array of wonders, as can either of those alone. It takes a very small amount of other things (again, notably more by weight but generally very little per meal) to do impressive (or at least sufficient) things to a pretty wide variety of staple foods.

I've got basically a rotation where I rotate between a couple of sorts of noodles (mac and cheese, ramen, occasional varying sorts of pasta), rice, and potatoes as my meal base, and then whatever other stuff I've got on hand (usually cheese, occasionally meat, a few different sorts of sauces and seasonings). It is a little samey at times, but there's enough variation and enough unique tastes among the combinations to keep me sane with only the occasional more luxurious food indulgence. Most expensive non-luxury (not meat, not cheese, no seasoning) I eat is something like 12 cent to the unit of measurement (usually either ounce or gram), and most is less. The luxury (/perishable) stuff runs up to about 30 cent per unit, but gets spread out over a couple weeks (or a couple months) of meals which, again, makes a by day influence of maybe twenty, thirty cent/meal at the high end. And I don't exactly optimize, t'be honest. Someone actually working at it, and with a more varied diet, could do a bit better. Minimalist cooking like that really isn't difficult at all, you just have to muck around a bit to find out what suits your tastes.

And dude, if ramen's running you at like 75 cent a pack, we could probably set something up so I could buy it in bulk and ship it to you for an overall reduced price That's like. 600-700% increase over what I'm getting it at. Get enough of it together and the shipping cost should be mitigated.

... alternately just find whatever that's in your area that's cheaper. Rice is cheaper than ramen (particularly the very large bags) where I'm at for some ungodly reason, iirc, as an example.

[Karlito]

So, I've reading up on some comments.
The "recipe" he posted is for a whole day apparently, he consumes it over the course of the day, so it's less than $5 for a whole day, he listed the cost as being about $154 a month, which is about 1/4 what the average American spends on food.

Really? The portion he posted is only about 1300 calories, so I'd imagine most people would need more.

Closer to 1800. Fat = 9 calories, the others are 4.

Bluh, I knew that. I guess even 15 straight years of math classes can't stop me from punching something into a calculator incorrectly.

[Cthulhu]

On the taste front, I'm not seeing this as a food replacement.  My favorite quote was that food was something he enjoyed like a trip to the movies, but he doesn't go to the movies three times a day.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There shouldn't be anything wrong with Soylent on the taste front at all. What you perceive as tasting good is an evolutionary response to convince you to pursue what you need. This is also why we don't eat trees even though they are full of energy, because we (almost) can't digest cellulose so it tastes bad to us.

Taste change has always been interesting to me because of how robust it is in convincing us to eat whatever we need, even though it isn't a conscious process. Of course, it can also go completely haywire, as most pregnant women and pica sufferers know.