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[Sheb]

Do you feel the same about watching a movie for example?

[GlyphGryph]

Only one more shipment of stuff and I'm ready to begin! Whee. This week!

[SalmonGod]

Do you feel the same about watching a movie for example?

Learning new things, challenging myself in any fashion, social experiences, and art are all things I don't feel that way about.  Those are all experiences that build on each other and have meaning outside of the time in which they're taking place.  A good movie will give me stuff to mentally and emotionally process for a long time.  If it shows me something I've never seen or thought about before, that's an experience that's meaningful for the rest of my life.  These are the things I strive to spend as much of my time doing as possible, which eating just gets in the way of, no matter how temporarily pleasurable.  I'd give up a week of good food for a good book.

[Pnx]

And of course, $7.66 a day is still less than the typical American spends on food.

Shenanigans. My girlfriend and I have some pretty badass metabolisms and we spend about $6.67/day on food together by my generous calculation.

It is definitely possible to eat on less, but A) Not everyone has access to food cheap enough to allow them to eat on less B) It can be pretty difficult to manage a decently nutritious diet on less, and C) Believe it or not, most Americans really do spend at least eight to nine dollars on food, and that's just home food, many people actually wind up spending up to $20 a day on food when they've been eating out at restaurants and such.

There's also issues with dietary constraints raising the cost of food, and the issues with how healthy is your diet at $6 a day?

[Frumple]

We've already done this at least once in the thread

You can eat pretty damn healthy, at least if you're in an area roughly comparable to where I'm at, for somewhere around 4-5 USD a day (and that's at three or two meals, really.). I actually usually eat for less, but even with varying supplements my diet's fairly unbalanced. That said, I price pretty much everything when I'm shopping and have a fairly comfortable handle on prices, and if I could stomach it I could swap tracks to something solid on the nutrition front with only a minor upward fluctuation to cost. It is a bit more in other areas, but not enough to go beyond 6-7 USD a day (price comparison between my area and Tampa was about a 150% difference or thereabouts. I'd eat for about 5-6 USD a day on the outside, including the cost of supplements.) from what I've seen. Twenty bucks a day is vaguely insane t'me, but yeah, if you're eating out that's fairly trivial to hit. Restaurants price gouge like a something or other, in almost all cases.

And it becomes especially true if you can manage a small cost efficient garden, hum. Said it before and say it again... a lot of folks in the states seem to have no bleeding idea how to shop for food.

[Grakelin]

I still can't relate     Even if I really, really enjoyed that chicken... it would be over in 20 minutes at most.  Twenty minutes of a physical sensation that has no meaningful context beyond the sensation for its own sake cannot define an entire night, or even have any bearing on anything beyond that specific chunk of time.

I don't know what you're talking about, sex is great.

[DWC]

The NPR article wasn't what I heard on the radio, but the sentiment was basically the same.

Yeah, people do seem unusually hostile to the idea of this kind of food. I think 'soylent' would be good for athletes and other people who view food as fuel, rather then some crucial pleasure. I'd probably live off this stuff too if it was available and affordable, I eat the same crap everyday anyways. It costs 80$/ mo to feed myself and that includes coffee. I love coffee.

Calling it 'soylent' seems like a bad marketing choice though. Even though it resembles the intent and function of the soylent products in the books and movies, nobody is going to take it seriously using the dystopian novel as a reference. Also, soylent doesn't actually have any soy or lentils in it either, so, should be called something else.

The concept isn't exactly new either. I know there are maritime emergency rations that is something like this guy's soylent powder, but compressed into briquettes and flavored and intended to have indefinite shelf lives. It

[Jimmy]

I still can't relate     Even if I really, really enjoyed that chicken... it would be over in 20 minutes at most.  Twenty minutes of a physical sensation that has no meaningful context beyond the sensation for its own sake cannot define an entire night, or even have any bearing on anything beyond that specific chunk of time.

I don't know what you're talking about, sex is great.

Some people don't like sex.

This guy doesn't like eating.

Same thing, different wrapper.

[Frumple]

I still can't relate     Even if I really, really enjoyed that chicken... it would be over in 20 minutes at most.  Twenty minutes of a physical sensation that has no meaningful context beyond the sensation for its own sake cannot define an entire night, or even have any bearing on anything beyond that specific chunk of time.

I don't know what you're talking about, sex is great.

Sex generally has meaningful context beyond the sensation for its own sake

I'd definitely say the acts surrounding food can, too, though, even if the act of eating it doesn't to the same degree. Preparing food for family and friends, the mechanical aspects around the acquisition and creation of meals, appreciation of the skills behind the cooking, the social aspects that can surround the necessary time-off-for-eating... those can provide meaning to the act beyond the act itself. I can definitely see where SG's coming from re: eating itself not lasting much beyond the act of eating, but I also definitely enjoy cooking for myself and for others, and the process behind acquiring and preparing the food. I like to cook, and power shopping is actually kind of enthralling.

Lot of people have trouble really finding the time for a lot of that these days, though, and the issues surrounding preparing healthy (and, perhaps, ethical) meals can be pretty daunting. A desire for something less troublesome is... understandable.

[Jimmy]

I still think sex is a good metaphor here. It's a social activity as much as it is a reproductive act, one of the most core binding activities between two people. Sharing a meal with someone is also a meaningful social activity, one that is generally recommended by psychologists for family bonding.

What we have here in soylent is I guess the equivalent of masturbation. Still a reasonable substitute, but lacking the social bonding inherent in the involvement of others in the act.

[frostshotgg]

Soylent really doesn't fill the role of masturbation at all, unless you consider sexual gratification the important function of sex. Sex is a great comparison as far as the attachments people have to eating; people eat with other people and get social benefits in addition to fueling the body, and they have sex to bond closely and enjoy it as much as to reproduce. The analogy falls apart when you throw Soylent into the mix, because it's the equivalent of reproducing without the social aspect, so it would be something like donating to a sperm bank if it worked like blood banks did.

[SalmonGod]

Sharing a meal with someone is also a meaningful social activity, one that is generally recommended by psychologists for family bonding.

I've never understood this.  Eating as a social activity is one of the most impractical human behaviors.  You're stuffing your mouth.  What kind of social bonding is supposed to take place when you have stuff in your mouth?

For me the analogy doesn't work because eating isn't a social activity.  It's true that people tend to engage in social behavior while eating, but the eating itself isn't social.  It's really an obstacle.

[Mech#4]

Sharing a meal with someone is also a meaningful social activity, one that is generally recommended by psychologists for family bonding.

I've never understood this.  Eating as a social activity is one of the most impractical human behaviors.  You're stuffing your mouth.  What kind of social bonding is supposed to take place when you have stuff in your mouth?

It's the idea that sharing food with others fosters a greater sense of trust between each other. The idea of sharing food with a visitor, sitting down together and acting as a host and presenting your food for them is quite common in those cultures that are thought of as being very hospitable, in places such as Italy, Greece and so on.

[SalmonGod]

Hospitality gesture does make sense to me, but that only explains one specific situation.

[Sheb]

Eating is a social activity, because as a culture we decided it was. That's why we have business lunch, and inviting friends over usually mean having diner with them. There's no real explanation behind that.