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[10ebbor10]

Those extraordinarily cheap mixtures usually aren't technically healthy though.

Basically, what's happening here is that someone is trying to optimize food. To get exactly what you need, with the least effort and expense.

[GavJ]

Also, I see no logic in the concept of this helping world hunger. Maltodextrin, for instance, is synthesized from... starch which comes from... farms.

Taking existing calories and processing them a bunch (which costs money) and shuffling them around and repackaging them is not saving anybody's life from dying of hunger. It might serve some niche desire for an on the go, WYSIWYG, complete meal option, or whatever, but starving Ethipians don't need "on the go, convenient meal options." They just need meals.

[GavJ]

Those extraordinarily cheap mixtures usually aren't technically healthy though.

Basically, what's happening here is that someone is trying to optimize food. To get exactly what you need, with the least effort and expense.

What on earth is unhealthy about lentil noodle veggie chicken stir fry?

If you're literally eating it every day, add on a vitamin supplement to be safe, but that's also dirt cheap (my $10 bottle lasts about a year) and is an existing and proven product that doesn't need reinventing. It also has massively longer shelf life.

[frostshotgg]

The idea behind it is a (relatively) low cost, low effort, and most importantly nutritionally complete.

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: "starving Ethipians[sic]" aren't dying of hunger. They're dying of malnutrition. There's a reason every time on television ads you see "starving" African kids with pot bellies, and it's certainly not that the human body decides to expand when lacking food. It's that they don't get a balanced diet.

[10ebbor10]

Yup, the lentil noodle chicken thingy is missing something, and while it's not problematic for the human body it's suboptimal.

[Bauglir]

1) Only if your gut microorganisms aren't already healthy. So far, this stuff seems to maintain healthy gut flora just fine, but I agree that if things get upset it wouldn't be a bad idea to throw in some yogurt or something for a week or two. In any case, if your diet is composed entirely of cooked food like your suggestions, you aren't exactly getting much in the way of microorganisms anyway.

2) I've tried that. Much less convenient - mixing up a two-week batch of the dry ingredients for this takes about 30 minutes, tops. Assembling that with water and everything else takes about 5, including blending time. And I'm not terrifically well-practiced. Cooking two weeks' worth of food takes hours and takes more than 5 minutes to thaw, much less whatever else goes into preparation. And a bottle of this stuff is much more portable, and more convenient if I'm doing other things at the same time as eating.

Also, yes, it's certainly not helpful for world hunger at this stage. Once it hits mass-production, though, it's a much more compact shipping strategy, which is tremendously important. Remember, we already produce plenty of food for everyone on the planet - that's not the problem. It's distribution. It's also simple to assemble at the receiving end, which helps with any kind of efficiency.

This isn't even a huge reinvention, if that's what bothers you. Think of it as fortified gruel.

[GavJ]

The idea behind it is a (relatively) low cost, low effort, and most importantly nutritionally complete.

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: "starving Ethipians[sic]" aren't dying of hunger. They're dying of malnutrition. There's a reason every time on television ads you see "starving" African kids with pot bellies, and it's certainly not that the human body decides to expand when lacking food. It's that they don't get a balanced diet.

I apologize for choosing the unfortunate example of maltodextrin. But the same argument applies to almost all of his ingredients.
They aren't synthesized from rocks and air. They are synthesized from foods. Grown on farms.

Vitamin C, for instance, is made from fermenting glucose, which is derived from... our old friend again, starch.




So yeah, soylent might give Ethiopians better nutrition, but so would simply taking all those starch crops used to synthesize vitamins for soylent and growing stuff with some damn vitamins in it instead and feeding it to them directly.

The fact that this isn't being done is a policy and strategy issue, not a technology one.

it's a much more compact shipping strategy, which is tremendously important.

Shipping food in the first place being one of the policy issues causing problems... Grow local food with local resistances, and they are self sufficient. Half these countries did that before places like Monsanto and their predecessors came in, promised them wondercrops, which then occasionally massively all die off when locally prevalent disasters strike they aren't resistant to (unlike the original crops), and you get a famine. And that's not getting into predatory seed policies and fertilizer rackets.

Modern farming PRACTICES and EQUIPMENT used to whatever extent possible while still supporting indigenous crops grown locally = no potbellied children, efficiently. And continuing lack of potbellied children even when America and Germany and France stops caring or sending ships for any reason.

[Skyrunner]

So you're saying that since this thing isn't a panacea, we shouldn't put money into it even if it's useful in other areas...?

[Bauglir]

Okay, so just to be clear, we've established that the only problem here is that it's an inefficient way to get food? You have no other objections? I don't want to engage in this argument and then suddenly find myself talking about aesthetics or something, so we're strictly limiting ourselves to A) Sustainability and B) Impact on World Hunger?

[GavJ]

Well other things are certainly an issue. Aesthetics -- I don't care if you in your American air conditioned apartment feel like eating fortified gruel if you so choose. That's not an issue. But aesthetics may be an issue when you're essentially OBLIGATING whole nations of people to always eat this stuff, which may be culturally abhorrent to them compared to recognizable foods, or who knows?

But although I acknowledge there are various other issues, yes, I'm happy to focus on sustainability and world hunger from a logistical standpoint alone for now as probably a more focused discussion.  In that vein:

1) How much space does it take up for a day's food?
2) Is it actually PURELY powdered prior to mixing with water? The article was unclear on this and the blog portions I read also unclear. I thought some of the ingredients were liquids themselves, making it have not super long shelf life even before being mixed (a week or two wouldn't be long enough at all to ship worldwide, for instance. More like a year+ would be needed with customs delays and storage and blah blah)
3) If it is all powder, is the powder temperature stable over time or would it need refrigeration? Is it hydroscopic powder such that it would need to be carefully guarded against moisture with vacuum packing etc. versus just dumping it in a silo?
4) How much does it actually cost for a day when ingredients are bought in bulk? (for you, in the developed world, I mean. Such that we can compare to other alternatives in the developed world, and presumably the RATIOS would still hold for world aid.)
5) You would want to also get an idea of how much farmland would be required for a day's soylent, versus conventional alternatives, for all its raw ingredients? It might be similar. It might be way more due to processing step needs. This sounds very difficult to determine, but is pretty relevant.

So you're saying that since this thing isn't a panacea, we shouldn't put money into it even if it's useful in other areas...?

No, small helping measures can be okay. But shipping food can actually CONTRIBUTE to a continuing problem. It encourages no sustainable agriculture because it's easier to just rely on aid. And it contributes to unemployment and other social ills by side effect, etc. This might be getting a little off track from a "only logistics discussion" so we don't have to get into all that if you don't want, but if not, realize that it may still undermine the point of the entire thought experiment all the same.

Though regardless, depending on how logistically miraculous it is, unemployment might still be temporarily worth it if we can feed a whole nation on one freighter of dirt cheap stuff for a year, but I'm very much doubting that soylent actually would be logistically miraculous (see above concerns, for starters).

[Bauglir]

Well, I guess the main thing I'd say in response to all that is that I don't think it ought to be mandatory for anyone. There is no secret cabal planning to replace the world's food supply with Soylent. As a matter of fact, very few people are really touting it as a miracle cure for world hunger, and there'd be a lot of work to be done on that front if it's ever going to get there. It's certainly not a cost-effective strategy right now, nor is it supposed to be. Meanwhile, there are other products you may want to tackle in the vein of fighting anti-starvation foods. Which, for some reason, seems like something you're intent on doing.

1) A couple of cups of powder, pre-reconstitution.
2) It has liquid ingredients, mostly oil, that are added at the time of reconstitution to the dry powder. They amount to a couple of tablespoons per day.
3) It's as stable as flour. It's about as hygroscopic, in my experience. It would not be stable in a silo - more likely you'd pack together sealed cubic packages inside crates, stored in a warehouse.
4) About 4 bucks a day, taking into account my experimentation with flavoring and such. Far from optimal, but still on the cheaper side of a nutritious diet in a Western country. EDIT: Keep in mind, economy of scale means it would be much better in the context we're talking about.
5) Less than we need for the meat industry, certainly, if you want to get into infrastructure.

All that said, I feel like this whole argument is based on a really dishonest premise. Soylent isn't supposed to be a world hunger remedy. And it's certainly sustainable compared to a lot of more natural food industries, such as meat. There's no problem in this vein that Soylent has that isn't also shared with traditional food industries. Certainly, there's no reason you couldn't prepare the ingredients for Soylent as locally as you could farm anything else, so that's kind of a big non-sequitur. When you came into the thread, you were wondering why people would consume this stuff instead of other foods, and for almost all of us, this has nothing to do with that.

Maybe there are problems that Soylent doesn't solve. But you're acting as though it creates those problems, when all we have is a product that isn't something it was never supposed to be.

[GavJ]

Well, I guess the main thing I'd say in response to all that is that I don't think it ought to be mandatory for anyone.

Not mandatory by law. Mandatory by nature of "I'm in a country that has become entirely dependent on foreign aid for food, and soylent is the only food being shipped in"

But anyway, I was just going on the suggestions of world hunger from the original article. The inventor did sort of hint at that. But since you're much more integrated into the whole thing than I am, obviously, if that's not something the community has persisted about, then nevermind. Don't need to argue about it if it's not a thing that's touted much.

Thanks for the materials stats, too.

[SalmonGod]

Also, I'm pretty sure Rob has said the oil solution is only packaged separately so people can treat it as optional, since it's not kosher and a lot of feedback from people said they'd rather get that part of the formula from other sources.  He seemed to be implying that it could be worked out to have no separate liquid component, other than the water you're expected to add yourself, that is.

Also, he's noted several times how much of the formula was designed based on the efficiency of the crop it's processed from, and I know he's stated that at least a couple of the micronutrients are obtained completely independent of agriculture.

Well, I guess the main thing I'd say in response to all that is that I don't think it ought to be mandatory for anyone.

Not mandatory by law. Mandatory by nature of "I'm in a country that has become entirely dependent on foreign aid for food, and soylent is the only food being shipped in"

And how does that compare to the sort of food provided by foreign aid programs, currently?  I think I've read before that the staple of those things is nutrient-dense biscuits.  Regardless, I doubt it's anything more culturally lavish than Soylent.

[forsaken1111]

Christ, GavJ just because toady locked your other thread doesn't mean you need to start shit here.

[GavJ]

Christ, GavJ just because toady locked your other thread doesn't mean you need to start shit here.

emphasis added:

Don't need to argue about it if it's not a thing that's touted much.