Has there ever been a legitimate attempt to create a mass market food compound that would contain all of a person’s daily nutrition needs? I haven’t seen ‘Soylent Green’ in a while and can’t recall what the purpose of the soylent versions was.
If someone did (assuming it hasn’t already been tried) would you eat it? Assuming it would be affordable enough for use world-wide, could it work?
I don’t eat the same thing every day but I think I could get used to it. I think I could get my need for variety elsewhere. It would solve a lot of issues.
If someone did, I wouldn’t eat it. I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read, vitamin supplements or artificially-created food is never as good as the real thing. For example, studies showed that people who ate foods high in beta carotene had lower cancer risk, but then a study of people who just took beta carotene supplements showed that they had a higher risk of cancer.
And that could be for plenty of reasons. Maybe the beta carotene needs to work with another nutrient to be most effective. Maybe it’s not the beta carotene at all, but some other ingredient in carrots, etc. that does the trick. It used to be that we only knew that food was made up of either carbs, fat or protein. Then vitamins & minerals were discovered and we thought that was the only thing we needed to pay attention to. But now people are still discovering more things in food, like phytochemicals, etc. Who knows what else food contains that we just haven’t discovered yet?
I think Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” is a great book on this topic.
To answer your question as posed by the title of your post… food is good because of its variety. If the human race ate the same thing everyday we would all be like automobiles who only need fuel. blekkgh
I know many people are passionate about food, especially on this board but I’d say there are a vast amount of people who don’t have the luxury of variety or don’t particularly see food as anything other than fuel (there are a few of the latter on this board also). If the food substitute in the OP tasted good enough I’d eat it every day, no problem.
