Soylent is a meal replacement drink primarily marketed to nerds and people with severe food issues. The premise is that you will save so much time during the day by not having to prepare your own meals. The kick starter was surprisingly successful, and I am trying to wrap my head around why people are so into this stuff:
-The market is full of meal replacement drinks. I’m sure if you know where to look, you can even get them fairly cheaply.So I’m puzzled about Soylent’s appeal, aside from being marketed to gullible nerds.
-The factory where this stuff is made is not up to QC standards for food preparation because the creator wanted to make it as cheap as possible. So there may well be ground up rat feces in your soylent shake.
-The creator is obsessed with saving water to the point of dehydrating himself frequently. He also puts dirty shirts in the freezer instead of washing them. Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with the product, but when a person talks about their own questionable personal hygiene habits, I feel it hurts the product’s credibility. It would be like if while discussing the iPod Steve Jobs told anecdotes about how he doesn’t feel the need to ever wipe his bottom and saves his urine in jars so the sewer company doesn’t steal it.
I think it is the marketing that is creating a buzz. The ironic name, appealing to workaholic techies , people who don’t know how to cook, or people so picky about food they can’t stand any kinds of flavors or textures .
I guess kick starter proves you do not need to make an innovative product to be successful. You just need to find a way to appeal to people with more money than sense. When I initially heard about it, I thought maybe it had some cool unique property, like eating a teaspoon full of goop and feeling sated for the entire day. Or doing something to help absorb other nutrients better/prevent the absorption of sugar/fat/etc to help diabetics And people losing weight. But no, its not any of those things, it is apparently a product for people allergic to flavor/texture.
I like to think of it as something we’d like to know we can do. Find out exactly what a human body needs to survive/thrive, and reproduce that. As a research program it is very interesting. As a way of life, less so.
I don’t think that’s quite right – I think it’s more for people who don’t care about flavor or texture (or maybe are extremely habit-based and want things uniform). I mean, I’ve heard soylent is a pretty unpleasant flavor and texture itself. But I’ve heard some people who really could care less. They take no pleasure in good food. It’s all just food. Some such people have nutrition issues, because they just eat what’s easy and than can result in things like way too much sodium or lack of certain vitamins and whatnot.
In theory, Soylent is mean to be a cheap, dead simple way to ensure you’re dosing yourself with a sorta healthy intake.
As I understand it, soylent is intended to be healthy enough to be the only thing you ever eat, while meal replacement shakes and stuff are not.
I like food too much to be very intrigued, but if they make a version 2 that’s actually pleasant to eat, I would consider it. I have a bad habit of eating unhealthy lunches because I’m lazy / careless, and having a simple pre-portioned thing would be beneficial. There’s options that exist, but many are prohibitively expensive on my budget.
I’ve used it. And while obviously it offends the OP to his very core, it’s not a scam.
It tastes like mild cake batter, and genuinely makes you feel full after drinking a meal’s worth.
I’m a nerd, but I can cook. I just like the idea that it is a cheap, nutritional meal replacement that’s fast to use. Pop it in a vacuum thermos, and you have a filling chilled drink/meal all day.
That said, I only used it when I had an office job. As a freelancer that has a variable schedule it’s not worth it to me. But if the choice is brown bagging it, paying $20+ dollars a day for lunch, or Soylent, I’d take the third any day.
It takes less than a minute to prepare, and it’s filling, it tastes okay, and it’s nutritious. Nothing more than that.
In addition to Lobohan’s testimonial, there are people who do not enjoy food. Which sounds weird, but it’s true. There are people for whom dealing with food is a chore, and they’d rather just get past the process. Soylent is great for those people.
There is also a set of people who (like me) enjoy food, but not having to eat it twice a day, every goddamn day of my life. Like almost everything else in life, food is more enjoyable after a suitable absence. But I do still need nutrition to live. A food which I can consume quickly and with a neutral flavor would make “real” meals all the better.
I remember the last thread about Soylent, and I think this is the wrong question. The appeal of Soylent is that it’s food. That’s about it. You need food to live, here’s some.
The question I would like to understand is, why is its very existence so offensive to so many people?
Hm. This is starting to make it sound interesting to me.
I have food/eating issues thanks to a couple of meds I was on at one point. I can be fine one minute, and the next I have to go with totally bland [oatmeal is my normal breakfast because of this - it usually hits in the mornings] I even tend to do the identical lunch most every day [a particular chopped salad, to be specific.] I may run the idea past my nutritionist and endo of doing this for breakfast and lunch most days. Is it possible to make it up as single serving instead of the entire day at once?
My grandfather was this kind of person. He had two meals he ate. One that he ate every day and one he ate at restaurants. He rarely varied from these two meals. He didn’t even need to cook. My grandmother would prepare two meals. His food and food for the rest of the family. He had no nutrition problems though. He was healthy as a horse until smoking got him at 79.
He would say food is fuel. That’s all it is. I never could get behind that one.
I don’t know enough about this specific product to say whether it’s any good, but I support the concept. Finding the cheapest, easiest way to provide a healthy diet is something worth doing. Even if it’s not as nice as “real” food, there are lots of places where that would be useful.
It isn’t cheaper than other meal replacement products already on the market, has a shorter shelf life, and is manufactured in a factory with much lower hygiene standards. Would this slurry pass FDA muster? What does a software engineer know about nutrition?
All the extravagant claims surrounding it. It is a somewhat nutritious paste designed by a man with no background in biology or nutrition. It is also manufactured under conditions that are not proven to be hygenic. Once we move beyond "this is somewhat better than you starving yourself or eating a diet of bacon grease on whitebread sandwiches,’ everything is hyperbole (to be charitable).