There is no Vitamin C for starters, so you will get scurvy, and only trace amounts of Vitamin K and niacin (note that this is for raw eggs) and low but maybe adequate amounts of several other nutrients (conversely, cholesterol is a problem, never mind what the AHA says about eggs, that is just one a day or so).
Except you could increase the calorie amounts just by adding sugar or something.
Except not actually.
Sugar is around 4 calories per gramme - it takes quite a lot of sugar - Neo’s little tobacco-tin dish would only be worth maybe 500 calories if it was stacked to the brim with solid sugar - and obviously, it isn’t - it’s a quarter full of watery goop.
(Unless you were referring to me bulking out my calorie intake with sugar, which, in the context, probably isn’t a great idea)
You could also use oil instead of water to get 9 Cal/gram, in which case the wateriness would indicate a high calorie content… but I think the portions shown in the movie are still too meager to provide enough calories unless they’re eating lots of little meals throughout the day.
You could, but oily is not watery - and that stuff was watery.
I am always puzzled as to why people assume there would only be one flavorless variant of People Kibble. We have thousands of food scientists standing at the ready to make Vanillaberry Kibble, Beefy Vegetable Kibble, Apple Cinnamon Kibble, Bleu Cheese and Sriracha Kibble, Parmesan Marinara Kibble, and Choco-caramel Bourbon Kibble. Not to mention Buttered Toast and Marmite kibble (rich with B vitamins)!
I love food and it’s amazing variety, but I still believe there is a market for this. The fact that the these sorts of threads appear regularly here is proof enough.
And the continual absence of such a product on the supermarket shelves suggests otherwise.
I don’t think a single all-nutrient food could be made to taste really good. Some of the essential components of our diet have distinctive flavours - and the superimposition of all those flavours at once is liable to be unpleasant or at least not amenable to masking with other flavours like vanilla-berry. It would be hard to make it not come out tasting like pet food.
And if we solve this by separating out groups of nutritional components into differently flavoured offerings, we didn’t actually invent anything. That’s just called ‘food’
bump
I made prison loaf for ironic hipster Thanksgiving yesterday. It’s not near as bad as it’s made out to be. It’s just mushy and overly sweet. I wouldn’t bother to make any again, but I would eat it if I was hungry and it was premade.
Has anyone else here had it?
edit: After our real Thanksgiving dinner, of course.
I’m going to stick with Chocolate Chip Cookies here.
WHAT recipe did you use?
I’m always puzzled that of all the questions that arise over and over on the Dope, this one causes people to wonder why anyone would want to know that. This is the Straight Dope. I’m here because I want to know everything! I have absolutely no desire to eat human ejaculate either, but that didn’t stop Cecil from answering how many calories it contains and a whole thread to arise on whether it could be pan fired (which I believe was answered empirically by a straight male!)
Besides, people always respond by saying that any nutritionally complete kibble would taste terrible, but they never provide empirical evidence, just an argument that it would surely have to. Out of curiosity if nothing else, I’d like to know what a single nutritionally complete food would taste like and how palatable it could be made. (Obviously it could be made to taste terrible, like nutraloaf or Purina Monkey Chow, but could it be made tasty?) So far, apart from the dubious commercial claims of the Dilberito (which arguably isn’t a single food anyway), no one has been able to answer this question. Is curiosity on this matter really hard to fathom?
Likewise, there is a second, related question that always comes up in these threads, and many others as well: what single food item could humans survive the longest on, and if no single item would sustain a person, what is the smallest number of items someone could live off of (and what would they be)? Again, I’ve seen many suggestions , but no definitive answer. Lots of people wonder about this, and it has nothing to do with dietary planning. Aren’t you even the least bit curious what the answer is? If not, are you sure you’re on the right message board?
And finally, there’s a third question implicit in the others, that is never answered: how well does science actually understand human nutritional requirements? Again, I don’t see how this isn’t a fascinating question! Obviously we know a lot about the basic requirements, but I see various claims bandied about these threads about how complete the USDA minimum daily requirements, for example, are, but very little in support. Those requirements are obviously formulated with the idea of providing guidance in planning an ordinary, varied diet, and I don’t know if they are even intended to list every nutrient necessary, much less whether they in fact do so. I would love to know whether anyone has actually lived for a long time on a diet that provides every known necessary nutrient and and nothing else and what the effect would be. Do we even know? Since every natural food contains far more chemical compounds that those on the nutrition label, I imagine it would be very hard to develop a diet that actually contained only those substances identified as necessary in order to test whether the list is actually complete, and of course it would be even more difficult (and unethical) to keep a large sample of humans on such a diet for life to identify any problems. Someone must know what the actual state of our knowledge on this subject is, but I’ve never been able to find out because whenever it’s asked the thread is filled with cries of, “Just eat a varied diet, you fool!” Which is perfectly good advice, but does nothing to answer the question.
I think there are people for whom food, eating (and especially preparing food) is a chore they wish they could do away with (although looking around at waistlines, I don’t think there are many of these people).
I guess for such individuals, a batchelor chow/human kibble type product would seem to be a solution, however, in reality, I think it’s more likely an additional problem, because of the challenge of making it palatable, especially as it would be a bowl of kibble, rather than a pill.
Well there’s your problem right there, buddy. First of all, you’re consuming this stuff in mililitres and grams. Of COURSE you’re not getting what you need. Try eating quarts and cups of the stuff; I guarantee it’s way more satisfying.
Secondly, you’ve added an extraneous “h” into your yogurt which is known to interfere with nutrient absorption and can sometimes get stuck in your esophagus causing discomfort.
Cheerfully yours,
F.I.
Yeah, but he says he can’t eat more because it is too filling, regardless of how many calories it actually contains. I suspect that a thinner liquid would be easier to get enough calories from; after all, you can drink a can of soda or glass of milk and it passes right through you. You’d need to drink about a gallon of either (or an equivalent nutrient drink) to get enough calories, but you don’t have to drink it all at once; try drinking throughout the day (that doesn’t seem like a problem; of course, if it is a balanced nutrient drink).
The one from the Onion AV Club, which got it from this Illinois court case. I judged it to be the easiest one to make.
After the prison loaf has completed its transit through my digestive tract, I have another complaint, but there’s the confounding variable that I also had the usual enormous Thanksgiving dinner about eight hours before. And we weren’t exactly using water to wash it down.
Here is a nutritional analysis of the ingredients. I made that to confirm my suspicion: one reason they find it so unappealing is they’re being fed three of the damn things every day. That’s 3 x 1,255 Calories! As I was eating half of the loaf (I split it with a friend), I thought, this isn’t that bad, but there’s no way I could eat three of these a day, it’s just too much food.
I think even two is pushing it for those of us in the nonincarcerated population. Just one plus the eating with friends, snacks, beverages, and eating out that an average person does should be fine. If you were going to go all the way and try to survive solely off prison loaf you would want two a day.
You could easily make three loaves for $10. ~$3 a meal is okay price-wise if you consider you’re getting a “complete” “nutritional” “package”. Most cheap meals are just carbs carbs carbs with some spices sprinkled on top.
After the first bite we cheated and put Tony Chachere’s on it, but that was just us, it wasn’t necessary to make it go down.
NutritionData often shows ridiculous serving sizes though (although you can often select a smaller portion); is anybody really going to eat 738 grams (1.6 pounds) of anything at once? Three a day also does sound like too much; that is 3,765 calories, probably double what a prisoner needs and more than what most people, even very active, need.
Thank you for expressing some of my thoughts - and more eloquently than I could.
Those waistlines (who am I kidding, my waistline) is often an indication wishing for the preparing part of the chore to go away. It does by eating junk food.
I would love to have People Kibble. And I love food. I don’t need super duper fancy food at every meal, though. I bet it would help with being healthy and weight loss, too. If I could have People Kibble for even two meals a day and then have a delicious dnner, I’d be very happy.
Not like pre-prepared food has to be unhealthy and full of calories though, only because people like to eat junk food because it tastes good (and even then, you can actually lose weight on junk food, since again, it is all calories in/calories out). By contrast, eating three of drew870mitchell’s self-made prison loafs a day would make you obese right quick.
That’s what the “diet shake” type things are. You drink your goo for breakfast, goo for lunch, and then eat a sensible real meal for dinner. Of course, by then I think I’d be hungry enough to eat a baby.
If we mixed the powdered goo with fiber–plenty of sawdust does a body good–and then a bit of moisture and baked, there’s your kibble right there.