Huh? Where’s the hijack? Derleth, I’m confused.
Also, you say:
There are many cheap foods that are nutritionally sound. Like brown rice and beans.
You want market demand? I’m your market demand. If there was a vegan People Chow, I’d buy it in a second. It’d be great for the college lifestyle. As it is, one of the biggest problems I anticipate in moving into my own place is keeping myself fed with a limited money supply. If I could get a 50 lb sack of kibble and just keep it in my room, I’d be set! Maybe I could even get a plastic bowl with my name on it. I’m not kidding here. I would love it! I’d eat other things, of course, but there’d be nothing like the peace of mind of knowing I have balanced meals available to me well into the foreseeable future.
And, as an aside, I’d claim that humans don’t naturally “crave variety.” It’s just that living in an industrialized society, with a wide variety of flavorful foods available, we don’t want to settle for a homogenous diet. We only “crave variety” insofar as it is necessary to get all necessary nutrients.
Oh yeah, and Balance Bars and such wouldn’t work because they are expensive as fuck. I envision People Kibble as being relatively inexpensive for the amount of nutrition you get.
<hijack>
The advertising slogan for Chin Chow should be “Choosy chinchillas chew Chin Chow!” (Will anyone besides Eve get that reference?)
</hijack>
OK I guess it’s time to get serious.
IIRC there is a cracker the Red Cross uses to feed the starving. I believe they used it in Ethiopia.
That would probably fill all your requirements.
Don’t know any of the particulars except I remember a TV special that mentioned it.
Tasty enough to be used for snacking,I doubt it.
Yes, except we’re busy eating our Jif.
Besides, don’t expect Eve to “get” anything newer than 1955.
J/K
–Tim
Well, judging by the response, there’s obviously some interest in the possibility of a cheap, crunchy food that could meet all of the nutritional requirements of humans. There are several potential markets; college students, vegans, the poor, the hungry, the stoned (“This stuff tastes great!” “Yeah, and it’s crunchy…”) and the terminally lazy, like myself.
I’ve heard “eat a balanced diet” since elementary school, and yet there seems to be no way to do so without becoming a nutritionist and spending an inordinate amount of money at the local organic grocery store. It’s expensive to eat well; easy, cheap foods are almost universally bad for you. Is it any wonder that, as a nation, we’re carrying around a few spare pounds?
So, can anybody out there tell me…
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What are the nutritional requirements of the average human?
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Is there anything in these nutritional requirements that procludes them being fulfilled in the form of a crunchy, yummy snack food?
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Can anyone get me any more information on the Red Cross biscuit, mentioned by Justwannano? Might be a good starting point. Likewise, the Primate Chow. Seems like we might already be most of the way there. This is a very exciting time.
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Does anyone have any suggestions on a name for the product? People Kibble may not exactly remove the stigma of pet food; and while I like Smackfu’s “Sapien Chow”, it might be mistaken for Sapient Chow, and then we’d lose our vegetarian market.
I think this is a multimillion dollar idea whose time has come. I don’t have the managerial or scientific knowhow to even start this project, let alone see it through to commercial viability. Besides, it would just ruin my laid-back lifestyle. So, who wants to get rich, solve world hunger, and make millions of starving stoners and skinny vegans ecstatically happy? Any suggestions on how to get this off the ground, if it’s possible?
People Kibble. It’s what’s for dinner
Andy
I claim Purina High-Protein Monkey Chow is already the perfect “People-Chow”. We’d need a vegan version, though.
Just slap on a new label, jack up the price, and ship it! 
Arjuna34
That post-prandial noise you hear is the sound of your arteries slamming shut.
A tabulated version of the US RDA (1989, revised 1997-1998) can be found at:
http://www.nutritionhealthreports.com/RDA.html
Combined carbohydrate and fat intake requirements for a normal adult are generally considered to be approximately 2000 food calories / day. This would need to be scaled up or down, depending on the individual. I suppose, though, that People Kibble could be tailored to a low calorie diet, and if people needed more calories, they could eat some rice with their kibble, or some such.
Because of the varying requirements for different groups of people, we’d probably need a few different versions of the kibble (Youth Sapien Chow, Working-Adult Sapien Chow, etc…). I think that the National Academy of Sciences outlines ten (or so) different classes of individuals with respect to nutrition.
I checked out the nutritional information of the High-Protein chow. From a cursory glance at the nutritional information, it doesn’t look like the proportions of nutrients are correct so as to satisfy the US RDA requirements.
What was the nutritional composition of the people kibble that Soylent put out a few years back?
Someone (Me? I’m pretty bad at it, but this is such a good idea that I’d be willing to put the work into it.) should start a website where we can sing the wonders and benefits of People Chow and put up all the information we collect on its feasibility. And I could make a T-shirt advertising the website that I could wear. That would be cool. A People Kibble shirt. Hell, I just might make one anyway, just for fun. This is simultaneously one of the funniest and best ideas I’ve ever heard on the board.
Muffin wrote:
What was the nutritional composition of the people kibble that Soylent put out a few years back?
To Whom It May Concern,
The Soylent corporation would like to apologize for the misunderstanding concerning Soylent Green. It was an honest mistake. We sent R&D a memo asking them to create a nutritious kibble made FOR people. Unfortunately, the temp we had filling in that day made a common typing error.
We have recalled our Soylent Green product line, and are in the process of reformulating it. We apologize for the inconvenience, and urge consumers to try our Soylent Red, Soylent Blue and Soylent Orange products, which we guarantee to be 100% human-free.
Thank you.
The Soylent Corporation
“We’re just People, like you.”
Didn’t anyone see the movie, I don’t have the video but what they ate they called a single celled protein mixed with all the vitamins and amino acids the body needs. I would have put that in quotes but it’s just from memory so I doubt it’s right. Maybe the writer did his homework and outlined the people kibble formula right there. I will admit it was liquid and kinda lumpy, not exactly the cruchy bagable type everyone is talking about. After I saw that movie I thought what a great idea.
I would buy it
Just the thing for poor suds like me who tend to get stuck at the office in the evenings - a 5 kilo bucket of People Kibble in the filing cabinet would save me from living on Snickers & Bi-Fi mini salamis. Seriously, a food substitute for the occasions where you just want to refuel and keep moving sounds like a good idea to me.
The closest thing I’ve seen to this is the pemmican in survival rations (AFAIK, it’s used in disaster relief as well), but it leaves you hungry, even though it probably provides your body with most of what it needs. And the taste is so boring that merely bland would be an improvement.
If you make it, they’ll come…
S. Norman
mrvisible: ROTFL 
It ain’t Monkey Chow, but Kraft Dinner has to rank up there on the kibble-meter. I lived on the stuff for a long time in College. It can be made in about 10 minutes, and a big bowl of it cost about 50 cents and filled me up for most of a day.
In this thread on what prison life is like, Lissa reports on life in a super-maximum security prisof, which she knows about because of a friend who works at one (or at least so she says :)). Her comments on the meals received by the incarcerated at such a facility:
It looks like some variation on “the loaf” is what we are looking for here. Anyone know any prison chefs who could get us the recipe?
Bit late to the party, here, but IIRC, NASA experimented in the '60’s with soy-based edible structural materials for spacecraft interiors (such as instrument panels), as a way of providing emergency rations for astronauts stuck in orbit for extended periods. This sounds like a possible base for People Kibble. Wish I could provide a cite for this; perhaps another Doper could confirm that such a program existed.
Otherwise, as long as it didn’t look too much like dog food, long-life People Kibble™ would probably fly as a product.
This may be it!
http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/field/food_line/index.html
No, it’s not quite kibble, it’s closer to bar food… but you have to eat something equivalent to a bowl full as far as amount goes. As it says, it can be made into a porridge if water is added, so I guess there’s your bowl full too.