[dead_battery]

none of the points im making are meant in an argumentative way.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i can put in more nutrients across the whole spectrum, with much better taste, for way way waaaay less than $3 per individual meal. i can do it for about 1/3 of that.

it's called "basic life skills."

you can't. you don't know the exact nutrients your body needs, and you do not possess the ability to go out to any food selling place that exists and pick them off the shelves just by looking at the produce and guessing what it contains. no doubt you can eat well, cook meals that look and taste far better than soylent, and no doubt you can host intensely enjoyable evenings around them. still, whatever you make will be technically worse than soylent nutrition wise because nature just doesn't grow a single source of food that gives the body everything it needs.

think of it this way - what is a potato? it's a collection of smaller parts. it's a composition of ingredients. you can't see them. you can see fat, the rest our brains can't process without technical apparatus.

what is soylent? it's a composition of ingredients, only soylent is created from data based on the body itself and our best empirical data on what it requires to function maximally. a potato is not.

soylent like foods simply have to be the staple of the future because there is just no point in creating foods with random levels of nutrients based on our primitive understanding of what they were. we are working from the flawed assumption that a banana tastes good because it is a banana. it's healthy because its like, natural and from the sunshine and or something.

the future will be products like soylent serving as the base nutrition of the day, and expertly engineered supplements and flavourings providing the taste, pleasure, experience and social dining aspect.

if you're telling me that in the future people will engineer a substance to consume that has the exact ingrediential profile of a standard potato of today, then you're making an absurd argument. in the future people will demand and expect meals that are made to serve their body, not labels like "banana" or "potato" that we cling to out of some primitive romantic conception of what food is.

Originally Posted by symbolicus

the daily rda is well and good as a rule of thumb but it's a coarse statistical mean that is not in tune with my individual body/activity/DNA/immune system/etc.

i get it as an emergency and/or convenience meal replacement though. there's definitely a place for that in life. like military rations. but seems expensive.

it's hardly coarse. nonetheless, what you've said here is an argument FOR soylent and the inevitable future of food technology. soylent is the first step towards being ABLE to attune food to the exact requirements of your body. google glasses feeding you real time stats - soylent like systems producing your meals based on that data?

and it doesn't stop there at the level of maximal functionality - the potential for experimentation, with chemicals and substances that go beyond simple utilitarian value - psychedelics, nootropics etc. all of this is massively augmented by soylent like technology.

also, as i already said, the fact that the price is $5 a day NOW - when the product isn't even in stores yet - that indicates that within years or decades soylent like products might be unbelievable cheap. considering their superior value to anything else you can eat - its exciting.

military rations - of course, and why not prison meals? why not hospital meals? again, noone is saying you can't a banana or a bar of chocolate after you've had your soylent.

i also suspect survivalists will be big on soylent. their larders could be MASSIVELY reduced in size.

foodbanks too - i hope some forward thinking people are already considering this.

Originally Posted by symbiosis

i don't think it's "corporate" (yet, anyway), and i haven't tasted it, but it DOES sound bland by the description. i mean, nobody here is arguing for its gourmet qualities, are they?

yes, the taste is bland and chalky. but within a few years there will be a multitude of flavourings, there's no limit on what it could taste like.

also, on something like soylent, you can afford to eat tasty foods because the basics of your diet are covered.

Originally Posted by symbo

i think that's a bit of an idealized technofetish. take rice, extract the protein, mix other things, add a lot of packaging-- seems like a lot of processing which is money.

?

Originally Posted by symbol

some of the criticisms mentioned in the article are worth noting. this one is really a big one for me:

i think "the poor" might be better off developing a measure of food self-sufficiency than becoming dependent on an industrial commodity they must purchase. i get that this is already the case in urban areas anyway, but even urban areas can accommodate small gardens (roof, balconies, buckets), and even small livestock operations (look up urban chickens).

poor indian farmers drink their pesticides to commit suicide because corporations like monsanto gouge them. they patent their seeds and make you purchase new ones each year. markets are rigged so US farmers get heavy subsidies and african ones cannot compete. the "free market" is rigged against them.

the poor don't have much room to grow gardens or raise chickens. the time these things take, the amount of food you actually get from them - it's obscene. a years supply of soylent can easily fit in a cupboard and does not go out of date.

and agriculture itself is a serious problem. forget about the space it takes up, the ridiculously long growth times, the pest problems - its one of the single largest sources of carbon emissions. soylent is the first step into a post agricultural world. that's terrifying for many, and will end entire ways of life. its also progress. it is simply archaic to grow things in fields for months using the sun when we can do it in labs and totally engineer the process.

we're talking about efficiency and progress. people will complain, they will cling to the phantasmagorical fetish object called "nature" because the brain doesn't like complexity and risk and imagines it can sustain itself from a "pure" and "unspoiled" source that does not really exist.

you call me a technofetishist - in fact, today nature fetishists are the majority. they fantasize about cutting away at consumer modernity and restoring a non existent space that is supposedly free and pure. they are deluded. it's very natural to go out in the woods and pick up a mushroom, consume it, then die slowly in agony as you're poisoned. that mushroom will look, taste and smell in a way that's very very appealing. nature wants you dead. consumer capitalism wants to harvest you for profit. consumer capitalism is harder for people to process since its going to sell you things for profit then when you get sick maybe you can sue it or maybe its too late.

and only people such as we who are so utterly detached from the reality of "nature" could imagine it as a pure, untampered with, safe and benevolent space that just wants to feed us.

and again, noone is forcing anyone to buy soylent, noone is forcing the poor to chose to take it. all these arguments that it will hurt them are fucking absurd.

the poor would be much better off learning the science of how their bodies work, learning how to synthesize and create chemicals, and disseminating the knowledge that the corporate power structures will use to addict, impoverish and ensnare them on p2p networks.

telling them to cling to peasant nature because of fetishized notions of its purity and dignity serves only to disempower, stupefy and hurt them in the long run. not that growing vegetables is bad, not at all. it's just not enough.

i feel strongly that this retreat back into nature is a betrayal of the poor and the greatest single mistake the left and anyone on the side of the individual is making right now. it's the opposite of the direction we should go in. there are obvious reasons why it's a horrendous idea, and why it enables the poor to be exploited by advanced systems of instrumentalized techno rationality. the future is scary, daunting, complex and difficult to understand, but progress is unstoppable. it goes in only one direction and we either keep up or we don't.