On Wed, 28 May 2014 22:30:53 -0400, Travis McGee
> wrote:

>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/te...e.html?hp&_r=0
>
>The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable
>
>MAY 28, 2014
>
>Farhad Manjoo
>
>I just spent more than a week experiencing Soylent, the most joyless new
>technology to hit the world since we first laid eyes on MS-DOS.
>
>Soylent is a drink mix invented by a group of engineers who harbor
>ambitions of shaking up the global food business. Robert Rhinehart, the
>25-year-old co-founder and chief executive of the firm selling the
>drink, hit upon the idea when he found himself spending too much time
>and money searching for nutritious meals while he was working on a
>wireless-tech start-up in San Francisco. Using a process Mr. Rhinehart
>calls “scientific,” the firm claims to have mixed a cornucopia of
>supplements to form a technologically novel food that offers the
>complete set of nutrients the human body needs for survival.
>
>You can live on Soylent alone, Mr. Rhinehart claims, though in practice
>he said customers would most likely use it to replace just their “staple
>meals,” by which he meant most of the junk you eat every day to fill
>yourself up. Mr. Rhinehart argued that Soylent, which costs about $3 per
>serving, is cheaper, easier to prepare and more nutritious than much of
>the food that makes up the typical American officer worker’s diet today.
>Photo
>Robert Rhinehart spent months living on nothing but Soylent and claims
>it improved his health.
>
>About a week and a half ago, I began drinking Soylent every day. I can’t
>recommend that you do the same. For a purported breakthrough with such
>grand plans for reshaping the food industry, I found Soylent to be a
>punishingly boring, joyless product. From the plain white packaging to
>the purposefully bland, barely sweet flavor to the motel-carpet beige
>hue of the drink itself, everything about Soylent screams function, not
>fun. It may offer complete nourishment, but only at the expense of the
>aesthetic and emotional pleasures many of us crave in food.
>
>And although the drink is tastier than its horror sci-fi name implies,
>the whole idea of replacing lots of your meals with the same stuff day
>after day is a nightmarish prospect. It suggests that Soylent’s creators
>have forgotten a basic ingredient found in successful tech products, not
>to mention in most good foods. That ingredient is delight.
>
>Most whiz-bang technologies don’t sell themselves on function alone;
>they’ve got to offer pleasure, too. My favorite recent example is the
>ride-sharing service Uber. Sure, hailing a cab on your phone is more
>convenient than waiting for one on a street corner. But that’s not the
>main reason people love Uber. They love it because Uber lets you feel
>like the boss: A car rushes to pick you up, and when it drops you off,
>you jump out without ever reaching for your wallet, as if you own the
>town. Uber isn’t using technology to sell convenience. It’s selling
>addictive thrills. It’s selling joy.
>Continue reading the main story
>What’s in Soylent?
>
>There are over 30 listed ingredients in the shake. The vast majority of
>it is carbohydrates, fats and protein:
>Primary Ingredients
>
> Over half is made up of oat flour and maltodextrin, a starchy
>substance that comes from corn.
> About a quarter is protein derived from brown rice.
> A significant portion is also made up of fatty acids that come from
>canola and fish oils.
>
>Supplementary Ingredients
>
>The shake includes several vitamin and mineral supplements, like vitamin
>C, zinc, potassium and calcium, plus small amounts of more surprising ones:
>
> Copper, which works with iron to help the body form red blood cells.
> Iodine, which helps the body metabolize nutrients.
>
>Sources: Soylent, National Institutes of Health
>
>Besides offering no joy, Soylent presented other troubles. For much of
>the time I used it, Soylent produced gastrointestinal symptoms ranging
>from mildly irritating to perilous. Judging by other users’ online
>descriptions of my experiences, my gut’s reaction wasn’t unusual, but
>Mr. Rhinehart said it was likely to be temporary, the result of my body
>adjusting to the government-recommended amount of fiber in Soylent.
>
>I believe him, but there are still questions about Soylent’s
>healthfulness. Though Mr. Rhinehart spent months living on nothing but
>Soylent and claims it improved his health, the firm has not performed
>any large-scale studies to show that drinking Soylent over an extended
>period of time is good for you, or even that it’s not bad for you. Mr.
>Rhinehart said the firm was conducting a large study, but he declined to
>divulge any details or a timeline for when it might post results.
>
>Soylent’s biggest failing, though, is its stultifying utilitarianism.
>Even Mr. Rhinehart describes Soylent mainly in terms of its functional
>promise. “The most important aspect of this product is simplicity,” he
>told me. “We’re trying to abstract away the complexity. Here’s this
>drink that has everything you need, so if it’s your go-to meal, you
>don’t have to worry about anything else.”
>Photo
>Credit Stuart Goldenberg
>
>But there is something troubling about the notion of a “go-to meal.”
>During the last week and a half, I consumed Soylent for most, but not
>all, of my meals. There were a couple of days when more than 90 percent
>of my calories came from the powder. At first, as Mr. Rhinehart
>promised, I did find Soylent to be extremely convenient. It alleviated
>some of the stress I often feel when I’m pressed for time on a busy
>workday and need to find something healthy to eat.
>
>That feeling faded. The longer I used it, the more Soylent began to feel
>like a chore. I began to yearn for the mechanics of solid meals —
>chewing, swallowing, using my hands and silverware and experiencing a
>variety of textures and temperatures. I missed crunchy foods, salty
>foods, noisy foods and hot foods. (Soylent, like revenge, is best served
>cold.)
>
>Most of all, I missed variety. Soylent’s instructions suggested adding
>peanut butter, fruit, vanilla extract or other flavorings to the drink.
>I did, but still, Soylent tasted pretty much the same from day to day —
>like gritty, thinned-down pancake batter, inoffensive and dull.
>
>Mr. Rhinehart offered a canny defense for the criticism that Soylent is
>leaching the joy out of food. “Obviously there’s a lot more to food than
>nutrition,” he said. “We don’t expect people to live on this entirely.
>In fact, we think this elevates food into more of a leisure activity.
>You can go out with your friends or family, and if your default, staple
>meal is very healthy and sustainable and balanced, you can enjoy your
>other meals even more, because you don’t have to worry about how healthy
>they are.”
>
>But as soon as I began using Soylent, it dawned on me that Mr.
>Rhinehart’s entire premise of dividing food into “staple meals” and
>“leisure meals” was suspect.
>
>It’s true that people sometimes eat meals that are mainly for sustenance
>(cheap frozen dinners, dried ramen, corn dogs) and other times we’re
>looking mostly for pleasure (72-hour short ribs). But I suspect that
>most of the time, for most meals, we want both sustenance and pleasure.
>
>Soylent’s fatal flaw is that it can’t offer both. It optimizes for total
>sustenance at the expense of any pleasure. So while the drink might be
>nutritionally preferable to eating a diet of pizza, ramen and frozen
>dinners, I doubt it would be more pleasurable than doing so. There’s a
>lot of variety in pizza and ramen (try each with a fried egg). Soylent,
>meanwhile, will always be just the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sp-VFBbjpE

John Kuthe...