>Do you think of all the thousands of students who go to University for 4-7 years to learn about one subject - Food - haven't thought "hey? why don't we just mix the basic chemicals together and solve the world's food crisis?".
Surely you are intelligent enough to realize that this is not a serious attempt at fixing anybody's "food crisis", and rather it's a convenience product aimed at affluent Westerners? I mean, disregarding that $65/week is higher than the average income in many parts of the world -- and far more than roughly 50% of the world's population can afford -- they're marketing this through the Internet! It costs nearly as much as my grocery bill, and I'm white and live in America!
This isn't in the category of "feed the world" products, which is why academia has had and will continue to have little interest in something like this. In fact, many people have through the years done similar things in a more ad-hoc fashion: a cousin of mine ate a diet consisting almost entirely of yogurt when he had no cooking equipment beyond a yogurt maker, and there's a rather infamous tale of some dude who lived entirely on raw beef:
He's still doing it, by the way. It seems to work.
And yet it would take a doctorate in insanity to think that any of these propositions could "feed the world", when we have trouble distributing enough simple dry rice to meet everyone's basic calorie requirements.
As long as Soylent makes up less than 75% of your diet, and you still eat some vegetables, I'd give you a roughly 100% chance of being just fine. Even if you really go whole hog on the stuff, it probably won't be that bad -- people have eaten worse diets. Much worse.
For me, the central discovery here is not that a monotone food product is possible -- that's easy, just take some reasonably healthy foods and stick them in a blender -- but that people actually like to live this way. If you'd asked me before this all began, I'd have bet they'd all get bored in a month.
> This isn't in the category of "feed the world" products,
From the linked article:
50% of the food produced globally is wasted, and food makes for the largest component of municipal garbage. If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive. 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. 70% of americans are overweight or obese. 1 in 7 people globally are malnourished, and 1 in 3 in the developing world suffer from deficiency. Countless others are living hand-to-mouth, subsistence farming, hindering economic development. Even in the developed world, agriculture is the most dangerous industry to work in by occupational injuries and illnesses, and obesity is on the rise.
By taking years to spoil, dramatically reducing cost, and easing transportation and storage, soylent could have a dramatic effect on hunger and malnutrition.
The business plan appears to be trivial: he can claim it will solve the food crisis, basic economics (he simply won't be able to reduce the cost below current levels) makes this thoroughly impossible, but it doesn't matter to his real customers (you), in the same way that a Toyota Prius ad can show the car driving through a field of flowers and causing them to bloom, even though cars can't do that!
Now, not having any idea how difficult it is to scale production of a physical product is a pretty serious form of ignorance, so my apologies if anyone can verify that Rhinehart intends for anybody to believe this.
Surely you are intelligent enough to realize that this is not a serious attempt at fixing anybody's "food crisis", and rather it's a convenience product aimed at affluent Westerners? I mean, disregarding that $65/week is higher than the average income in many parts of the world -- and far more than roughly 50% of the world's population can afford -- they're marketing this through the Internet! It costs nearly as much as my grocery bill, and I'm white and live in America!
This isn't in the category of "feed the world" products, which is why academia has had and will continue to have little interest in something like this. In fact, many people have through the years done similar things in a more ad-hoc fashion: a cousin of mine ate a diet consisting almost entirely of yogurt when he had no cooking equipment beyond a yogurt maker, and there's a rather infamous tale of some dude who lived entirely on raw beef:
http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/testimonials/lex-rooker-usa/
He's still doing it, by the way. It seems to work.
And yet it would take a doctorate in insanity to think that any of these propositions could "feed the world", when we have trouble distributing enough simple dry rice to meet everyone's basic calorie requirements.
As long as Soylent makes up less than 75% of your diet, and you still eat some vegetables, I'd give you a roughly 100% chance of being just fine. Even if you really go whole hog on the stuff, it probably won't be that bad -- people have eaten worse diets. Much worse.
For me, the central discovery here is not that a monotone food product is possible -- that's easy, just take some reasonably healthy foods and stick them in a blender -- but that people actually like to live this way. If you'd asked me before this all began, I'd have bet they'd all get bored in a month.