You ever known anyone with some sort of gastro-intestinal disease? Like IBS or Crohn’s disease? Those usually present with uncontrollable diarrhea. We all get diarhea now and again, but we can usually make it to the bathroom with plenty of advanced warning people with things like IBS literally can not.
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If Rhinehart and his start-up colleagues were genuinely interested in a cheap convenient alternative to meals, they could have focused their attention on some form of Nerd Kibble. But their target consumers are wannabee Post-humanists who want to avoid reminders that they are burdened with digestive tracts, hence the bottled spoof.
Not to forget that this way, they are primarily selling you water.
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You can make a white Russian with it?
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EDIT: urgh, some horrid script-filled video playing site. Blech.
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Excellent! Well done!
It’s comments like this that keeps me coming back!
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I suffer from irritable vowel syndrome. Too many umlauts give me diæresis.
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sounds like you are in-consonant, and having trouble with your :
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Testimonials from two different guys who tried to live on monkey chow for a week:
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I threw this together during a past Soylent thread, but I think you off handedly comissioned it, after a fashion.
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Thank you! I’m glad you took ownership of the amazing thing!
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It’s a diacritical condition. Acute and grave.
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Now this is the kind of topical image diversity I can get behind.
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Mind you, “processing” is a meaningless thing to have a problem with. Blending, separating, grinding, chopping, shredding, baking, boiling, frying… they’re all processing, and they’re fairly different from each other. There’s absolutely nothing about so-called processed foods that is inherently bad, it all comes down to the specific ingredients and the specific processes involved in each distinct food.
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Right. Technically Honey is a processed food. Its just that bees are doing the processing.
With things like Soylent though what’s meant is that the ingredients have been stripped down as much as possible. Often to the point of representing a single nutrient. That does present some particular problems in terms of meeting all your nutritional needs with a slurry of such components. You could miss something, particularly something we don’t actually know about yet. Choice of components with lower bioavailability can terribly skew the actual nutrients absorbed (not the same thing as nutrients consumed). Contamination via usual vectors or accidental substitution. ETC
Like wise in terms of supplying a staple for “save the world” purposes you’re talking about a single product with an incredibly complex supply chain. If a component stops being available do they keep making the Soylent the world no relies on? All the processing, shipping, limited sourcing etc. Restricts access and supply and potentially increases costs. And so forth. There are tacit admissions of these complexities in Soylent’s recipe and marketing. The use of oat flour and other more “whole” ingredients. All the techno-babble about the probable pipe dream of breeding or creating algae to spit this stuff out as a complete product.
Typical complaints about processed food are usually just a short hand for a particular sort of processed food. But in this case its a genuine source of a lot of complications on Soylent’s part. And I’m still better the shittening is down to a sourcing or ingredient problem resulting in contamination directly related to these issues. Just a hunch though, doesn’t seem to be any real information out of them at this point.
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There is no evidence to support these assertions.
There is a large body of evidence to the contrary.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/90/3/680.full
“On the basis of a systematic review of studies of satisfactory quality, there is no evidence of a difference in nutrient quality between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs. The small differences in nutrient content detected are biologically plausible and mostly relate to differences in production methods.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20463045
“From a systematic review of the currently available published literature, evidence is lacking for nutrition-related health effects that result from the consumption of organically produced foodstuffs.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22944875
The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods."
A plant is a limiting reagent problem: you need a particular ratio of elements to grow one, and if the soil runs out of one of those elements (other than C and H and O which it gets from the sky) then it can’t grow any more. But you don’t need equal amounts: a plant needs 400 or 500x as much N as Fe by mass, for example. The trace minerals aren’t ever the thing the soil runs out of. The things the soil runs out of first, and the things that limit further plant growth, are N and P and K. Which is why that’s what goes in fertilizer. You don’t need to “replenish” iron or copper or manganese because the soil won’t run out of those things. If you did, the plant simply wouldn’t grow, because you can’t run photosynthesis without them. Your “mineral-depleted” plant doesn’t exist, and plants grown using “organic” and conventional fertilizers are nutritionally identical.
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interesting, i’ll read later when back home, thanks for the links.
just peeked at them, couldn’t help myself 
it is more interesting and complex then i thought.
also just found this.
apparently it is how fast the plant grows that limits its nutrient uptake and ability to manufacture nutrients, so many heirloom varietals (like some organic farms grow) are far more nutritious but not because of the soil.
A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.
They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century. Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.
“Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly,” reported Davis, “but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.” There have likely been declines in other nutrients, too, he said, such as magnesium, zinc and vitamins B-6 and E, but they were not studied in 1950 and more research is needed to find out how much less we
are getting of these key vitamins and minerals.
The Organic Consumers Association cites several other studies with similar findings: A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal,found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.
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