There are cafeteria-style buffet restaurants where you could absolutely pig out on all four food groups every day for less than that.
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Jesus $80 (that’s like $60ish US) a week? Per person? When I was broke I had to eat on ~$26 ($20 US) a week. In one of the US’s most expensive cities. It wasn’t great. Lots of rice, beans, potatoes, plantains, pork, chicken, cheap but bulky veg. And I’m sure it wasn’t the healthiest way to eat. Low on greens. Skewed toward the insoluble fiber side of things in a way that stopped you up. I’d make big batches of things and eat them for a week or more. Single most depressing period of eating in my life. But I had more than enough for one on that $20 a week. On $60 I could have been eating fresh fish and not on sale Brussels sprouts.
We did a bunch of math on the last soylent thread. Never occurred to me to do the numbers on what it took to actually live on the stuff. Is that pre-mixed liquid or powder?
Looks like with US pricing. 3 cases of pre mixed liquid per week for ~2000kcals (5 meals per day, 7 days per week). $102 for for 36 pack without the “subscribe” discount. That’s about where my grocery cost peaked living alone, a week where I got schmancy. My parents spend that per two people. And there’s a lot of steak, fresh seafood, and fresh veg involved.
Powder is packaged by number of meals, 4 meals per bag. 7 bags as a minimum order. 35 “meals” in a week for 2000kcal per day. 9 bags gets you closest to 35 meals. So around ~82.28 using the base pricing for a 7 bag order.
Jesus. I missed the forest for the trees last time. Discounts for increased order size, and subscribing. But that’s not cheap for a week of food. Especially given that to use this stuff not insanely you also need to be buying regular food as well. At least they don’t charge for shipping.
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That is their marketing spin, not reality. The “startup bros” were looking for a viable startup to get rich off of, this was their fourth one. They weren’t out to save and feed the world, and clearly have made no effort to do so.
they don’t donate soylent to the poor or starving, they did toss around the idea of a buy one for yourself buy one for donation program which puts all the charity on the purchasers. if they cared about feeding the masses they’d do clinical human trials to make sure their product was truly safe and viable and be engaged in philanthropic activities. they’d source from better sources and change their packaging if they cared about their ecological footprint. it is pretty clear they care about neither. they don’t even have transparency about their profit margin, they are already valued at over $100m though, which indicates it is very high based on the number of units they ship. this is the closest they have come to transparency, which is an elaborate justification for high costs, but at least you get a shout out as a way to cut costs when marketing! 
of course all this marketing spin is a pretty thin veneer, and a recent addition. they were much more honest and transparent before the investors became involved.
In order to be a viable meal replacement, they would at the very least need to use the cheapest bio-available, usable, nutrients. Not the ones with the highest profit margins. They clearly are cutting corners with every possible ingredient, just look at them. There are a lot of less expensive ingredients they could include that provide far superior nutritional profiles, like whole foods powders or alfalfa and cereal grain grass powders. they care more about maintaining the bland neutral taste to market to techies who don’t feel like cooking, and decoupling themselves from agriculture, than creating a cheap viable food to feed the masses.
The poorly absorbed low quality nutrients would show up gradually as chronic health issues. The intense diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration in whatever percent of people is a separate issue and likely either a poorly tested ingredient or contamination. Granted both show flaws in formulation and would have been rooted out if they’d done clinical trials before releasing to the public and testing ingredients and the final products for contamination.
It isn’t like i have citation on hand, i learned this back in veterinary medicine. i’d have to dig around for them. as @gadgetgirl02 points out this is common knowledge among both vets and pet owners. Also this is getting pretty far off track. The point is that even most pet food is scientifically formulated, has clinical trials, and ingredient contamination and purity testing, because anything less is negligent. If they are producing an acceptable meal replacement, they need to step up do the minimum that all the other meal replacements companies and even pet foods do for good reason.
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Price is a more legit complaint about Soylent than anything else since its primary goal is to be this universal inexpensive food replacement. If they can’t make that happen, everything else – 0.1% diarrhea incidents notwithstanding – is moot.
If they can’t achieve that goal, it is ultimately little more than a diet fad for the middle class. Won’t be the first, won’t be the last.
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I can’t imagine they’re even trying. Its more expensive than the thing they’re trying to replace! At full price. When I was young, and we didn’t have much. My mom would feed a family of six for 2 weeks on around a $100-$150 per grocery trip. We cheated a bit. My grandfather had a small farm, and dad was a commercial fisherman. So we had free or nearly free additions. Also it was the 80’s and inflation is a thing. But still.
ETA: I FOUND IT
These things are fun. My mom’s $100 grocery trip is $220.28 in future dollars.
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So every single brand of pet food on the shelf has a safety study dedicated to its exact formulation? While I agree that quality can vary, the idea that every single pet food brand has this kind of dedicated study is comical – it doesn’t even pass a sniff test. Instead, they meet the US RDA (or pet food equivalent) nutritional guidelines, combined with safe food handling and manufacturing processes, which are well documented and already enforced.
You are saying “every food product must have an individual twenty year longitudinal double blind safety study to document its safety” and I’m saying “every food product must meet the existing food safety and preparation guidelines that already exist”.
I do agree that there is a big difference between “food X is safe” and “food X is safe if you only eat that and nothing else for six years”. But pet foods already work this way, I know our cats literally ate the same thing every day for years, and thus pet food is the closest analog to what Soylent is trying to do.
Like bachelor chow from futurama.
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no. all the respectable ones do. like i point out above the cheaper ones don’t and are a regular source of health issues in pets because they are full of cheap fillers and low quality ingredients ingredients, wait, are you making my point for me? even the cheap pet foods typically do contamination testing though.
where did i say that? that’s a bit extreme. I’m only advocating for doing the minimum level of testing to not be considered negligent and to actually contain usable nutrients. like other meal replacements and quality pet foods already do.
I’ve never argued against any such argument, but what you describe is the minimum to be considered safe to consume, NOT what is required of a meal replacement, as even you point out in your next statement. These clinical trials are about a lot more then basic safety, you have to be able to maintain body weight without exercise, not lose bone density, maintain endocrine health and hormone levels, maintain electrolyte balances, not get anemic, etc. etc. etc. when on a meal replacement. like i’ve said instant ramen is a safe food, it isn’t a viable long term meal replacement, despite my best efforts in university. 
well that and the huge array of meal replacements for humans on the market that have been scientifically formulated and clinically tested. i’m only holding them to the minimum bar required by quality pet food and other meal replacement products.
If you were to consider using soylent as a meal replacement for any length of time wouldn’t you want the same as a bare MINIMUM? I would. Seems reasonable.
I don’t have issue with the concept of meal replacements, even though I prefer whole foods myself.
My main issues with soylent are:
- low quality ingredients that aren’t very usable biologically by humans
- not formulated by nutritional experts
- no clinical trials for testing
- high costs despite the cheap ingredients (least important issue, imho)
These are reasonable expectations for any potential meal replacement.
If they were to honestly market themselves as fortified pancake batter, my expectations would be reasonably lower.
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Mmm. The woo won’t kill you until it prevents you from seeking a real treatment. I’m of the uninformed laymen’s opinion that Steve Jobs died in an untimely manner because the woo woo prevented him from receiving very real and effective treatment for his cancer.
Heavens, no! (Ha! I had to). I am not nearly smart enough, unfortunately. And - while they are getting more and more able to test theories due to advancements like LIGO and bigger and bigger supercolliders, the vast majority of cosmology “experiments”, I am led to understand, consist of making predictions and searching for natural events that may or may not confirm or deny them.
As for the motherboarde video - it’s a hack job.
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I said “… a diet almost exclusive of plant fiber” - not “exclusively”. I should have perhaps been more straightforward and said “any plant fibers in the Intuit diet are there mostly by accident, they eat animals”.
But - my opinion and yours apparently do not count here, because (I assume) neither of us is a nutritional anthropologist, so we are unqualified to comment. Pity things like books and websites that let us read and become informed don’t actually exist. (THAT WAS SARCASM, GUYS. Please do not correct me by pointing out wikipedia, I know it’s there)
Which is why they did all the regular blood testing while developing the product. Whether this was presented as a clinical trial, I don’t know, but weight and blood tests and consulting nutritionists and doctors was done regularly during the development of Soylent over a period of years. These people are perhaps amateur geeks but they are not idiots and they are as interested in not personally dying and not being known for building a product that kills or sickens people as everyone else.
https://discourse.soylent.com/search?q=%40rob%20blood
All this goes back goes to the original point, this stuff was done, the relevant health data was collected and experts consulted … just not to your satisfaction as a “real” clinical trial. So we are now going in circles, and I will respectfully bow out.
Worst case, you have been on the grapefruit diet. But diet is a massive industry.
Oh i agree. I don’t advocate woo, only that i’d take harmless woo over random pharm that wasn’t scientifically tested for safety and whose effects weren’t scientifically known. It is the science that makes pharma medicine reasonably safe.
Could be, I can’t speak to that. The direct quotes from the founder and the footage of their facilities and attention to safety and quality and contamination aren’t fabricated and speak for themselves. I’m sure with all their money their new facilities are a vast improvement, but all that money doesn’t change the nature of the people running the show. The video should at the very least give one pause and make one question what they are doing and demand evidence that things are legit on all fronts. at least that was my takeaway.
cheers.
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I find it difficult to believe a trained surgeon could somehow achieve that state without science somehow being involved, if only in his training curriculum. I associate successfully completing training with at least some minimal level of rationality that seems absent in the quackery I suggested as an unscientific alternative.
By “Define Single source” I mean is “animals” sufficiently single? Soylent is made of many sources, so it seems no more single source to me than a cake from a bakery - yeah, I got it from one place, but it was assembled from a multitude.
From your further comments, it seems clear you don’t see “animals” to be a single source - but somehow the varied sources of the various soylent ingredients don’t count in the same way. That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.
Because they want to? Because someone has to be the first to try something? I mean, I don’t understand why people climb mountains either, but they do it.
As for price - you would be more accurate comparing it to other ready-to-eat meals than to normal groceries, where part of the “price” you pay by your preparation. When I am being a take-out slob, I can easily spend $20 a day, or more, and that’s junk fast food. Something healthy would be more - point being, Soylent isn’t cheap, but it’s not grossly expensive compared to other pre-processed foods.
Presumably, just because they have not reached the goal of “100% healthy and inexpensive” doesn’t mean they won’t at some point - if it becomes proven and popular, volume and competition will cause the price to fall.
these comments don’t contain the right info only one contains a casual passing mention of blood work done by rob’s doctor on rob.
rob having a doctor measure his blood levels is good. that isn’t a clinical trial. as another commenter points out most deficiencies take a while (up to years) to show in blood work, some can’t be determined by blood work at all, and as rob says in his interviews that he eats regular meals a few days a week and snacks.
again, not science! rather an incomplete personal medical checkup.
~insert video of ralph from the simpson’s at the doctors saying “i did science!” with a bandaid on his arm.~
certainly not even close adequate for any meal replacement on the market.
i get that you aren’t going to be convinced…c’est la vie. i’d hope you’d reconsider before trying it as a meal replacement at the very least.
I’ll agree to disagree.
well they sure are playing fast and loose and well below the minimum standard for the industry. if those are their intentions they really really really need to up their game to at least the industry minimum.
fair enough! i’ve commented enough on soylent for a lifetime. thanks for the discourse! also, despite the level headed disagreement on this subject, i have mad respect for your company and development chops, just wanted you to know that my respect doesn’t hinge on agreeing on random shit. hee hee. 
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Where did I imply that?
Steve Jobs isn’t dead. His perfectly balanced diet cured his cancer.
More seriously there are some indications that Jobs was harmed by ALT med nonsense, its established that he delayed initial treatment for 9 months. And there are reports that it was diet woo that he went with. Perhaps specifically the Gerson protocol. A well established bit o’ bullshit. I tend to agree with you, but its a difficult thing to really prove.
I misread it at first too, but I’m sleep deprived.
The two are often deeply connected.
Animals are pretty varied as to their nutritional content. A dozen oysters is around a 100-200 calories. A single slice of bacon has 50+. Think in terms of single food or primary ingredient. That’s what Soylent is attempting to replace. They’ve stated they’d like to have this stuff spring fully formed from an algae tank. Just as another example if we went with “plants” as the single source you’re gorging yourself on beans, grains, fruits, nuts, roots, tubers, greens both tender and hearty. Its far to varied.
They’re not. There are tons of meal replacements nearly identical to Soylent on the market. Including medical ones that actual humans have survived on for multiple years. Their product does not appear to be even as good as those.
Their stated goal is to create a cheaper replacement for other forms of food as a staple, bulk component of the diet. Comparing it to my base ability to feed myself on $20 bucks a week is apt. I once went and entire week on a $5 bag of potatoes. It wasn’t exciting, nor was it a good idea or sustainable. But I had a full belly. Beat the potato. It kept an entire nation of Millions alive for centuries using minimal land space, effort, and cost. Potatoes are RAD.
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It still works out expensive. Decent ready meals are around the $3-$4 mark here and often found on special offer. Crappy ones are even cheaper. Round it out with instant oats for brekky and I could come in way under budget with almost zero cookery and not much washing up.
Wouldn’t be the worst diet, either. Lil high in sodium, maybe, but good enough with a fair mix of veggies. I’d probably die of boredom a few months into this diet, but it wouldn’t be the worst I’ve eaten.
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Yes. Even without the weird monotony of convenience food living cheap on limited food choices is emotionally devastating. Purely on the food and isolation front.
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What really strikes me about this topic is that the symptoms described seem pretty much par for the course when eating Taco Bell, Chipotle, or McDonalds, and not uncommon for a nice bowl of homemade chili, a grilled cheese sandwich, or even a fresh leafy green salad. Especially taking the numbers into consideration (99.9% success, 1 in a 1000 chance of digestion issues).
I kinda get the feeling people are just lashing out because Soylent is relatively new and not one of the popular ‘cool kids’. Taken in perspective, nothing about the reports sounds bad. In fact, it’s a positive that they are doing proactive recalls. More often, recalls come later “_ has been recalled due to listeria/e. coli contamination” not just “_ has been recalled just in case there might be something wrong”.
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That would be relevant only if you’re willing to ignore the distinction between ‘product’ and ‘contaminant’.
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the accounts of the symptoms have been much more severe then a little tummy trouble.
I’d take the self reported numbers with a grain of salt. It is highly unlikely they’d recall based on that rate unless either the rate was much higher or the issue underlying the symptoms was recall worthy. Remember, they wrote off the symptoms with the bar until it became clear their version wasn’t matching the issues being reported.
not that i’ve seen in this thread. most the arguments against soylent in this thread are due to legitimate concerns unrelated to coolness or newness. we like new things. we like uncool kids aka happy mutants. i’ve found most the discussion in this thread highly reasoned and about legitimate aspects of the company and products.
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