20,000 Customers Have Pre-Ordered Over $2,000,000 of Soylent 543
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Less than a year ago, Rob Rhinehart published a blog post explaining how he had stopped eating food and begun living entirely on a greyish, macro-nutritious cocktail. Today, he told Motherboard that he's sold more than $2 million worth of Soylent to tens of thousands of post-food consumers worldwide—and that it's on track to ship next month. 'We have crossed $2,000,000 in revenue from over 20,000 customers, with more every day,' Rhinehart told me. 'International demand is really picking up as well.' This despite the fact that Soylent isn't technically on the market yet, and has thus far only been available to beta testers. Rhinehart's company spent much of last year tinkering with the formula—the version he tried first was deficient in sulfur, and contained since-jettisoned ingredients like cow whey. But there's been a steadily building crescendo of publicity—both positive and negative—around the project since its inception."
"post-food consumers" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"post-food consumers" (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to replace your entire diet with Soylent.
Re:"post-food consumers" (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I think this might work as an emergency ration, or perhaps a diet regimen, but I'm not seeing the attraction otherwise.
It also makes me think about something I read decades ago. Supposedly a scientist extracted every known vitamin and nutrient from rat chow, and fed it to rats, leaving out the leftover "non-nutrients." Eventually the rats sickened and died. The lesson of this, as told by the nutrition types I heard it from, was that we have not identified all necessary vitamins and nutrients in foods, so it's risky to think you can make fully nutritious artificial food.
But I just finished a 12-hour work day, so I'll leave it to someone else to track down a reference.
Just had a meal (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Steak ( bloody ) in green pepper sauce, no potatoes or whatever side dish
3) "Mohr im Hemd" ( Austrian chocolate dessert )
accompanied by Rhine wine. How does that compare to slurping some soylent ? The table conversation ? The joy of eating ? I simply don't get it, what the fun of soylent could be. Must be me.
Re:"post-food consumers" (Score:3, Insightful)
Most meals are just an inconvenience.
The problem I have with this is that I don't think (Score:5, Insightful)
we really understand nutrition well enough to hack it. We keep learning that things we'd overlooked were significant -- phytochemicals, resistant starch, and a practically un-ending parade of classes of fats.
Still, we *are* being nutritionally hacked by food companies all the time, so I suppose this can hardly be worse. But the food companies have a specific goal in mind -- to get us to eat more of their product while making that product cheap as possible. I don't think we're at the point where someone can look at a nutrition textbook and design a healthy synthetic diet.
Awesome! (Score:3, Insightful)
I encourage all the "healthy People" and all of the "diet gurus" and all of the Activists to jump on this bandwagon.
The ones jumping off the "eat stuff" bandwagon will help me get cheaper foods to support my PETA habit... (People Eating Tasty Animals)
To toss a stab at the "oh god it takes so much effort to make food" whiner.
Open a crock pot, drop a slab of beef in it, open a jar of pepperoncinis and dump the contents in, turn on, walk away for a few hours, then consume. It takes less than a few minutes to prepare, and you won't get sick from mixing powders together.
Variety ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just had a meal (Score:1, Insightful)
It's fast to take, you don't need to spent upward to an hour to cook, so it's great if you're busy.
It makes things like "proper" meal into special occasion, you get to enjoy that proper food even more as well with a richer taste due to you not consuming anything of the sort for a while.
This is mostly aimed for single people for now I guess. Though quite frankly, we don't speak at the table here, it's considered impolite.
No matter it's Soylent or Soylent Green ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... where's FDA ?
I mean, FDA (the Food and Drug Administration for the uninitiated) is supposed to have been tasked to oversee the safety over ***FOOD***.
This guy is selling his Soylent brand ***FOOD*** to 20,000 people to the tune of $ 2 Million, isn't it time FDA takes some samples and have them tested for safety ?
I am never for BIG GOVERNMENT, but there are times the government does need to step in to assure the safety of the food people buy and eat - especially when this guy use the word "Soylent" as his brand of food, which originally means Soy and Lentil, when his food doesn't even contain Soy.
Re: "post-food consumers" (Score:5, Insightful)
As a different AC who can cook quite well, and considers cooking a rather major and serious hobby with considerable cumulative time and effort investments: I agree most meals are an inconvenience. While I cook most of my dinners from scratch, quite often breakfasts and lunches are more about fitting into a schedule,often lacking time, equipment and space to make a properly cooked meal. Unless you want to precook something specific to that meal, or take a decent chunk out of your lunch time to prepare something (even though I can prepare a decent dinner in 15 minutes, that would be a large fraction of my lunch time, and the entirety of my breakfast time), you end up with either leftovers or paying someone a lot more to get something decent, quick, and healthy.
If I had the option to replace a meal with a 5 minute drink, I would frequently exercise it for meals, because eating well is not the only pleasure in life and cooking is not my only hobby. I would rather get back to working on other interesting projects during the day, and even possibly get home earlier to have more time to concentrate on making a single nice meal, then spreading time over three meals.
I don't view every meal that I don't cook as a wasted opportunity, because sometimes the compromise is letting me make gains elsewhere, and I'm not trying to maximize every meal at the expense of any other priority or preference. I also don't consider every glass of water I drink to be a missed opportunity to drink something more interesting or better. I don't consider every packaged program I install to be a missed opportunity to program my own, nor would I question someone else's interest or skill in programming because they choose some packaged programs over doing everything from scratch.
Re:Just had a meal (Score:1, Insightful)
Is there anything more enjoyable than tasty food? (except maybe sex, for me is a tie)
Re:No matter it's Soylent or Soylent Green ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't imagine that the FDA would have much to say, beyond the usual cleanliness checks, etc. that any food company faces. After all doesn't pretty much everything in his concoction qualify as a ingredient or food additive? Hell, it's probably a lot closer to real food than a Twinkie.
Re:"post-food consumers" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I wouldn't care to be one of those gambling my health on the foodless diet, but I could certainly see the appeal of using this for a meal or two a day - it's likely more nutritionally complete than anything I normally eat, even if it's missing trace stuff. Hopefully he can get the price down to something more reasonable though - I mean a few bucks a serving? I can cook up a %$#@! awesome spread for that and be eating delicious, nutritious leftovers all week to defray the prep time.
I could also see this being a valuable asset for food-assistance programs of all kinds - dry, stable, almost flavorless powder that could be used as either a shake or an ingredient, and provides the most complete nutrition science can recommend? Where's the down side?
Re:Variety ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Funnily enough nobody is forcing you. You are clearly not the target for this product, but so far about 20,000 other people are.
I am one of the pre-orderers of Soylent. Why? I enjoy tasty and varied food but I don't always have the time or money to eat the way I'd like to eat, so I end up spending more money than I'd like on restaurants/takeout or eating really unhealthy food like Cup Noodles. Soylent appears to be a relatively affordable way to get a fast and nutritious meal replacement. While I try it out I will probably replace lunch and/or dinner with Soylent since for me these tend to be the most inconvenient meals. Other pre-orderers seem to view it differently and see food as more of a hastle that Soylent will help them avoid, but to each their own.
You might ask why Soylent and not an existing meal replacement drink? *shrug* For me at least it's really down to supporting Rob's stated vision for the project. I haven't done detailed research on how or if Soylent is different from existing products but I do know that his goal is different and going for total food replacement is probably a higher standard than instant breakfast drinks or diet drinks, which may mean something or nothing. I just ordered one of the lower tiers to try it out and if I like it I'll buy more, assuming the product continues to be produced.
Re:"Soylent Green is people!" (Score:5, Insightful)
You want a truly great read, get the book. You want a horrible viewing experience, get the film.
You want to make up your own mind instead of being told what to think by someone on the internet, do both.
As someone who's drinking it right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been drinking my homemade "soylent" (with a lowercase 's', because it's not his brand) most weekdays for about 2 months now. In fact, I'm drinking it right now, literally. Actually not literally, I set it down to type. I adapted it from various recipes I found online, all started by the ideas of the creator of Soylent. I'm also a competitive athlete, so I tweaked things quite a bit, particularly the macronutrients. So, as the (seemingly) only commenter who actually has experience with it, I'll point out a few things:
1. To those whining about lack of fiber...it has plenty of fiber (33.45 grams to be exact). More than that little bit of shredded lettuce in a Big Mac extra value meal. In fact, my bowel movements seem more regular on soylent than when I eat regular food.
2. I eat better on it than without it. Meaning: Okay, what if my recipe isn't perfect? What if I'm missing something? Well compare that to what I would otherwise normally eat on a weekday...maybe some toast for breakfast, a microwave chicken burrito for lunch, and a reasonably healthy but probably too large meal for dinner to make up for the slice of toast I had for breakfast. Then I have to try to work those meals around my workouts, which probably means downing some extra calories. Some days I ate well, some days not.
3. It's a timesaver. This is related to #2. If I wanted to take several hours to create the healthiest most ideal meals every day, then perhaps it would come out healthier than soylent. But let's face it, that just doesn't happen. I've tried that in the past, and it always falls by the wayside. I'd rather be out having fun...obviously if cooking was your version of play (e.g. it's your favorite hobby) then this isn't for you. I can hold my own pretty well in the kitchen and have always enjoyed making delicious meals once and a while, but 90% of the time it just seems like work.
4. I eat at better times. I spend 10 minutes in the morning mixing it up. Then it's right there, available to me anytime, all I have to do is go to the fridge and poor it into a glass, or take it with me in a water bottle, so I can eat at ideal times that are the healthiest, meaning my caloric distribution throughout is even and/or at proper times around my workouts, rather than having too few calories in the morning and too many late at night like most people do. Otherwise, I end up being too busy for awhile, then by the time it's my next meal I end up either just throwing something in the microwave and/or eating too much all at once, or I go too long before or after a workout without eating, or I eat right before a workout and my stomach isn't happy...you get the idea.
5. I never feel too hungry. I don't crave junk like I do otherwise. If I do have a thought like, "gee, some chips sound good," I don't feel compelled to eat them because I don't feel hungry, plus I know I can eat them on the weekend if I still want them.
6. I chose to eat normal on the weekends because that's when it becomes a social thing. Also, by knowing I'm going to eat other foods on the weekend it keeps me from craving junk, and also if I am missing something from my soylent recipe that only exists in regular food, then I'll still get some.
Re:Somebody wasn't paying attention (Score:5, Insightful)
This nitwit has borrowed the name, probably having seen the derivative film and never twigged to the fact that the word meant something.
It's a metaphor. He's not saying it's the exact same stuff that's in the book. Maybe it's silly, but it's also catchy. If he didn't know what he was doing when he named it, then perhaps it would be reasonable to call him a nitwit, but that's clearly not the case. It's like Sex Wax surfboard wax. Did the creators really think it was actually intended to be used for sex? Of course not. They named it that because it's catchy and people buy it. It also happens to be the best wax on the market IMO.
You can buy this (in a non-nasty form) today (Score:5, Insightful)
Go to your local drugstore. Go to the "Nutrition" isle. Purchase Ensure, Boost, Slim-Fast, or one of the store-brand generics. It has a smooth texture (unlike Soylent), a palatable tasted (unlike Soylent), and was developed by people that have some clue what they are doing (unlike Soylent.) If that's not enough calories for you, ask the Pharmacist to order Nutren or a similar product.
These are professionally-developed products that have been in use for years and years. The high-test stuff, such as Nutren, is used for people with feeding tubes (but it is flavored and can be drunk) and they live off this stuff for decades.
Re: "post-food consumers" (Score:1, Insightful)
Bullshit. 2 eggs on a tortilla wrap with salsa, a glass of water, medicine and checked the blackberry in about 5 1/2 minutes this morning. Hell, you can throw yogurt and fruit in a blender and get a smoothie in less than 2 minutes, including rinsing the blender. Toast and jam? Terribly hard to make; no longer than a cup of coffee. How long does it take to put together a reasonably healthy sandwich? You don't have to wait for the dough to rise. People do that for you. Apparently, you can't cook well; you can cook fancy. In fact, there are all sorts of things you can just toss in a crock pot and magically turn into breakfast, taste good and are nutritious.