20,000 Customers Have Pre-Ordered Over $2,000,000 of Soylent

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."

Guy is a loon

[RobinEggs]

Go read his blog post about the "results" he experienced. He's giving the full-blown "I now have the body of a 12 year old and my brain increased in efficiency 400%" kind of crap under "qualitative". It's great to feel better after you start eating better, but unless his prior diet was >50% animal product and too much of it for his calorie needs, I'm calling bullshit.

Under quantitative, apparently his blood work improved quite a bit. Yeah, your blood work tends to improve when you eat a simple vegan diet, and that's all soylent contains. Vegan ingredients with a 2 oz mix of fish and vegetable oil per day.

I guess it's nice to have a supremely convenient and very healthy diet that makes you feel better, but he's laying it on pretty fucking thick. Not to mention you could create a diet of the same health benefits with maybe 15 raw ingredients. You could just put the shit in a blender if you wanted...

Re:"post-food consumers"

[dbIII]

That lesson was learnt by the British Navy before lime juice, and by some Arctic explorers almost just over a century ago (Karluk). State of the art diets let to deficiency problems that seemingly random fresh food could fix (eg. seal blubber and offel). The state of the art have moved on a lot, many things have been identified since the Karluk and surely many things since the rat experiment, but the true test is seeing if the state of the art diet really does perform in an experiment.

Re:"post-food consumers"

[dryeo]

Cheap food for prisons?

Re: "post-food consumers"

[AK Marc]

I can cook better than most, borderline cooking show good. Meals are still an inconvenience. I look forward to a cure for sleep, and a cure for meals.

Pre-ordering food?

[Animats]

This "pre-ordering" thing has gotten out of hand when someone takes $2 million in pre-orders for a food product. Even worse, their current payment policy:

"When is my card charged?
Since we have already reached our fundraising goal, your card will be charged immediately."

Since they promised shipment in "early 2014", and it's early 2014, If they don't start shipping in volume within days, they're going to run into trouble with the FTC's Mail Order Rule. (The Mail Order Rule can be summarized as "ship within 30 days of promised delivery date or offer a refund; after 60 days, send a refund unless the customer explicitly gives you more time in writing").

Fibre etc.?

[AxeTheMax]

From the article

I poop a lot less

That should be something to worry about. What I've read doesn't say much about fibre, but our digestive systems have developed not only to deal with directly useful food to absorb, but also to process such 'indigestibles', and to deal with all the variation we get in a normal diet. Without this work there is every likelihood that long term harm to the guts will result. We already know that this happens to factory farmed animals fed on processed food rather than their normal diet.

Re:"post-food consumers"

[AthanasiusKircher]

That lesson was learnt by the British Navy before lime juice, and by some Arctic explorers almost just over a century ago (Karluk). State of the art diets let to deficiency problems that seemingly random fresh food could fix (eg. seal blubber and offel).

I don't know much about seal blubber (though I believe it, like many animal fats, has decent concentrations of important fatty acids), but the idea that offal would solve nutrition problems isn't weird at all. I'd hardly call it "random fresh food."

Organ meats have high concentrations of lots of nutrients, since that's where a lot of specialized chemical stuff happens inside an animal. It's not surprising at all that -- particularly for mammals and things related to humans -- eating organ meats would provide a number of useful things that we need but which aren't found in decent concentrations elsewhere.

Ask anyone from many traditional cultures around the world -- organ meats are often considered delicacies. For some reason in the past century or so, Americans and other Western cultures have started to develop an aversion to offal, but that's a recent and somewhat stupid development.

Admittedly, the tastes and smells of organs can often be a little more unusual than your average steak. But with a little experience (and particularly with good recipes), they are quite delicious. We consume lots of things that taste weird or even bad the first time we encounter them (bitter foods like black coffee and beer come to mind), but because some of these foods have effects from consumption that are "useful" or at least desirable to us (coffee gives us "energy," beer gets us drunk), we get accustomed to flavors that are not often appealing at first.

Many traditional cultures still view offal in the same way: it may seem a little unusual, but the nutrition is more than worth the initial "eww!" experience.

More importantly, kids are exposed to these things at a young age (they are often even preferentially given to kids, because of their nutrition), so it doesn't seem "random," much less "weird" or "gross."