
Results of the 2015 Soylent Eaters Survey - ketosoy
http://www.ketosoy.com/blogs/news/17275588-results-of-the-2015-soylent-eaters-survey
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stcredzero
I tried Soylent. It made me fart. A lot. Really a lot. It was pretty
unprecedented in my life, and I'm generally pretty gassy and have even had the
bout of the vegetarianism thing where I pressure cooked and ate lots of beans.

Right now, I'm "changing my relationship with food" but by cooking everything
myself. I almost exclusively roast and steam things. So long as you can plan
things ahead a little bit, on about a 45 minute horizon, this is actually very
convenient. As it so happens, it's also very low carb. I've lost 12 pounds
since this summer. (Of course, people vary a lot, so your results may vary.)

Roasting results in complex flavors. You don't have to fuss with lots of
ingredients. or undertake a lot of cooking steps. Instead, it just happens for
you in an emergent process. We're programmers -- we should be excited by
emergent processes. Likewise with steaming fresh vegetables. So long as you
use fresh vegetables and do not overcook them, you wind up with lots of subtle
and fantastic flavors. (Add butter to be decadent.)

So basically:

    
    
        1) Learn how to roast and steam everything properly 
        2) Go buy fresh produce once every 3 or 4 days 
        3) Be as efficiency minded in the kitchen as you are in hot code
    

I call this my "hyper lazy cuisine for programmers." If you do this right,
you'll be able to cook 2-4 meals at a time with just several minutes of prep,
a 20-50 minute wait, then several more minutes of cleaning up. (With roasting,
foil wrap everything possible. Aluminum recycling is very sustainable, with
industry groups planning to achieve carbon neutrality in the near future. And
for you smarmy smarty-pants out there, gasification of the carbon electrodes
in smelters can become carbon neutral through the production of electrodes
from carbonized farm waste instead of coal.)

(If you like bacon, and would like to do that "hyper-lazy," I'm planning on
doing a blog post about, "Why you should make folding bacon a chore.")

~~~
ashark
> 2) Go buy fresh produce once every 3 or 4 days

I would add:

4) Buy stuff that's in season

This can save a lot of pre-planning on meals, since by just buying one or two
measures of several things (focusing on getting a variety of colors) you'll
naturally have what you need to make a bunch of traditional recipes, which are
almost always based around seasonal fruits/berries and veggies ( _i.e._ you
won't find a lot of recipes calling for both something that's ripe in Spring
and something that's ripe in late Fall).

You can buy first, plan later. I find it to be nearly as easy as sticking to
small set of dishes week after week, except that it gives you much more
variety. Since what you bought determines the set of things you can make, it
removes most of the time and stress associated creating new meal plans for
every week and shopping to match them. A good middle ground between the two,
IMO.

As a bonus, your food will taste better. AND it opens up the possibility of
shopping almost exclusively at farmers' markets, which will make it taste
better still. There's no, "oh, they didn't have any fresh X at the farmers'
market, and the dish I'm making tomorrow requires it, so now I have to go to
the grocery store too, even though I don't need anything else from there right
now". Staples at the grocery store, fresh stuff at the farmer's market, make
what you can with what you got.

This may be less practical in the Winter, depending on where you are, when
canned and frozen stuff becomes important if you don't want to eat rice &
beans and various stews for every single meal, but works well for the most
part.

~~~
stcredzero
_4) Buy stuff that 's in season_

Excellent point.

 _You can buy first, plan later._

Excellent! I'm going to adopt that as a pillar of "hyper-lazy cuisine."

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sowhatquestion
"Click-bait headlines" may have claimed it, but Rob Rhinehart himself was
always clear: Soylent isn't the end of food, it's the end of _having no
alternative to food_.

I eat Soylent about 50% of the time, so I'm not surprised the data show others
doing the same.

~~~
sowhatquestion
P.S. Weirdly enough, I crave it most in the morning. There's no better
breakfast than a simple Soylent and coffee (roughly one part Soylent, two
parts coffee). Somehow, Soylent ended up being the best non-dairy coffee
creamer of all time.

~~~
seanflyon
Assuming you mix it hot, how does that effect the Soylent? Does anything break
down and lose nutritional value?

~~~
devindotcom
Priorities, man! How does it affect the coffee!! Does it lose its delicious
coffee value?

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AlyssaRowan
I wonder, why the gender gap? Could it be associated in some way with these
products' resemblance to existing products with a strong marketing
differential between genders?

Men might think of protein shakes: you know, whey protein GMC-type stuff, that
kind of thing. Women, on the other hand, might think of _diet_ shakes: Slim-
Fast and the like.

These might both have a broadly "body improvement" type outlook, but one of
these associations is perhaps more positive-thinking than the other.

Or maybe not. Just a thought.

~~~
seiji
GNC used to have (still has?) two entirely different wrappers on their store-
brand protein shakes. One bottle proclaimed "lose weight! get lean!" (light
colors, blue/white) and the other boasted "build muscle! grow bigger!" (dark
colors, red/black). The contents of both bottles was _exactly_ the same. They
were exactly the same price. One was just marketed to women and the other to
men.

~~~
jakobbuis
And the claims are identical, it's only the wording that differs. Compare it
to pink and blue toothbrushes.

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bobdvb
I was an original sponsor of Soylent and I really thought it would be
interesting. However, as a European customer I was totally neglected and
eventually I cancelled my order (after corresponding with the founder about my
disappointment). I'd like to give something like this a go but the way they
treated me I am in no hurry.

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xkcd-sucks
How did Soylent manage to secure VC funding for a product with absolutely no
intellectual property protection?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Didn't Tesla give all of their patents away? And are at ~$200/share?

Knowledge is cheap. Execution is where value is delivered.

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cafebeen
They claim to study the "how and why" of soylent usage, but I don't see any
data or discussion of the "why". Am I missing something?

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PinnBrain
Does the headline writer not notice the irony at all? How about? `Nobody
really said Soylent was the end of food, despite what click-bait headlines
claim`

~~~
SyncTheory13
What? [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&rlz=1C1...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS565US566&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=active&q=soylent+end+of+food&spell=1)

~~~
Shish2k
Most of those headlines end in question marks, and therefor are implicitly
saying "it isn't" :P

~~~
ketosoy
The headlines I see on page one, in order:

* The End of Food - The New Yorker

* Soylent Isn't People; But Is It The End Of Food?

* New Yorker: Soylent to end food? (secondary article)

* 11 Craziest Parts of The New Yorker's Soylent Article (secondary article)

* Following the rise of soylent and the end of food | The Verge

* Soylent Could Make Food Preparation A Thing Of The Past

* Let's embrace the end of food | Al Jazeera America

2 of the 7 articles have question marks, and one of those is a secondary
article. 1 of 5 of the primary articles pose it as a question.

~~~
PinnBrain
Thank you for the detail!

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Animats
With Soylent, employees will only need 5 minutes for lunch. Once somebody
starts bottling this stuff premixed, it's going to be huge with startups.

~~~
quadrature
I really hope that's not what we've come to.

~~~
Karunamon
I wouldn't be too worried - but the stuff is a godsend if you are running your
tail off every now and then and need something cheap and easy to keep your
energy up.

I think that's Soylent's niche. Imagine those days when you're too
(busy/lazy/unskilled/low on cash) to cook or get takeout, so now you've got
this alternative that's probably better for you than the stuff you would have
gotten anyways.

~~~
Animats
Japan already has this. There's CalorieMate Block, a "nutritionally balanced
source of the energy needed for daily activities".[1] Humanoid chow,
basically. It's popular with salarymen who eat lunch at their desks.

CalorieMate is manufactured by Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company. No hype, no cool
branding. The very plain box just has a list of ingredients. Available in
convenience stores and vending machines. It's kind of blah, but it's not bad.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Calorie-Mate-Balanced-Chocolate-
Ounce/...](http://www.amazon.com/Calorie-Mate-Balanced-Chocolate-
Ounce/dp/B000W9CNOK)

~~~
quadrature
sounds a bit like [http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Complete-Balanced-Nutrition-
Str...](http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Complete-Balanced-Nutrition-
Strawberry/dp/B00032FQFO/ref=sr_1_1?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1424983866&sr=1-1&keywords=ensure)

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rdmcfee
Great marketing for a competing product. Has anyone tried ketosoy? I suppose
the obvious first question is: How does it taste?

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malkia
So this is the "Video killed the radio star" food

