

Silicon Valley gets a taste for food - deegles
http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21645497-tech-startups-are-moving-food-business-make-sustainable-versions-meat

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Vraxx
I've been eating soylent for "utility" meals for about 2 weeks now and I
couldn't be happier with the product. I usually eat one meal a day for the
satisfaction of eating food, but it's nice not having to deal with preparation
for the breakfast or lunch at work. This article is even slightly outdated as
soylent 1.4 was released a couple of weeks ago.

~~~
jkachmar
I actually just got my first batch of Soylent this week, and I'm cutting out
'traditional' food for 2 weeks as an experiment. I've only been eating it for
about a day and a half now, but changing from eating discrete meals to sipping
on a cup of Soylent continuously throughout the day is very different.

Have you noticed any psychological changes in how you view food since
starting?

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datashovel
The most noticeable thing to me is, before I started using Soylent as meal
replacement, I noticed my brain would shift attention and in a way interrupt
me to say "you need to go eat now, you're hungry". These days I don't notice
the interruptions as often and when they do happen they're not as significant.
Instead it's more like "Ok, I'm done with that task, what should I do now. Oh
yeah, I haven't eaten lunch yet..."

~~~
jkachmar
I'm curious, is there any reason you're breaking your Soylent consumption up
into meals? I've just been keeping a small mug of it on my desk and sip
regularly while I work; every hour or two I'll get up and refill it.

Aside from the convenience factor, it's nice (and strange) to go through my
day only feeling hungry in the morning before I've started eating.

~~~
datashovel
Actually I just used the term "lunch" to communicate the idea. I do similar to
what you've described. But generally I try not to let it sit there too long,
mainly because I imagine a spilled glass of Soylent might not be good for the
laptop :)

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Toast_
beyond meat's patent is such a fucking joke.
[https://www.google.com/patents/US20120093994](https://www.google.com/patents/US20120093994)

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pyrois
How is that a real patent? As far as I can tell (and I'm not a lawyer),
they're patenting mixing protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water in specific
ratios to make a meat substitute. Why isn't every veggie burger ever prior art
in this case?

~~~
jmedefind
I showed it to a former patent examiner.

It's just an application for a patent. It was rejected on 2/20/15\. Now it's
just kept around as prior art.

They also requested and then denied a refund on their filing fees apparently.
Cause it's a really stupid patent.

~~~
gyc
Well no not exactly. Yes, a final rejection was issued by the patent office on
2/24/15, and the applicant still has up to 6 months to respond to the final
rejection or to file an appeal. With respect to the request for refund, the
applicant requested a refund of extension fees and excess claim fees. The
refund for extension fees was granted but the refund for excess claim fees was
denied. None of this has anything to do with the merits of the patent
application itself.

To check on the status of this patent application, go to
[http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair](http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair),
enter the captcha, and then enter the patent application number (13/272,825).
Select the Image File Wrapper tab to view the various documents relating to
the prosecution of the patent application.

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mc32
What's interesting about this tack is that it would go against the anti-
corporate anti-big food movements which have steadily grown since the mid
seventies and had taken root vigorously in the recession and expressed itself
with people cooking at home more, cooking from scratch more. A belief that the
closer to the source the healthier the food.

But this is an attempt to figure out how to feed a growing world cheaply
(pocket-wise and ecology-wise) which small local organic farming would have
trouble achieving, presumably.

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amelius
Is there a working theory yet on how taste and smell work?

(Can they be decomposed like the RGB triplets of vision, or the frequencies of
sound?)

~~~
svachalek
Taste comes down to combinations of 5 basic flavors, but smell is very complex
and as far as I know, not well understood. The actual experience of food
however, combines both of these as well as temperature, texture, color, and
more.

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jobu
The hamburger substitute sounds promising, but if the point of this is to
create protein efficiently then this doesn't make any sense to me:

 _" Mayonnaise made without eggs that is creamy and smooth."_

Eggs are one of the most efficient sources of protein there is.

~~~
chaosphere2112
Right, but (at least in theory) the total economic/environmental cost of
growing the plants is lower than that of raising the chickens to produce the
eggs.

~~~
wavefunction
Do you have information on the environmental cost of growing the plants vs
eggs?

I would agree that factory farming of eggs has a terrible effect but it seems
like on a small scale it wouldn't necessarily be true.

~~~
maxerickson
It takes ~2.4 kg of feed to grow ~1 kg of (cooked) eggs.

(this is called the feed conversion ratio)

Eating vegetarian gives the baseline for comparison, a conversion ratio of
~1:1 (I think it is better to not claim exactly 1, animals eat different
things than humans and maybe do better with extracting value from fiber).

The details of a given process for making a lower compromise meat replacement
would have to be considered to calculate the equivalent measure. I don't think
it would even be 2:1, but that's just a guess.

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shanev
Silicon Valley needs to understand the food domain and it's environmental
impact better before investing in these processed food startups. We already
have the most efficient machine that converts plant matter into meat. It's
called a cow. Cows and other ruminants have evolved over millions, if not
billions of years, to make this process super efficient using just solar
energy (photosynthesis) and water. Who are we to think we can do better in a
few years in the lab?

Have these companies thought about the environmental impact of growing more
row crops to create this fake meat and eggs? Row crops destroy ecosystems and
reduce topsoil. It's also a system that sounds like it would need lots of
logistics and energy to operate. Also it's not sustainable.

Silicon Valley should instead fund organizations looking to work with nature
to create the future of food. Companies like Summer Technologies [1] are doing
the right thing by acknowledging nature and creating technology that empowers
sustainable agriculture that scales. With the right tools, these kind of farms
can be more productive than massive industrial farms [2], feed the growing
population of the world [3], while improving the quality of land and reducing
CO2. It's a win-win-win if I've ever seen one.

This article also fails to mention anything about how the dangers of meat are
greatly over exaggerated and not corroborated by modern science. [4] And
what's wrong with eggs? They're one of the most nutritious foods out there
with healthy omega-3 fats and a variety of minerals that are sorely lacking in
modern processed food diets.

[1] [http://www.summertechnologies.com](http://www.summertechnologies.com)

[2] Soil Carbon Cowboys:
[http://www.carbonnationmovie.com/about/clips/225-new-
video-s...](http://www.carbonnationmovie.com/about/clips/225-new-video-soil-
carbon-cowboys)

[3]
[http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world...](http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change)

[4] [http://chriskresser.com/red-meat-it-does-a-body-
good](http://chriskresser.com/red-meat-it-does-a-body-good)

~~~
ethanbond
I don't see any evidence that we have "the most efficient machine" and that
it's a cow. Evolution is incredibly slow, and humans outpacing it (using their
brains) is exactly why we're at the top of the food chain.

Who are we to think we _can 't_ do better in the lab, when almost every
worthwhile human invention has been precisely that – beating evolution at its
own game?

I do agree with your initial premise though, we should be very careful and
spend a lot of time considering the environmental impact. It's also very easy
to say that as a well-off westerner with abundant access to food, though ;)

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Egregore
I happy that they're not only working on taste, but also try to add all the
healthy nutrients to the product.

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liveoneggs
If only SV could first get a few decent restaurants they might not feel the
need to invent industrial chemical food.

