[Veloce]

Some of you may have heard of Soylent, a kickstarter-backed product that would essentially serve as a meal replacement powder. According to its creator, Rob Rhinehart, it would allow people more time to focus on work and other activities and less time on cooking, cleaning, and dishes.

When I first heard about it, obviously I was at odds considering what I do for a living. A life without food is about the most depressing existence I can think of. But then I started reading his arguments and presentations. He's a very, very intelligent guy. And on some level, what he's proposing is an age-old practice. Many Buddhist monks start their day off with a simple porridge, and in many spiritual practices it's seen as a sin to dwell too much on getting pleasure from food. I can relate, as sometimes I burn out from thinking about food too much and the next meal.

That said, I love cooking and when I need to simplify my diet, I simply stick to oatmeal and boiled vegetables. I won't be consuming Soylent anytime, ever.

However, I started reading Rob Rhinehart's blog, and he's a very good, very witty writer. I came across this posting today; it's something I can easily see a computer-nerd version of Roosh writing:

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005

The rest of his blog is very interesting. Worth a read.

[Solus]

I'll take the green version.

[kinjutsu]

That is kinda awesome actually hahaha

[Santoro]

Dude has a sense of humor...this was his april fools post: Rob's article on genetically modifying kittens

[The Lizard of Oz]

thedude, I read his blog and felt that it was well matched to his product -- a lifeless, bloodless, tasteless distillation; a distillation, in this case, of all that is worst about mere useless "intelligence" on the Internet.

What can be duller, at this point, than this sort of sterile intelligence earnestly going through its death-dealing motions of irony and understatement? I would rather bathe in the fetid swamps of a thousand fatty Tumblrs than in this Dead Sea of sameness.

[All or Nothing]

(06-20-2014 11:28 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

thedude, I read his blog and felt that it was well matched to his product -- a lifeless, bloodless, tasteless distillation; a distillation, in this case, of all that is worst about mere useless "intelligence" on the Internet.

What can be duller, at this point, than this sort of sterile intelligence earnestly going through its death-dealing motions of irony and understatement? I would rather bathe in the fetid swamps of a thousand fatty Tumblrs than in this Dead Sea of sameness.

Lizard, we have pretty opposing views on science and engineering.

I have seen you criticize and berate new research and technology on a variety of threads and I simply do not understand your disdain.

The whole point of scientists and engineers developing new areas of research and creating new things is not for it to be a surefire home-run, but rather attempts at expanding the breadth of human knowledge and introducing technology into the foray that has the possibility to change how things work.

It is like curiosity and creativity powered by intelligence is bad if it does not fit into some preconceived list of things that you approve of.

You are free to express yourself, but the constant nipping at the heels of the STEM community wears on me.

[Veloce]

(06-20-2014 11:28 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

thedude, I read his blog and felt that it was well matched to his product -- a lifeless, bloodless, tasteless distillation; a distillation, in this case, of all that is worst about mere useless "intelligence" on the Internet.

What can be duller, at this point, than this sort of sterile intelligence earnestly going through its death-dealing motions of irony and understatement? I would rather bathe in the fetid swamps of a thousand fatty Tumblrs than in this Dead Sea of sameness.

He's interesting to me nonetheless. It's rare that someone can stand on an issue so absolutely opposite to my own values, yet make compelling arguments and statements that leave me nodding along.

Edit: I feel it's unfair to dismiss him as "mere useless 'intelligence'". The guy got a mil in backing to create a product he feels passionate about. I might disagree with the product and his mission statement, but he's a far cry from some well-spoken blogger that rants away ineffectively. The guy honestly believes his product is a viable solution to feeding 3rd world populations. Whether it is or isn't, I admire his boldness and plan of action.

[svenski7]

Thought this was going to be about Soylent Green.

[The Lizard of Oz]

@thedude, I guess it surprises me that this guy is interesting to you since, whatever his arguments, -- such as they are -- he strikes me as the personification of what is uninteresting, in fact indistinguishable from the same thin mental gruel that is served up by countless others on the web circa 2014. Your own posts, at their best, are full of life and interest, so I am mildly nonplussed to see you drawn to the opposite of those things.

@All or Nothing, what you say is very odd since I'm probably the biggest fan of technological progress on the forum -- in fact I'm sure plenty of guys roll their eyes whenever I start talking about the inexorable advance of mathematics and computing power and how this is what sentience does to make progress against materials and so forth (all completely true but it may not be what every dude wants to have for breakfast lunch and dinner ). So I don't know how you could so completely misunderstand my feeling about those things. I'm genuinely curious -- can you give an example where I was "criticizing and berating" new research and technology?

[Foolsgo1d]

A powder mixed with water does not give you the energy. Unless it provides 2-3k calories then it wont do anything. Hell if that stuff existed we wouldn't have MRE's for our soldiers.

[scorpion]

Imagine a future where the vast majority of humanity lives on Soylent or something like it, a "nutritional" slop manufactured by large corporations in order to feed the masses. Meanwhile, only the rich would be wealthy enough to eat real food. Pretty disturbing, especially since it's actually quite plausible. People who never ate real food wouldn't know what they were missing, similar to the way that people born in poverty aren't existentially miserable, simply because they don't know any other life.

[runsonmagic]

I am for it in theory, but in practice it's terrible.

I am a prime candidate, since I already take a greens supplement, fish oil, protein powder... what if you could put all those in one drink? Score!

The problem is what he is making is not nutritional.

His problem is sourcing. Say he determines you need 150g of protein per day. Where does that protein come from? Vegetables? Soy? Whey? What kind of whey? Is it sourced from grassfed cows or factory farmed cows? What side effects will consuming that much factory farmed anti-biotics have?

Go through EVERY ingredient that way. Where does this magnesium come from? Where does this selinium come from?

He also believes you need 300g carbs per day. WTF? And sourced from oats?! Do you see the problem? Would you eat 300g of oat carbs per day? Sure you'll feel full, but why?

I like the idea of a comprehensive nutritional meal replacement in theory but his execution is sloppy at best.

[Chemical O]

"Is it made of people?"

[The Beast1]

I'm against any form of artificial meat and using insects as food. It's nothing more of an excuse to move normal foodstuffs into the realm of luxury goods.

I'm already paying astronomical prices on meats, dairy, and eggs. If I have to eat this powdered shit i'd be pissed.

[Samseau]

http://www.returnofkings.com/11247/why-r...s-an-idiot

[Slick Shimmer]

It's way more likely we will see insect meat become traditional filler.

[Veloce]

(06-21-2014 09:39 AM)scorpion Wrote:  

Imagine a future where the vast majority of humanity lives on Soylent or something like it, a "nutritional" slop manufactured by large corporations in order to feed the masses. Meanwhile, only the rich would be wealthy enough to eat real food. Pretty disturbing, especially since it's actually quite plausible. People who never ate real food wouldn't know what they were missing, similar to the way that people born in poverty aren't existentially miserable, simply because they don't know any other life.

What you're talking about exists today, except instead of a "'nutritional' slop", it's highly addicting, empty-calory, amazingly tasting slop (i.e. junk food) that is manufactured by large corporations in order to feed the masses.

Meanwhile, the middle class and the rich are increasingly the only ones wealthy enough to eat real food. Rhinehart does an effective cost-per-calorie breakdown of a tomato vs. a fast food cheeseburger. A fresh tomato is, by a wide margin, much more expensive than a cheeseburger. I can tell you firsthand that wholesale prices of produce and animal protein are increasing at an alarming rate, not to mention higher quality products that aren't the result of the factory farming methods. At farmer's markets, I'm regularly seeing chicken go for $8/lb. One single chicken costs $24-$32? Fuck that.

When the organic movement really got started, we were all told, "Well, the more people that support organic farming, the cheaper it will get." I haven't seen this.

Kurt Vonnegut had a poignant anecdote in one of his books...I forget which one. It was a dystopian portrayal of citizens in the future going to a seedy movie theater. Instead of watching porn, the citizens watch footage of people eating fresh fruit, since fresh fruit no longer exists in the future and the imagery of seeing mouths bite into juicy, sweet fruit is considered raunchy.

Shit, I'm gonna go eat a peach right now.

I don't agree with the idea of Soylent, but Rob is certainly no idiot and his criticisms of our food production system are absolutely valid. The number one cause I see of how we got to where we are, is the population shift from rural to urban. It costs next to nothing to grow a perfectly delicious, sweet tomato. But to grow 10,000 perfectly delicious, sweet tomatoes, to till the field, fertilize, plant, water, harvest, store, and ship those tomatoes is increasingly expensive. There's a huge amount of waste involved as well. And once that tomato has been off the vine for more than a day, it's flavor diminishes greatly. So you wind up paying $4 per pound for something that grows incredibly easy and is absolutely delicious fresh off the vine, but instead you get a flavorless chunk of plant flesh that is mostly calorie deficient and only provides meager amounts of fructose, some plant cellulose, and a little hit of lycopine. This is the system that "whole food" enthusiasts would prefer we live by? Sounds pretty faulty to me.

Dan Barber has some very compelling arguments regarding food production, and he accurately points out that we put in a huge amount of resources to growing food and only reap a very small fraction of what goes in (like fruit). Many parts of many plants are edible in some way or another, and just like it was (is) fashionable for "nose-to-tail" eating, soon you will hear more and more of "seed-to-stalk" eating. It'll be the next hipster buzz-term in new restaurants, but these ideas have to reach big agra. It does no use for the country to have a tiny population of boutique farmers to be maximizing their plot of land. These ideas have to move their way up into our commercialized food production system.

The only other solutions I see is with weird byproducts such as Soylent, or restructuring urban plots to include communal gardens, or a population shift away from urban centers and to repopulate rural areas which would include a lifestyle of living closer to the land (growing food yourself) and away from Chipotle and Starbucks (no chance in hell).

[Valhalla]

Here's a documentary about soylant and rob

http://youtu.be/t8NCigh54jg

http://www.vice.com/read/rob-rhinehart-i...-eat-again

[Basil Ransom]

(06-20-2014 11:28 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

thedude, I read his blog and felt that it was well matched to his product -- a lifeless, bloodless, tasteless distillation; a distillation, in this case, of all that is worst about mere useless "intelligence" on the Internet.

What can be duller, at this point, than this sort of sterile intelligence earnestly going through its death-dealing motions of irony and understatement? I would rather bathe in the fetid swamps of a thousand fatty Tumblrs than in this Dead Sea of sameness.

The funny thing is, though you know him only through his words, his demeanor is very much like you describe:

It's borderline parody, how robotic this man is - although I suppose such types abound in Silicon Valley tech circles. It reminds me of how we let economists tell us how to lead our lives and structure our societies, when economists are among the most profoundly lifeless people, and most ignorant of man's needs and desires.

Quote:

Meanwhile, the middle class and the rich are increasingly the only ones wealthy enough to eat real food. Rhinehart does an effective cost-per-calorie breakdown of a tomato vs. a fast food cheeseburger. A fresh tomato is, by a wide margin, much more expensive than a cheeseburger. I can tell you firsthand that wholesale prices of produce and animal protein are increasing at an alarming rate, not to mention higher quality products that aren't the result of the factory farming methods. At farmer's markets, I'm regularly seeing chicken go for $8/lb. One single chicken costs $24-$32? Fuck that.

It's clear that the world's population, and probably America's as well, is far in excess of what's optimal for human health and prosperity. The only way the whole world can be fed is with a substandard diet - and few are willing to sound the alarm and question the status quo because you're basically a Nazi if you say that the third world should have fewer births, and that the West should stop mass immigration (the source of most to all population growth in the West). Innovations like Soylent and in vitro fertility treatment are enabling inventions, inventions that accord us the ability to further degrade the human condition and further diminish the dignity of the individual. Scorpion described this with Soylent, while IVF burnishes the career woman's delusion that she can have it all - a strong family, career and balance sheet. There are many other such enabling innovations afoot, whose aim is to mend the outward symptoms of a deeper problem, thereby amplifying the virulence of that original problem.

I was just in a far more sparsely populated city than my current home of Los Angeles, and the enhanced quality of life in many ways was obvious and significant, including (or especially) in the attitudes of the girls - and this is not a location that you'd pick for 'love tourism.' If the average man cannot afford himself and his family a healthful diet and a comfortable home, as is most assuredly the case in our metropolises, then we have to wonder if we are overpopulated. To be sure, this ideal state of affairs is unprecedented in historical terms, but we have achieved it in the past, and technology permits us a high enough productivity level to deliver it... but population density has in many areas ushered in a material retreat in the human condition. Some allege that this is the history of human existence, whereby man went from hunting to farming, at great cost to his physical health and prowess.

The idea that population growth is essential to the well-being of individuals, to the prosperity of the average man, is of the same quality of the idea that women entering the workforce en masse would enrich us, i.e. evil and wrong. I'm continually surprised at how many otherwise intelligent people believe this sophistic fiction that population growth is synonymous with individual wealth and prosperity. Of course, big corporations and big government want higher population, because it means bigger revenues and more people to control, even if the typical man suffers a lower quality of life.

Median male wages in the US peaked in 1973, and virile men are increasingly frittering away their earnings involuntarily to the selfish elderly. Instead of letting your mother sleep in your home into her old age, a fifth of your earnings are going to fund a whole class of old people you've never met.

[Samseau]

^ Well Rob is basically an idiot I won't ever take advice from. The video reveals it. Go to 1:30 and he says he spent $500 a month on food, and $150 a month on solyent. What a joke.

I spend $200 a month on food, and I eat fresh vegetables, meats, carbs, eggs, and milk every day. Why would I spend $150 on some processed liquid nasty shit he calls Soylent? Rob is an amatuer who sucks with food.

[Veloce]

(06-21-2014 02:36 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  

It's clear that the world's population, and probably America's as well, is far in excess of what's optimal for human health and prosperity. The only way the whole world can be fed is with a substandard diet - and few are willing to sound the alarm and question the status quo because you're basically a Nazi if you say that the third world should have fewer births, and that the West should stop mass immigration (the source of most to all population growth in the West).

I would argue this. If America created a social program focused on integrating agrarian principles into normal, everyday life, you'd be amazed at what could happen.

The problem is that not enough people are interested in working with the land. You couldn't force it on the population. What I'm talking about here are community gardens. Community gardens are presently used as a sort of past-time for inner city troubled youth and community service programs, but they offer a truly sustainable model for feeding the world's populations.

Since agriculture has existed, it has been largely of the CENTRALIZED model. The problems with this are endless. In a hypothetical "village" society where you have the farmer, the blacksmith, the butcher, the doctor, etc, it makes sense to produce the largest amount of food possible, with the smallest amount of labor. We are a far cry from that scenario, and we OVERproduce food. There are grain silos filled to the brim that will never get touched, we have more corn, soy, and wheat than we know what to do with. We have entire states that are made up almost entirely of farmland that releases tons of nitrogen into water supplies that create dead zones in their outlet.

Meanwhile, in Africa, they have more land than they know what to do with and none of the know-how or resources to utilize it, not to mention corrupt governments that won't allow steps to be taken to feed their population.

As the world grows, the old model of food production has not changed drastically, and the progress under that system is measured in calories per acre.

What I would propose is a DECENTRALIZED food production system. Instead of several farms the size of Rhode Island, you have neighborhood farms, thousands of them spread throughout a metropolitan county. Want to talk about job creation? Creating supply and demand? Affordable and higher quality food? There would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of farming jobs created overnight. There would be thousands of companies created, trade relationships established, companies going public. In L.A. you'd have West Hollywood peaches, South Central citrus, Eagle Rock herbs, all offering truly local, fresh produce for less than half the price of what's found in any grocery store or farmer's market.

Humans have moved away from food as new industries emerged, all in the name of progress. Rhinehart touches upon this; our greater efficiency allows us to forget about food and work on particle accelerators, and apparently that's "progress". But what real progress have we achieved? Land a man on the moon? Create microprocessors that allow women to attention-whore in bars? If there's so much progress, why are people more stressed than ever, working harder than ever, and having shittier human relations than ever?

What does the average person get out of particle accelerators? Nothing.
What does the average person get out of food? Life.

I know what I'm preaching are Communist ideals, but they needn't be associated with Communism at all; to me it's just common sense and sustainable models. The only Communist reference is to the typically agrarian-based economy that is espoused.

The problem with my scenario is it requires surmounting the problem of human laziness, and political change, both of which are unlikely if not completely insurmountable. It's too radical of a change from the current system. People would rather spend 20 minutes looking for a parking spot at Whole Foods, herding inside that clusterfuck of humanity, and spend $2 on an unripe peach that was picked a week ago, than simply grow one in their backyard for pennies on the dollar. And we would never see any state-sponsored spearhead for this kind of endeavor for community gardens either. It's too forward-thinking and would mean ending their relationship with lobbyists and campaign funding from companies like ConAgra and Monsanto.

[Nemencine]

Some of the dystopian points raised, i have a couple of response to:

#1. on a cost/benefit basis, will increasingly efficient greenhouse technology bridge the gap in the future? With greenhouse technology, you can turn vast areas of wasteland in to a farm, even rooftops of urban areas or sides of skyscrapers. Is there a taste difference between greenhouse bred food and traditional farm ones?

#2. This goes to point #1. Hydroculture, hydrofarming, hydroponics. Which eliminates the need for soil completely. Hydroponics is basically "soylent for plants".... so we can then turn around and eat those plants. As the technology in these areas become more efficient, what effects will it have on the dystopian vision for food?

#3. Genetically engineered food(animals and plants.). Already they can make salmons that are 5 times bigger, pinker, and tastier than natural wild salmons by tweaking around the genetic codes of salmons. They can even shorten the gestation periods of animals by modifying their genes. Genetically modified foods will require less maintenance, and have greater durability and longevity. It will accomplish all this without the need to add artificial preservatives. (this occurred to me when you mentioned fresh tomatoes having a day before losing their flavours.)It is possible to genetically make tomatoes that are bigger, juicier, redder, and preserve their flavours long after they've been plucked from their vines...all these without the use of chemical preservatives. Again, what effect will this have on the dystopian vision of food?

#4. The land part of planet Earth is only 25%. the remaining 75% is water(ocean, etc). There are more marine animals in the ocean than there exists on the land part of planet earth. Basically, there are more meat in the ocean than on land. Also, there are more natural resources in the ocean than there are on the land part of planet earth. There are some technologies being developed to increase the efficiency of farming the oceans....cost/benefit of these technologies in the near future versus a dystopian future of food.

#5. The soylent by rob reinhart will serve well on deep interstellar or interplanetary missions to mars, etc. Besides, the technology may lay the groundwork for a futuristic food replicators, something that will re-sequence and re-combine proteins, minerals, hydrocarbons, and flavours, etc, to create a chicken that perfectly matches your taste bud requirement...i.e..to create a a perfectly looking and tasting chicken that wasnt a live chicken before, albeit, having all the nutrients and fats, etc of a real chicken and also tasting like one. The first television was a huge disappointment compare to what we have now; maybe this is the first baby step in creating a food replicator?

#6. On the issue of organic farming, I think organic farming cost has a floor because it strictly requires organic components-- which are not synthetic. Engineering/science can reduce the cost of synthetics at a faster rate than it can do for organics. The cost may potentially be reduced with influx of more people thereby introducing more supply...however, organic food requires organic component to grow(you cannot use cheaper and cheaper synthetics), hence the floor to the cost reduction.

regards,

Nemencine

[Basil Ransom]

(06-21-2014 03:44 PM)thedude3737 Wrote:  

The problem with my scenario is it requires surmounting the problem of human laziness, and political change, both of which are unlikely if not completely insurmountable. It's too radical of a change from the current system. People would rather spend 20 minutes looking for a parking spot at Whole Foods, herding inside that clusterfuck of humanity, and spend $2 on an unripe peach that was picked a week ago, than simply grow one in their backyard for pennies on the dollar. And we would never see any state-sponsored spearhead for this kind of endeavor for community gardens either. It's too forward-thinking and would mean ending their relationship with lobbyists and campaign funding from companies like ConAgra and Monsanto.

Great post - I made the mistake of seeing the status quo and assuming it *must* be this way. Your point about distribution is well-taken - the fraction of every dollar of money spent on food that actually goes to farmers is so small it's almost criminal - it's 20%. I don't know what a solution would look like, but even nudging up that percentage to 25 or 30% could have a dramatic effect. Still, 'gentleman farmers,' in everything I've seen, make little money - it's a rich man's game to make sub-minimum wage earnings from farming.



Also, historically, imagine across human history, the typical ratio of food spending to medical spending. 10:1? 20:1? 50:1? In America, the ratio is about 1:3, 6.4% to 17.7%*. America spends the least amount of money on food as a percent of income of any of 83 countries studied** The Swiss and the Swedes spend about 11-12% of their income on food, about double what we spend.

*http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS
** http://www.ibtimes.com/us-spends-less-fo...ps-1546945

While I haven't quite thought about it at the city scale, I have had thoughts like yours about my workplace. Where I work there is a fair amount of landscaping and lawns - and every time I see it, I wonder, wouldn't this be put to better use with fruit trees or vegetable plants? Much of the landscaping is already labor and water intensive - either have low maintenance plants, or higher maintenance ones that actually bear fruit.

[Cyr]

(06-21-2014 09:21 AM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

@thedude, I guess it surprises me that this guy is interesting to you since, whatever his arguments, -- such as they are -- he strikes me as the personification of what is uninteresting, in fact indistinguishable from the same thin mental gruel that is served up by countless others on the web circa 2014. Your own posts, at their best, are full of life and interest, so I am mildly nonplussed to see you drawn to the opposite of those things.

@All or Nothing, what you say is very odd since I'm probably the biggest fan of technological progress on the forum -- in fact I'm sure plenty of guys roll their eyes whenever I start talking about the inexorable advance of mathematics and computing power and how this is what sentience does to make progress against materials and so forth (all completely true but it may not be what every dude wants to have for breakfast lunch and dinner ). So I don't know how you could so completely misunderstand my feeling about those things. I'm genuinely curious -- can you give an example where I was "criticizing and berating" new research and technology?

^Yes, what you are saying is true. I don't think I'ver seen you argue against technology. In fact I remember being frustrated when you are evangelical in favour of technological change haha.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Something that I've observed for a while now is that certain intelligent white dudes, once past their very first blush of youth -- with that first precocious white hair, so to speak -- are irresistibly drawn to some variety of SWPL agrarian asceticism. They become enamored of the dopey idea that you have to "farm the land" to have some right to its fruits, and that this impoverished vision of life is the locus of all human integrity.

It is nothing of the sort. There is nothing great or especially inspiring about "farming the land"; it is dull and tedious work, made more tolerable over time by advances in farming technology that have allowed us to relegate most of the work to machines. One of the very best consequences of the technological progress of the past century and more has been the dramatic reduction in the percentage of the population that is obliged to work in agriculture. To pine for a general regression to the hellish tedium of "farming" is not integrity; it is just one more utterly banal form of Gaia-guilting and ingrate masochism.

Being released from general farming duties is not bad, it's good. That does not mean, however, that "building particle accelerators" is somehow the only thing "we" "do" when we no longer "farm". Why all this rhetorical extremity that does nothing more than reduce the richness and variety of life in our endlessly interesting and complex world to an ugly and thin caricature?

To say that the only things progress has brought us are "selfies and shitty human relations" is to deal in such caricatures, and it reveals a lamentable truth: that many intelligent men have become cowards in the face of complexity. Faced with a world of unprecedented richness and bewildering variety, intelligent men are quailing and indulging in laughably sentimental visions of the "noble past" to assuage their ingrate rages and SWPL guilt complexes. Because the imagined integrity of the past is just that: a thinly imagined fraud.

The problem is that men expect everything and all at once: ease, comfort, convenience, and worst of all, lasting and insistent "happiness" at all times. They demand every imaginable good, material and spiritual alike, and can hardly tolerate -- much less with the great good humor required -- the unbelievably rich and protean culture in which we exist. They don't even have the boyish ability to enjoy being tumbled in the waves for its own sake. Unwilling to dare surfing the endless complexity of the world as it is, the intelligent -- but deeply uncreative -- men of this time have become whiners, ill-humored ingrates and thinkers of thin and fake thoughts. They need to reexamine their premises if they want to enjoy the life that is there, begging to be enjoyed -- like a luscious young girl begging to be ravished by a man that dares to not be a coward.