It lasts for years without refrigeration, preparing it is as easy as measuring out your daily dose and mixing it with water
There’s a romance to food. It’s one of life’s great sensory and social pleasures. But a lot of us don’t eat healthily, and a lot of us don’t enjoy the process of preparing food, especially when we’re eating alone. Furthermore, the way we eat today is incredibly wasteful throughout the entire production and consumption process, to the point where it actively damages our bodies and our planet. Enter Soylent: a food engineered to efficiently deliver 100 percent of the healthy body’s needs with minimal waste, junk food-beating convenience and a very low cost, or, as the inventors put it, “creating an efficient form of fuel for humanity for the first time in history.” Food has always been sexy, and this sounds about as exciting as artificial insemination. But when you check out the details, this ambitious plan actually makes a lot of sense.
This is a tough project to look at objectively, because food ranks alongside sex and sleep as one of the great pleasures of life. The subtle dance of flavor and texture, the mystery of the exotic, the social ritual of the shared meal that has glued families, tribes, friends and clans together for hundreds of thousands of years.
But if you can look past the romance and think about food rationally, there are some pretty significant problems with the way we eat in the developed world. For starters, it’s wasteful. If two things cost the same and one is bigger, we’ll go for the bigger one, all else being equal. American restaurant serving sizes have taken this to its logical conclusion. The result is either overeating or perfectly good food going in the bin, not to mention the packaging waste of all that extra food.
Secondly, a lot of us aren’t very good at it. I’d be fascinated to know what percentage of the population genuinely eats well, according to what the body needs, as opposed to overdoing it on the sugars, or salts, or carbs, or fats, or simply leaving out important nutrients because we felt like eating something else that day.
Thirdly, and more broadly speaking, there are supply chain issues. Steak, many people agree, is very tasty. But the land, water, feed and emissions cost of producing it is massive. As we have noted before, the calorie yield of a piece of meat is typically around one fifth of the calorie yield of the grain you’ve fed to raise that cow. Every time I eat a steak, I’m effectively throwing away four times that amount of calories. So I’m prepared to go along with Rob Rhinehart when he says there’s got to be a better way.
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Replacing food
- 'A lot of things people are tentative about': Danbury-area towns replace large-scale summer events with smaller oneson April 12, 2021 at 12:42 pm
The St. Mary’s Carnival, another popular town affair, has been canceled as well. While Knickerbocker hopes the COVID landscape will allow the town to continue its Food Truck Fridays, the event will ...
- Food City plans bigger supermarket to replace East Ridge store next yearon April 12, 2021 at 12:01 pm
Food City plans to relocate its East Ridge grocery store next year into a new and bigger supermarket that will include a Gas 'N Go fuel station, a food cafe and a broader selection of produce and ...
- Research Triangle Park agtechs' moves highlight sector's growth potential for food supplyon April 12, 2021 at 11:36 am
"Now with a lot of the societal pressures of people wanting a cleaner food supply, less chemistry used to grow their crops, biologicals are this great new emerging segment where there's a lot of ...
- Popular Foods That May Cause Lasting Damage to Your Skin, Say Dermatologistson April 12, 2021 at 10:46 am
We consulted dermatologists to find out the popular foods you should stay away from to keep your skin as healthy and youthful as possible.
- New Food City To Open In East Ridge In 2022on April 12, 2021 at 10:24 am
plans to construct a new Food City and Gas N’ Go on Ringgold Road in East Ridge. The 54,000+ square foot supermarket will serve as a replacement for the existing location and is expected to open early ...
- Here's all the new food for this year's Florida State Fair, ranked by how weird it ison April 12, 2021 at 9:13 am
Dutch stroopwafels replace the tortilla chips or shells ... Loaded tater burger Another strictly savory beast, this one new from Carousel Foods, is a hamburger with shredded toasted cheese, cottage ...
- Miss Manners: Will the new type of memorable wedding replace the grandiose gala?on April 12, 2021 at 7:30 am
What will the post-pandemic wedding be like? For couples who postponed getting married because of restrictions on crowds, it will presumably be that same pre-pandemic extravaganza: Three days of ...
- All-natural blue pigment found in red cabbage could replace artificial food coloring made from petroleumon April 9, 2021 at 1:13 pm
Blue is the world's most popular color but the hue rarely appears in nature, so manufacturers have had to resort to artificial dyes and chemicals to create blue food. That could soon change, now that ...
- More districts impacted by recent floods are eligible to apply for SNAP Replacement Benefiton April 8, 2021 at 5:13 pm
Due to recent floods and landslides, the new deadline to submit applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Replacement Benefit has been extended to April 14.
- New research finds a natural blue that could replace artificial colorson April 8, 2021 at 1:43 pm
The discovery is the result of more than a decade of analysis funded by Mars and a multidisciplinary approach involving analytical chemistry, food science, biochemistry, synthetic biology, color ...
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- In food, the carpet and cupboards - a Hamilton family's moth invasion that won't endon April 11, 2021 at 9:54 pm
It started with a bug flying into her daughter's ear, now a year later, a Hamilton woman's home and pantry are infested with the moths and larvae.
- 40 Expensive Mistakes You Don’t Realize You’re Making In An Average Dayon April 10, 2021 at 3:00 am
Little things drain your budget every day, but you can fix those expensive mistakes with these helpful products — and you don't have to spend a lot to save.
- Sports Nutrition Market 2026 With Top Key Players Coca-Cola Company, Abbott Nutrition, PepsiCo, Glanbia, Reckitt Benckiser Groupon April 8, 2021 at 9:12 pm
Sports Nutrition Market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of +9%. The base year considered for the study is 2019 and the forecast period considered To 2026. Sports ...
- Nongshim heir slates meal replacement noodles as next growth engineon April 8, 2021 at 3:52 am
The meal replacements market grew significantly here with the outbreak of COVID-19 and the increasing number of one-person households. To better meet the trend, Vice Chairman Shin decided to focus on ...
- Norway’s Kolonial rebrands as Oda, bags $265M on a $900M valuation to grow its online grocery delivery business in Europeon April 7, 2021 at 10:30 pm
Food delivery startups, and specifically those focused on grocery delivery, continue to reap super-sized rounds of funding in Europe, buoyed by a year of pandemic living that has led many consumers to ...
- The Simply Good Foods Company (SMPL) Q2 2021 Earnings Call Transcripton April 7, 2021 at 1:29 pm
And if you think about it, that makes a fair amount of sense. While we've been sitting at home, we are probably eating more meals and using our products less for meal replacement. When we start going ...
- The Simply Good Foods Company (SMPL) CEO Joe Scalzo on Q2 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcripton April 7, 2021 at 12:02 pm
While we've been sitting at home, we are probably eating more meals and using our products less for meal replacement. When we start going back to work and in transit to work, fewer meal occasions ...
- The Simply Good Foods Company Announces Participation in Walmart’s Fight Hunger. Spark Change. Campaignon April 5, 2021 at 6:21 am
The Simply Good Foods Company (Nasdaq: SMPL) (“Simply Good Foods”) a developer, marketer and seller of branded nutritional foods and snacking products under Atkins® and Quest® brand names has ...
- 1 in 4 meat substitutes ‘do not contain enough protein to be considered a source of protein’on March 31, 2021 at 8:11 am
according to research by Safefood into the nutritional content of more than 350 products which claim to be meat replacements. Ireland-based food safety and nutrition organisation Safefood looked at ...
- Bulk 1 Complete Food Shake review: one of the tastiest protein-rich meal replacement options to tryon March 28, 2021 at 8:52 pm
It’s true, meal replacement shakes used to taste not all ... is a very decent alternative to Huel and other complete food products on the market today. As well as containing loads of healthy ...