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Today in lunatic food faddism: Why eat at all? Just subscribe to my tasteless liquid diet and all your nightmares of tasting food will come to an end.
Via Russell Saunders and h/t to Lindsay Beyerstein for bringing this to my attention.
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That seemed like satire.
Yup. Isn’t “Soylent” the give-away?
Yeah, really. “Oops, I omitted iron from my carefully constructed food free diet!”
The loudest, most amusing alarm for me was “As any Instagram user knows, food is a big part of life.”
“I ran 3.14 miles non-stop. This is an irrational improvement.”
Now if only he’d talked about not eating pie in the same sentence, everyone might have gotten the joke.
By all accounts, it’s not a joke. Unless the person is really, really skilled.
What accounts are ‘all accounts?’ You also assured us the brothel menu wasn’t a fake but it turned out to almostly certainly be such.
Loomis hasn’t yet admitted to any error in the matter of the brothel menu, has he? That leaves him free to foist more nonsense on us.
Outrage about blog posts!!!!!!!!!
If a student wrote “by all accounts” in her paper, wouldn’t you circle that phrase in (soothing blue) pen?
Confirmation bias much?
Paranoia looks more and more prophetic every day.
It sounds like Beckett’s description in “Watt” of how Knott’s meals for the week are prepared, by taking all the ingredients of a balanced, stimulating diet and boiling them for several hours until they are reduced to a homogeneous pulp that is equal parts food and drink.
Hmm…
Maybe this is the reason that space aliens are usually depicted as semi-amorphous, toothless beige-white humanoids.
But they’re not really space aliens – that’s our future humans, trying to warn us not to fall for this fake food fad – or else we’ll make ET look like Arnold Schwartzenegger.
If you poke around a bit our nutritional pioneer eventually states he will not share his recipe because it might not be good for you.
Neither will he say where he gets his supplies. Some places require you to buy an bulk. And others are so small they’d be cleaned out by too many orders.
But if you give him your contact info he’ll send you some of his batch.
Oh ho ho. Yes please, I would like some urine in a jar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81eKLe_j7sc
I saw this on Ezra Klein’s blog… and the dude reporting it seemed genuinely excited about not needing to eat food any more, and had signed up to be a guinea pig. Bizarre.
But it’s perfectly plausible since people get liquid diets all the time and the main drawbacks come from the general need to do it intravenously… since most people would want real food if they were conscious and with it.
Here is the Wonkblog thing I mentioned.
It’s just hard for me to believe there are that many people who find food “annoying”.
That seemed sarcastic to me unless there’s some new fad among the kids these days that I’m not aware of.
Well he says at the end that he’s offered to try it and do blood tests, so even if he knows that few people yearn to be free from the yoke of solid food, he appears to be one of those that would like to spread his liquid diet wings… which is fine I guess? But definitely weirder that wanting to pretend you are eating like a caveman.
Is Wonkblog capable of sarcasm?
I do happen to know one, actually.
Unfortunately for her, her children do not share her views, so she still has to cook actual meals and stuff.
It does fit with the long tradition of “someday we’ll eat meals in the form of convenient food pills!” fantasies.
Trivia: the whole “food pill” thing mostly came out of the postwar British sci-fi tradition.
Food quality in the UK for most of the population for a good twenty or thirty years after WWII was pretty awful. Domestic sources of production had been crippled by the war, and it takes a long time to spool such things back up. And their economy was such that imports were costly. Many people in that era grew up in an environment in which eating was something of a chore, because all they could afford were things that were bland, tasteless, very unappetizing, and usually boiled to within an inch of it’s life.
In such an environment, the idea that one day you might not HAVE to eat, that food would come in convenient pill form, is very attractive.
I’m unaware of corresponding economic and infrastructural reasons for the same to be true of rural/suburban New England during the same time period, which is what my father has to say about it.
Also, sex and sleep, who needs ‘em. I think if you just put me in a tank of Soylent and wire me in to the command center, I’ll be ready to fly this ship outta here.
Recipe needs some Spice.
If you’re concerned about eating well, have a sensitive digestive track, or have dietary restrictions (allergies or vegetarianism) then eating can definitely be a hassle. It also depends on where you are. When I was overseas there was meat in everything and the quality of the food was poor (both in terms of ingredients and preparation).
Where I am now things are better, but it can still be a hassle to eat well. If it was cheaper and easier to do and had more nutritional value, that’d be great. I’ve actually been dreaming of something like this for a long time.
I recently spent some time in a hospital and was fed intravenously during that time. It feels like being starved to death. Your stomach is always empty, and you can feel it begging for food. It would probably be an excellent part of a torture regime actually…
Also, as someone who considers cuisine one of the fine arts, fuck everything about these guys. Why don’t they go back to throwing paint on old masters and producing Britney Spears albums.
Just curious, were you receiving TPN or just on an IV? If you aren’t sure: Did they have to stick a great huge tube in at your clavicle?
It was just IV, and only for I think 4 days (it’s fuzzy I was on a lot of drugs at the time.) I did have. I could probably dig the details out if i waded through the paperwork
Right. It was probably a basic IV with just enough dextrose to keep your body from thinking it was starving to death, which is bad for anyone and worse for sick people. But you aren’t being fed by IV, which is why your body was like “WTF? Feed me!”
Agree it sucks to be alert enough to want food but unable to eat food.
Knowing that the only food you’d get if you could eat is hospital food is just another turd on an already impressive shit sundae.
This is one of those Andy Kaufman-type performance things where he sees how many people he can sucker in to try his “experiment.” Like those guys who made up stuff like the doggy brothel to see who they could outrage.
Maybe it’s becaue I’m getting old, and have to worry about these things, but it seems to me that one likely side effect of this diet is a certain amount of . . . irregularity.
Ah rea that is a feature not a bug! See his comment on how little he now poops found near the bottom of his article.
/Count me among the people who think this is a spoof.
I think he sees that as a feature, not a bug:
Insufficient fiber in your diet, especially if you’re of a certain age, is one of the worst things you can do to yourself, of course. But he’s doing great!
Some of the more sane analyses of this thing that I’ve read speculate that he’s either in a manic phase or the secret ingredient of his Perfect Diet is Heisenberg’s finest.
I’m hoping it is a very clever experiment on what people are willing to believe. There are a number of tells in there that should tell people this is a joke.
It is a shame he can’t capture who is less credulous. I have to wonder if women are better at spotting this as balls because we’re constantly bombarded with product offers that will help us look like 16 yo super models.
Obvious satire.
Not to the vast majority of commenters over there. Good Lord. It’s impressive what your mind can do when you really, desperately want to believe something.
Once you realize there are thousands of people who’d like to see Palin in the White House it becomes less astounding.
While the guy himself might be a joker of some sort, or maybe just highly eccentric, the chorus of people saying “this is a spoof” seem to be saying not only “this guy isn’t serious,” but “this isn’t a real thing,” which confuses me because it’s totally plausibly a real thing. The guy is just (maybe doing a bad job of) synthesizing whatever they feed you with intravenously in a hospital, and the doctor Ezra’s under-blogger talks to indicates that if you take that stuff orally, there’s really no problem to doing it long term.
I would never want to make such a thing my diet. I love food. But I’m also struggling with my weight, and my time. I could see a purpose for something like this in the rotation of my meals, but if you’re not fanatical about only getting the raw chemicals I’m not sure there’s any benefit to this vs. just getting a blender and making yourself healthy but weird meal-as-protein-shake concoctions.
it’s totally plausibly a real thing
This is not plausibly real.
I don’t mean the guy’s specific claims, I mean the idea that you could subsist on the stuff they feed you in the hospital through tubes when you can’t eat.
You misheard the chorus.
After my dad’s stroke, he was fed via IV for a week. I can still hear him aspirating on all that liquid as he was dying. The amount of liquid they need to pump into you to keep you going is staggering. And the effects are literally the stuff of my nightmares.
Nobody does IV long-term. They do a feeding tube. And my understanding, when I was faced with making this choice for him, was that this would be even more horrid.
I was taking my cues from the doctor in the Wonkblog post, who IIRC said that he didn’t see why a person couldn’t subsist on that stuff forever if he were taking it in as a drink under his own power (he acknowledged the limitations and trauma of intravenous and feeding tube).
Please stop. TPN long term is really, really bad for you. And that’s the stuff the professionals mix up. It also must be calibrated for each individual patient.
It sounds like it’s a more focused version of blended meals. When you blend things you have to use different foods to get different nutrients, which isn’t bad, but it seems like you’d have much more control this way. Maybe too much control, since if you forget anything, it’s not going to be there.
I also wonder how long the concoction lasts for. Could you mix it up once a month, throw it in the fridge, and be set?
First of all, thanks for the link!
And for people who are skeptical that this is real (and I certainly can’t blame them), particularly because Rhinehart declined to supply the recipe in his initial post touting “Soylent,” you can find a follow-up post in which he gives the ingredients here.
I am skeptical that this is real because he called the thing “Soylent.”
Fair enough. Though, if it is an elaborate joke, he seems to have really committed to it. Those PDFs of his (utterly, utterly worthless) lab tests look pretty convincing to me.
Yes indeedy.
I imagine people will queue up for their shot of liquid mystery product, at which point we’ll hear that the FDA has stepped in and shut down the entire operation.
From a followup post:
I am guessing his apology rate is 100%.
As observed upthread, this is performance art of the “how far can I go?” variety. In the same post he muses about a Kickstarter project, but I’m sure that will be delayed by unspecified difficulties.
I missed that, thanks. I’ve been trying to think of ways this could be a profitable scam with a very low chance of legal repercussions. But that’s because I suck as a person.
I am not sure he’s in it for the money, i.e., he won’t let it get to the taking-money-from-rubes phase. I’m getting the performance-art vibe of “how far can I push this before the reveal” rather than a financial scam.
This. A scammer would never pick Soylent for a name.
Where’s bargirl20 these days?
Eh. If he is a performance artist (which I doubt), he’s not pushing things much at all. This isn’t something that would stand out in DIY health/nutritionist or biohacking circles.
This isn’t something that would stand out in DIY health/nutritionist or biohacking circles.
Then why is it all over the internet?
Good point. I suppose that Badger cartoon that went viral must be something special.
How about this for a question: since he blogged about it on February 13th, how come there was barely any mention of it for the first week, and yet there’s been suddenly an explosion of interest in it? Could it be that web popularity might not be entirely based on content? A shocker, I know.
Search the web and you’ll find other people who’ve tried supplement only diets (though haven’t done such a thorough write-up). But, uh, they’re not “all over the internet,” so I guess they don’t count.
No, no. I’ll be really surprised (and disappointed) if this is more than an elaborate charade. Maybe just a joke, maybe a brilliant statement about people/belief/attitudes about food.
It really is just a thought exercise: Here is a behavior. How could one make it an illegal behavior?
So in this case, a bad person could demand participants sign a release and require them to include enough personal information for quick n’ easy ID theft. Or more quickly, send me X dollars and I’ll send you my recipe…
I did say I suck as a person.
I don’t know, the general idea is not a bad one. I for one would kind of like to dispense with the hassle of procuring/preparing meals multiple times a day. If it is good enough for people in comas it is good enough for me.
Would you also apply that standard to lack of consciousness?
Some days.
From the lawyers who represent SSA in opposition to me in Federal Court, I would estimate a goodly portion of the government attorneys are semiconscious at best
Sticking with the diet and exercise, Gvt. Lawyer?
I was hopeful when I first read this. I’m sick of eating. Gets in the way of my talking time.
It’s called “Soylent” and the site’s titled “Mostly Harmless” (Ahem.) I’m going with a committed satirist.
There are obviously jokes involved, but they seem like the sort of jokes the sort of nerdy person who would think this would be a good idea would make in the course of being absolutely sincere. So it could go either way.
I think “Mostly Harmless” is the tip-off–recall the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser: “When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”
Another thing to consider: Fasting is making a comeback (AKA Fast Diet, 5:2 Diet).
I can imagine someone asking himself if he could make up something equally or more controversial. And once the answer was yes, he asked himself if he could convince other people he’d hit on a legitimate diet…
Please. This is half-assed bullshit. There is no need for “food” of any kind. Here is the real higher spiritual plane you want to be on.