Better stop eating then, since any plants or animals you might ingest have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Knowledge of our nutritional needs--this knowledge that we allegedly "don't have"--has completely transformed them.
any skepticism about long-term effects is well-warranted given the history of the processed food industry
The whole point of Soylent (the creators have basically stated as much) is to take the tools of "processed food" and use them for good, not evil. Seriously, Soylent is not McDonald's. The Atlantic explored this idea in a recent article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-junk...
Soylent is certainly different from McDonalds and the rest of the modern profit-driven food industry, but your first sentence is an insufferable straw man:
Better stop eating then, since any plants or animals you might ingest have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Knowledge of our nutritional needs--this knowledge that we allegedly "don't have"--has completely transformed them.
Breeding food over the course of many generations is completely different from inventing industrial processes that completely restructure food in a way that no organism has ever been exposed to. It gets worse when science is used to reformulate flavor profiles to make food appealing in a way that fools our bodies about its nutritional content. Pretending like the food system today is the same as early agriculture with selective breeding is intellectually dishonest.
The fact is our knowledge of how the human organism metabolizes food is still extremely rudimentary. The thing that bothers me about Soylent is the founder's utter dismissal of any complexity to the issue at all. He seems to unquestioningly believe this reductionist pseudo-scientific hand waving that a certain subset of geeks subscribes to wherein gaining weight is a simple thermodynamic equation of calories in > calories spent, and nutrition is a question of all the correct molecules passing through one's mouth.
This is an incredibly naive way of thinking, and will not allow Soylent to ever find a healthy formula. Of course, if they do start to take it seriously it will still take many decades to perfect as the necessary scientific knowledge does yet exist. A lot of people are invested in the idea of convenience foods because they make life easier, but the uncomfortable truth is that choosing any convenience food, even one with such good intentions as Soylent, is not a smart bet if you want to be as healthy as possible, and demanding scientific proof otherwise is based more on wishful thinking than solid rationality.
I kind of see @zenbowman's point, though I might reword some things. The biggest difficulty I have with accepting isolated mixes of nutrients and supplements is that when we consume and metabolize food, or anything, we don't do it in isolation. There are hosts of synergistic effects throughout biology that are difficult to understand and accurately replicate.
No I'm not a nutritionist or a biologist, so what I'm saying is admittedly highly qualitative. But I did work for several years on a project to curb improper disposal of pharmaceutical waste (into toilets where it gets into the water system), because I read hundreds of papers and articles about how scientists simply don't understand yet how different pharmacological compounds might mix in water and have synergistic consequences for wildlife, especially as it bioaccumulates up the food chain. (Side note, this will be hard to understand since so much of our studies are focused on isolating on variable and looking for effects ceteris paribus, but this isn't how systems work in reality.)
The difference to me when we breed food is that at least we're still consuming something in an evolutionary context, bred over several generations. Certainly it still could be bad for us, but I think that the plant/ animal itself is surviving is better evidence than just taking its component parts and ingesting them. Isn't it general best practice that the whole gestalt is greater than the sum of its parts?
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Better stop eating then, since any plants or animals you might ingest have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Knowledge of our nutritional needs--this knowledge that we allegedly "don't have"--has completely transformed them.
The whole point of Soylent (the creators have basically stated as much) is to take the tools of "processed food" and use them for good, not evil. Seriously, Soylent is not McDonald's. The Atlantic explored this idea in a recent article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-junk...
Soylent is certainly different from McDonalds and the rest of the modern profit-driven food industry, but your first sentence is an insufferable straw man:
Breeding food over the course of many generations is completely different from inventing industrial processes that completely restructure food in a way that no organism has ever been exposed to. It gets worse when science is used to reformulate flavor profiles to make food appealing in a way that fools our bodies about its nutritional content. Pretending like the food system today is the same as early agriculture with selective breeding is intellectually dishonest.
The fact is our knowledge of how the human organism metabolizes food is still extremely rudimentary. The thing that bothers me about Soylent is the founder's utter dismissal of any complexity to the issue at all. He seems to unquestioningly believe this reductionist pseudo-scientific hand waving that a certain subset of geeks subscribes to wherein gaining weight is a simple thermodynamic equation of calories in > calories spent, and nutrition is a question of all the correct molecules passing through one's mouth.
This is an incredibly naive way of thinking, and will not allow Soylent to ever find a healthy formula. Of course, if they do start to take it seriously it will still take many decades to perfect as the necessary scientific knowledge does yet exist. A lot of people are invested in the idea of convenience foods because they make life easier, but the uncomfortable truth is that choosing any convenience food, even one with such good intentions as Soylent, is not a smart bet if you want to be as healthy as possible, and demanding scientific proof otherwise is based more on wishful thinking than solid rationality.
I kind of see @zenbowman's point, though I might reword some things. The biggest difficulty I have with accepting isolated mixes of nutrients and supplements is that when we consume and metabolize food, or anything, we don't do it in isolation. There are hosts of synergistic effects throughout biology that are difficult to understand and accurately replicate.
No I'm not a nutritionist or a biologist, so what I'm saying is admittedly highly qualitative. But I did work for several years on a project to curb improper disposal of pharmaceutical waste (into toilets where it gets into the water system), because I read hundreds of papers and articles about how scientists simply don't understand yet how different pharmacological compounds might mix in water and have synergistic consequences for wildlife, especially as it bioaccumulates up the food chain. (Side note, this will be hard to understand since so much of our studies are focused on isolating on variable and looking for effects ceteris paribus, but this isn't how systems work in reality.)
The difference to me when we breed food is that at least we're still consuming something in an evolutionary context, bred over several generations. Certainly it still could be bad for us, but I think that the plant/ animal itself is surviving is better evidence than just taking its component parts and ingesting them. Isn't it general best practice that the whole gestalt is greater than the sum of its parts?
Most of the plants and animals that I eat have been created through selective breeding (a biological process), not synthesis (a chemical process).