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.
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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.