It’s usually the same people who think the marketing of the product is terrible by calling it Soylent—while I think the name is pure genius.

No. This fundamental tenet of Western philosophy (and Object-Oriented thinking) is flat-out wrong. Everything _looks like_ it’s made of parts when you’re looking at it from the perspective of a small brain with a small attention span that can’t directly perceive all of reality at the same time and see it for the indivisible whole that it is. The idea of “parts” (or “objects”) is purely abstract, it only exists in brains and only because brains can’t represent in themselves all of the details of the universe simultaneously. The more scientists study the “links” and “interactions” between the so-called “parts” of reality, the more they realize there are so many links that the whole idea of dividing things into “parts” in the first place is highly dubious.

“THE BODY IS NOT A MACHINE

[O]ur central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.”
http://edge.org/response-detail/11361

Sorry for being 9 months late to the party….. I hope this is still relevant.

Because while we all do need a lot of the same things, some of us need some things a lot more than others do.

Take iron for example. Not to put too fine a point on it, but women between 12 and 45 tend to bleed monthly, and by doing so, we lose a relatively larger amount of iron as compared to men. We need to replace it, and we therefore need more of it. Men, on the other hand, require a good deal more zinc than women do… it’s in seminal fluid provided by the prostate, so… well, logical conclusions can be drawn, but I imagine that teenage boys and young men need quite a lot of zinc by comparison.

Or take someone suffering from hereditary hemochromatosis. This is a disorder that causes a person to absorb life threatening amounts of iron, to the point that they may need to be have blood taken on a regular basis so that their own body doesn’t literally give them iron poisoning. Other than controlling iron intake and having an amount of blood drawn regularly, there is no way to treat this condition.

Or for another example, pregnant and nursing women need more protein and calcium than a woman who is not pregnant or nursing.. because they’re trying to grow someone else a whole new complete nervous system and skeleton.

Also, how do you account for the fact that having certain minerals and vitamins together in the same meal can cause some not to be absorbed, at the expense of others? Iron and calcium are, again, a great example, because for whatever reason they use the same mechanism of absorption and so interfere with each other if they are taken at the same meal. And there are some things that aid absorption too… you can take iron OR calcium with a vitamin C to improve absorption of one or the other, but if you take your iron tablet with a glass of milk, you’re not going to benefit yourself at all. So, how do you know you’re not going to give yourself a slow deficiency of some kind? Or poison yourself over the course of several years?

Yes, we have all the same building blocks, but I would strongly dispute the notion that this is a “one size fits all” dietary replacement for literally every human being in every life stage and situation. That’s just not possible, not by a long shot. And there’s literally no way you’ve tested this on enough people in different life stages and situations for long enough to prove that it is. You don’t know yet if the women who decide to replace with Soylent will wind up with anemia in 5 more years due to insufficient or unusable iron, or if it will provide enough USABLE calcium for young women who take it now to not wind up with severe osteoporosis when they hit their 50s. There are a lot of results of low-grade deficiencies or slow overdoses that can take a long time to show up.

I’m not saying this is a bad concept, I find it intriguing. But I think you need some more R&D, some caveats for people with certain bodily disorders, and maybe a few “specialized” formulas for certain people who are in certain life stages that require adjustments to the formula.

I live in Africa and the malnutrition of children is a major problem here. If you could make this Soylent available at a price so affordable that it could be used as part of school feeding programmes, it will change millions of lives.

Some schools have feeding programmes and these programmes have been shown to improve school attendance in impoverished areas. However, because food is expensive and preparation needs sufficient utilities, not many schools undertake to feed students and these programmes can often offer little more than maize porridge or soup. It’s better than nothing (sometimes the only meal a child will have that day), but not nutritionally ideal to say the least. And as mentioned, lacking in far too many schools.

I also want to comment on state hospitals, overcrowded and lacking resources. If feeding patients becomes easier and more affordable, more funding can go towards medicine and hiring additional staff. If Soylent is as nutritious as you claim, it will surpass the meals patients normally receive in public hospitals (all those I’ve been to at least).

Apart from that, this could be a wonderful supplement for people living with HIV, since this condition requires a diet that many cannot afford. A good diet allows those living with HIV to be healthier and, therefore, have a better quality of life and be consistently active contributors to the economy.

Please have this product exposed to sufficient external research and make it affordable so that it may be considered by governments and NGOs as a viable solution for widespread malnutrition.

You claim that Soylent is cheap to manufacture. I know that you need to make money but please consider how you can change the world if you wanted to. You will meet resistance and it will be tough, but please try.

Thank you.