Motherboard
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2016
23:55 · 4.1M views · Nov 12, 2013
A Motherboard documentary in which a reporter lives on nothing but Soylent for 30 days after founder Rob Rhinehart's own experiment. It looks at the effects on health, Silicon Valley and the future of food.
HN rarely recommends it; it is mostly cited in critical threads on Soylent's quality control, including footage of a rodent at its warehouse.
5 comments from Hacker News
I remember when the Soylent-Creator was on the Colbert Report, and he clearly marketed it as a 100% food replacement. Saying that you don't have to replace food with it completely is smart, it opens up additional customers, makes sense. Their Soylent promotional video however makes the claim that 1) it can replace any meal 2) while not having to replace every meal, it certainly insinuates it can (which is way different from other supplements). [LINK] I also do remember the piece by motherboard on Soylent this video Fair, they were a small operation back then, but even if it might not tell you how they work now, it certainly shows you how low the standards are. Their facilities don't even have to be inspected, ... at all. So you are too tired to cook, but fit enough to run? And usually I have to get dressed, have to shower, pack up my things, work over my schedule, read some mails, activities where I can have something on the stove at the same time. If something needs 10 minutes to cook I am not staring into the pot for the duration. The composition of the ingredients does not tell me how they know, where they buy, anything in beyond. I rather see food, touch it, smell it, know where it's from, I don't really bother about whether the fish I just bought has 1 gram fat more or less, that's not the "quality" in food I am looking for.
Soylent is classified as a nutritional supplement, which isn't the same as "food". It's the same umbrella things like body-building supplements enjoy being under, with far more relaxed requirements than "food". Sources are well known, a quick search turns them up[1][2][3]. The testing procedure has been disclosed by Soylent during their last debacle, and there was discussion here on HN[3][4]. I used to buy Soylent myself, started at version 1.5 (powder in the bag). But come on, this sort of thing is seriously not OK. You need better quality control, and you need better (and more rapid) testing of product as it rolls off the line. Hunt and pecking clearly isn't getting it done, and problems are slipping out under their noses. It's people's health - nothing to joke at. "Move fast; make people sick" isn't a good mantra. > FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA Soylent has no real idea if that ingredient was the culprit (and from the FDA's classification, it seems reasonable to suspect that ingredient is not the problem). For all anyone knows, it could be a combination of ingredients, or not an ingredient at all, but rather contamination in the manufacturing process. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] this video
> How might they acquire that knowledge, other than through the process they seem to currently be executing? Well, a lot of folks would like to see a bit more care paid attention to the entire process. This isn't the first time Soylent has shipped potentially dangerous product. Not long ago, they shipped their new bottled formula to folks, and it arrived covered in mold! Their snack bars have made people violently ill, and now their powder too. Every product Soylent makes, is making or has made people ill. Soylent has practically zero quality control/testing, and doesn't have on-site staff dedicated to ensuring their product is safe. They send out a few carefully selected samples to an external lab, but that's far from continuous testing of the product rolling off the line. Some might attribute it to the "silicon valley" mindset Soylent has. "We'll disrupt the food industry - but we won't bother to learn what it takes to produce uniformly clean and safe product". There's good reasons the "big guys" spend so much on lab personnel and equipment. If people all around the world started getting sick from Coca-Cola, it wouldn't be good - to say the least. Edit - Adding sources: [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] this video
Sorry for the strong language but bullshit. I am sure it has changed over the years but I still have vivid memories of the rodents that ran around the original warehouse they mixed soylent in. It was a joke. They had a bunch of randos mixing powders haphazardly and no sense of proper food prep/sanitation. It was scarier than some of the operations that supplement manufacturers run. I am sure its changed but it blows my mind that this is classified as an ambitious project. Edit: Here is the video. this video
Maybe the rats finally got in: this video Explanation: at least in 2013 they were producing the "food" in an abandoned old factory with disgustingly little care for hygiene. A TV crew caught on film a rat sneaking around in their "production facility".