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And inventor of the, apparently, complete meal replacement drink Soylent.

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requires-food

I wish I could get behind this and just go this way, but I love food too much. It grants too much primal joy.

I have a feeling his colon will disagree.

Wow, this idea is terrible for humanity. If this were to take off(which it logically won't) over time humans would evolve without teeth! And then the aliens would come and they'd chop off our arms and legs but leave are heads still on which is when their weapons would stop working, BUT WE STILL COULDN'T HARM THEM because our teeth would be gone! So in short, don't drink only liquid diets or the aliens will cut off your arms!

But seriously, its just another nutrition drink. They don't really get more than a few sub-cultures. Humanity loves stimulating the senses, and if this drink was completely tasteless it would make eating just a boring routine to which only people who work ALL the time would do.

Mr. Rhinehart, you are an absolute, total douche. With all seriousness, go fuck yourself.

DarkAudit said:

Mr. Rhinehart, you are an absolute, total douche. With all seriousness, go fuck yourself.

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I never understood that insult. If I could do that, I'd never leave the house.

Yoshimickster said:

Wow, this idea is terrible for humanity. If this were to take off(which it logically won't) over time humans would evolve without teeth!

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This is not how evolution works.

DarkAudit said:

Mr. Rhinehart, you are an absolute, total douche. With all seriousness, go fuck yourself.

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May I ask, what's your issue? I think it sounds cool.

blotsfan said:

May I ask, what's your issue? I think it sounds cool.

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I like to cook, I especially like to try new and different kinds of food. This guy and his attitudes spit in the face of the things that make me... ME.

After a hard day's work, you come home as your SO is preparing dinner. What is going to put you in the best frame of mind for the rest of the evening, that beige goop, or your favorite real meal that you can smell almost before you're even in your house?

Ravenpoe said:

This is not how evolution works.

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Evolution barely applies to human beings nowadays, what with us being able to take natural selection almost completely out of the picture.

I've previously been on a liquid diet for weight loss purposes (Nutrimed 420). It worked really well (until I got off it, but that's another story).

Long story short, yes, there was a period of several months where I only ate something once every week or two, and technically that was cheating. You can "drink" all the nutrients you need, but really, what he (and I) was doing technically IS food, just not solid food. He's still eating, still taking in nutrients through his digestive system.

But yeah, when I was on that diet... the smell of food turned me into a slavering, irrational man-beast.

I can't imagine a liquid diet would be very good for your digestive system. Even going vegetarian for a while gave me the runs almost constantly.

Bowielee said:

I can't imagine a liquid diet would be very good for your digestive system. Even going vegetarian for a while gave me the runs almost constantly.

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Depends on what's in your "liquid." Mine was extremely protien and iron fortified... so I actually had to be careful to avoid constipation.

You must have had tiny little rabbit droppings

Bowielee said:

You must have had tiny little rabbit droppings

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They were probably proportional to a rabbit of my size and weight.

This is excellent. Though corporations have already developed similar products, I can't help but give two thumbs up to a private individual showing this kind of resourcefulness and ingenuity in coming up with an apparently easy and cheap way to substitute for a vital commodity, and sharing the info with the public. Assuming the facts check out and there are no long term adverse impacts on health, I can see several possibilities here, particularly if this stuff can be made well suited to large-scale production.

I'm not sure I'd personally use it all that much, seeing as I enjoy food and have the money to pay for what I might reasonably want. But I understand that particularly the latter is not always the case with everyone. The lower the income bracket, the greater the proportion of costs that they pay for foodstuffs. This might help some people.

It sounds great on the surface and since I find eating and sleeping to be necessary wastes of time myself, I'd be for it ... except you're not supposed to only have bowel movements once a week. His digestive system is going to get fucked up if he does this long-term. Our technology may be ready for this, but our bodies are not, and may never be on their own.

That said, our bodies aren't ready for the shit we normally put into them that we buy willingly all the time, so for all we know, this is less detrimental than preservatives, chemicals, and fast food.

If this helps alleviate world hunger, I'm all for it. Probably won't use it much myself though.

I don't see anything there about him obtaining authorization for human experimentation. that... raises questions...

Thinking about this a second time, I think I see a number of hurdles along the way for this Soylent to become practical.

Assuming his data is valid, the non-fixed costs for home-level production seem very promising, but I wonder if he figured in the amount he paid for equipment, and if that makes the idea of small scale production impractical for low-income people. I orginally mulled on the possibilities to circumvent that through large-scale production in a facility, which would also make the most out of returns to scale, and then selling the presumably low-cost product. But turning the manufacturing into a business probably brings all sorts of food safety laws into play, likely requiring extensive testing which will further push up costs. And if the price for a unit starts to approach that of a Big Mac meal, then the idea has already failed. Those and other issues cast some doubt about the prospects of commercial scalability for this thing. I wonder what the manufacturing costs are for existing corporate equivalents.

Hmm, we'll see. But this still has potential, particularly if small-scale production is economically viable.

Bowielee said:

I don't see anything there about him obtaining authorization for human experimentation. that... raises questions...

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I'm pretty sure he can experiment on himself all he wants.

Quotemander Prime said:

I'm pretty sure he can experiment on himself all he wants.

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He's offering his food powder to other people for free if they're willing to eat it exclusively for at least a week and get blood panels before and after (he's also hoping they'll get psych evals.)

GasBandit said:

They were probably proportional to a rabbit of my size and weight.

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Just how many courics are we talking here?

figmentPez said:

He's offering his food powder to other people for free if they're willing to eat it exclusively for at least a week and get blood panels before and after (he's also hoping they'll get psych evals.)

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Didn't see that part; I don't know if you need a license for that or something.

Ravenpoe said:

This is not how evolution works.

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Well yeah, for my horrible future to happen it would take millions of years of consuming said drink. BUT STILL- I will be prepared.

Yoshimickster said:

Well yeah, for my horrible future to happen it would take millions of years of consuming said drink. BUT STILL- I will be prepared.

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That's still not how evolution works. Disuse of teeth would not cause people to stop being born with them.

Quotemander Prime said:

That's still not how evolution works. Disuse of teeth would not cause people to stop being born with them.

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Really? Well Lamarckism isn't iron law so whatevs.

Yoshimickster said:

Really? Well Lamarckism isn't iron law so whatevs.

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Like was already said, humans have more or less removed themselves from natural selection, so we're not a good example, but lets use girrafes.

Girrafes did not evolve long necks so they could eat leaves from taller trees. Evolution doesn't have a consciousness to fill a need. Rather, some giraffes, through random mutation, happened to have longer necks. Environmental factors, such as the ability to have more food available from higher sources, as well as a million other factors that are too complex to count, favored those longer necked giraffes. They were more likely to reproduce, so the long neck gene became more abundant and even more pronounced, until generations after generations produced all long necked giraffes.

If environmental factors changed so that long necks were no longer beneficial, we wouldn't necessarily see evolution swing the other way. Unless long necks were detrimental to survival and reprodution, they would remain. This is why so many animals (including us) have vestigial limbs or organs.

Yoshimickster said:

Really? Well Lamarckism isn't iron law so whatevs.

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I don't know what's in your textbooks, but when I was in high school, Lamarckian evolution was the dumb side of evolutionary theory.

Quotemander Prime said:

I don't know what's in your textbooks, but when I was in high school, Lamarckian evolution was the dumb side of evolutionary theory.

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Well, he is from jersey...

Ravenpoe said:

Well, he is from jersey...

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Living in the U.S., I should probably be happy that we still have textbooks covering evolution.

Quotemander Prime said:

Living in the U.S., I should probably be happy that we still have textbooks covering evolution.

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Don't you mean the Devil's propaganda?

Ravenpoe said:

Don't you mean the Devil's propaganda?

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What isn't these days? Evolution, alternative religion, alternative rock music, gay music, gay people, the weather... guy gets way too much credit. If I was the king of hell, I don't think I'd work that damn hard. Haven't these people read Good Omens?

Quotemander Prime said:

Didn't see that part; I don't know if you need a license for that or something.

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The actual legality falls into some question in the private sector, but it's considered unethical to experiment on humans with no oversight.

Actually, recent thinking is that Lamarck wasn't totally wrong. There may be some validity (within small bounds) to the idea. I'll see if I can find a reference. They had a story about it on NPR not terribly long ago.

fade said:

Actually, recent thinking is that Lamarck wasn't totally wrong. There may be some validity (within small bounds) to the idea. I'll see if I can find a reference. They had a story about it on NPR not terribly long ago.

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I can see it within small bounds if the behavior then affects the environment in a way that then causes issues for those that haven't adapted. Using Yoshi's idea: people only drink Soylent, which (hypothetically) leads to less tooth hygiene, which leads to ... I don't know, it's already become ridiculous in my head. I'll be interested to see the reference if you have it, because right now it's beyond me.

I assume fade is talking about epigenetics.

drifter said:

I assume fade is talking about epigenetics.

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That's a lot more complicated than Lamarckism, but I can see the connection, so point made.

Quotemander Prime said:

I can see it within small bounds if the behavior then affects the environment in a way that then causes issues for those that haven't adapted. Using Yoshi's idea: people only drink Soylent, which (hypothetically) leads to less tooth hygiene, which leads to ... I don't know, it's already become ridiculous in my head. I'll be interested to see the reference if you have it, because right now it's beyond me.

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Its not less teeth hygiene, its less teeth usage. If our species were to consume only liquids we wouldn't need to chew, and if we wouldn't need to chew than we wouldn't need teeth. So over millions of years, our species would theoretically evolve with less and less efficient teeth possibly even making them vestigial. And possibly over time our descendents would evolve without teeth altogether. Of course this would only happen if the entire species of humanity only drank liquids so I'm not necessarily worried....yet.

Yoshimickster said:

Its not less teeth hygiene, its less teeth usage. If our species were to consume only liquids we wouldn't need to chew, and if we wouldn't need to chew than we wouldn't need teeth. So over millions of years, our species would theoretically evolve with less and less efficient teeth possibly even making them vestigial. And possibly over time our descendents would evolve without teeth altogether. Of course this would only happen if the entire species of humanity only drank liquids so I'm not necessarily worried....yet.

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That's still not how evolution works.

This is how evolution works:

Yoshimickster said:

Its not less teeth hygiene, its less teeth usage. If our species were to consume only liquids we wouldn't need to chew, and if we wouldn't need to chew than we wouldn't need teeth. So over millions of years, our species would theoretically evolve with less and less efficient teeth possibly even making them vestigial. And possibly over time our descendents would evolve without teeth altogether. Of course this would only happen if the entire species of humanity only drank liquids so I'm not necessarily worried....yet.

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Let's put it this way: people will still be attracted to a pretty smile, so teeth genes will keep being passed along.

(this is the voice I keep hearing in response to Yoshi's posts)

It works this way:

Soylent. You guys aren't... getting... the JOKE.

Soy beans and lentils.

jwhouk said:

Soylent. You guys aren't... getting... the JOKE.

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Oh no we aren't, it's not like they mention it in the interview or anything!