Soylent Guy is Crazy People

[Sharkey]

Well, there's also the fact that eating should be one of those enjoyable aspects of being human. I'll probably miss it when the fungi from Yuggoth put my brain in a can. Sure, it's a chore sometimes, but it really shouldn't be. I think Michael Pollan got it about as right as you possibly can: ""Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

It's like a guy who is annoyed at his own libido designing a fleshlight, then going on an insane rant about what a bunch of knuckle dragging savages all the people having actual sex are. Because the fleshlight gave him fucking lead poisoning somehow.

[nosimpleway]

Crosschecked Boost with Ensure nutritional info on their website. They're p mich the same thing, within a few percentage points for RDA in nearly every entry.

So... I can verify that people on the verge of death from malnutrition can in fact limp along by getting the majority of their daily nutrition from (unleaded) sludge.

[Brandleby]

And Soylent is just (in theory) Ensure for healthy people. Our maybe more accurately, it's baby formula for adults. Adult formula.

I make a point of always keeping a pack of Ensure or something like it in my fridge. It mostly just sits there, since the stuff will keep through nuclear Armageddon if it has to. Every once in a while, though, I find myself in a position of not being able to eat solid food, and drinking one of those beats the hell out of slowly eating Cream of Wheat and praying it sits in your stomach long enough to digest.

So, yeah, an alternative to that which actually provides a full complement of proteins, fats and vitamins for a 32-year-old male, and maybe provides not so many poisonous base metals, would be pretty nice! Especially after I go and cause nuclear Armageddon.

(Fwiw if you cut all the bulking stuff out of Muscle Milk you'd probably be 90% of the way there.)

[Bal]

I've often though about a product to fill that niche of nutritionally viable, but requiring almost nothing from me at all. However, in my head it usually looked more like this:

[Mongrel]

Well, there's also the fact that eating should be one of those enjoyable aspects of being human. I'll probably miss it when the fungi from Yuggoth put my brain in a can. Sure, it's a chore sometimes, but it really shouldn't be. I think Michael Pollan got it about as right as you possibly can: ""Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

It's like a guy who is annoyed at his own libido designing a fleshlight, then going on an insane rant about what a bunch of knuckle dragging savages all the people having actual sex are. Because the fleshlight gave him fucking lead poisoning somehow.

Yeah, exactly. Especially since it's something we do more frequently than have sex (well, most of us anyway).

It's probably clear already, but I'll state it explicitly that I take a very European attitude on meals... only that's not even a European attitude. The US has to give the shortest shrift to meals and food of just about any country on the planet, although Canada is close enough to US practices in general terms.

I mean, sure, there are times when you might need to just **consume sustenance**, but those are like nuclear winter, or being sick like Brentai mentioned - times of bare survival. It seems batshit crazy to me to allow your life to come to a point where you're doing things that would normally only be done in extreme extremis on a regular basis.

Funny enough, I spend less on food now than I have in years and eat mostly better. It's not just having time to burn, it's also investing time in searching out places to get all sorts of good things on the super-cheap.

[nosimpleway]

I approach it from the other end, where I'm often too tired or unmotivated to make a brobdingnagian fantastic meal. Some nights I'd get home and settle for a bowl of nutri-kibble.

Come to think of it, boxed cereal for dinner isn't even that far off.

[Mongrel]

I guess I've always been okay with canned soup in that situation.

Also I know of a handful of non-chain places where I can get various takeout things as cheap as a homecooked meal. Not so many that I can go there all the time, but enough so that we're not cooking every night. Like I recently found out there's a place not too far off that does good samosas, five for $1, which is a stupid amount of food.

[Joxam]

You have to realize that I work in the service industry, mongrel. I literally don't get a lunch break even if I have a 16 hour shift. Probably four days a week I get home at 2 am having eaten nothing but maybe a handful (i hate the stuff after all these years) or two of popcorn all day. Also I live in such a small town that the only thing opened at 2 am is like, two gas stations, wal-mart and mcdonalds.

[Mongrel]

Everyone makes choices about what they want to do with their life. I mean, you otherwise seem to like working at the theatre, so in your case you've chosen to keep at it.

But that doesn't make what you do normal or right for everyone. We're just going in circles here. You're telling me that this is shit you and other people do to survive and my reply is, yes, exactly, this is shit people do to survive.

[Joxam]

I... What?

I was just explaining why I said in my more desperate times I have wanted like, 7 or so MEALS (MEALS MIND YOU I ALWAYS SAID MEALS) that I could live off of, mixing and matching, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Jesus Christ man...

[Mongrel]

Sorry, Jox. That seemed like you were making a YOU KIDS DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT A REAL HARD LIFE LIKE WE HAD IN THE WAR DEATH FAMINE HELL RIDE kind of post, which is how I took it.

[Joxam]

And in the beginning the only thing I was even fucking arguing was that 'food slurry' wasn't the 'base product' here. The base product was trying to be a complete nutrition self contained food item.

[Mongrel]

And in the beginning the only thing I was even fucking arguing was that 'food slurry' wasn't the 'base product' here. The base product was trying to be a complete nutrition self contained food item.

I think the talk kind of got away from that over the last page. Didn't think we were back there.

[Joxam]

I mean I guess I just bristle at the idea that what I do isn't 'normal' when you consider that for a majority of the people in our country it is, or the fact that I some how "choose" to make the hours and money that I do despite the fact that I am literally the second highest paid person at my place of business and the second highest member of management at my place of business. There is one, twenty year veteran of the theatre industry who works at my theatre who is higher paid than me, she also happens to be the GM, which is also the only position above mine.

Your attitude toward it seems to strike me HARD as the same attitude that gets thrown around when people say they don't tip because tipped wages should be higher.

EDIT: Anyways, this was slightly off topic, and mostly I am just defensive because of the judgmental tone of my 'choices' you used in your post, but plenty of people DO end up SURVIVING in this country, it sucks, and the answer probably isn't protein blocks, soylent, or whatever else someone might come up with; but right now all we've really got is mac and cheese, hamburger meat or other shit like that and there sure is a whole lot of 'do nothing' or 'just eat better' thrown around whenever hunger or obesity comes up as an issue.

[Mongrel]

I think it comes from my attitude being that if people are just barely surviving, we need to do something about it instead of just accepting that our lives are shitty. Watching people respond to suffering by trying to one-up each other in how much they suffered is something that just leaves me agape.

If the sun had imploded that's one thing. but we live on literally the most prosperous earth (for humans anyway) in all of human history. I didn't think hanging on in quiet desperation was the American way too.

[Joxam]

Mind you, I don't suffer.

I wasn't saying I make minimum wage, just that people DO make minimum wage in this country and that it sucks and people DO have to work the hours I do without also having the flexibility to just cook at all hours of the night or do basically whatever the fuck they want to like I can.

Like, I have plenty of money and I DO eat well. Like I said, I literally keep an electric skillet at my desk on the off chance I want to make food WHILE playing league of legends.

I just said that occasionally, and I have to admit, mostly when I was younger and way more into WoW, I wanted a way to live without all that mess of actually having to eat dinner, but that might come from more that my mom, at the time, was always making a brobdingnagian, hour long production of dinner where we all sat down and blah blah blah and I could be gaming MOM.

[Mongrel]

Well at that age a bowl of chips was close enough to dinner, come on mom of COURSE I ate.

(no my childhood was not actually like that)

[Sharkey]

I don't think that was intended to be anything personal. I do actually agree that from anything but a comparatively recent and local perspective, rat-race schedules with little time given to such basic pleasures as preparing non-shitty food are kind of horrible and aberrant. That's not so much a judgment of you as... I dunno, how far back do you want to go? Let's call it an indictment of Protestantism in general and Calvinism in particular for tying "work ethic" together with godliness. "Bust your ass and you'll get ahead. Not getting ahead? You must not be busting your ass hard enough." It's just an asshole cultural thing that's more pronounced in the US. I have no fondness for it. I like smelling the roses and taking a fucking siesta now and then... or pretty much constantly.

That said, I've often ended up in situations where I don't have a lot of time or resources, and have more than a few recipes that can be made on the cheap and in volume. It's totally worth putting aside a day to just do a shitload of cooking and then freeze enough meals for a few weeks or so. If nothing else it's always good to make and freeze a shitload of individual pizza doughs. Once you have those throwing one together takes less time than goddamn hamburger helper or whatever, and it's invariably better than delivery. Maybe we should have a topic in the other subforum for that sort of thing.

As far as bachelor chow: That's what I've been calling trail mix and I'm not ashamed. That shit's great.

[François]

I think the brobdingnagiest step I've taken that helped me lose a hundred damn pounds was discovering frozen vegetables. My freezer is practically packed solid with "italian mix", which is carrots, zucchini, lima beans, peas and red pepper. It's never great, but it goes with damn near everything and it always feels like it's a good thing to eat it. I do prepare more elaborate stuff often, but given that I have occasional periods where I'm only awake 4-6 hours a day it sure does come in handy.

[ocksi]

One thing I've read/heard about with regards to using a drink to replace food is your body won't register as satisfied. When you aren't actively doing the mouth work on your fats, your body doesn't think you're consuming many calories. Cheetos are a super-engineered abuser of this: because so much of them dissolves before you chew them up and swallow them, the caloric density won't really register so you can just keep throwing them down without feeling it.

EDIT: Apparently there have been posts since page two.