...and texture, and price, and familiarity, and ethical sourcing, and religious approval, and cetera, and cetera. Maybe you don't care about halal or free-range, but some people do.
Like I said, Soylent Dude is more exclusive in his optimization, but I still contradict the proposition that, "This optimization is premature..." How could it be premature when every human food preparer has been doing it since the invention of fire?
He's taking what we currently believe to be true about the human body's nutritional requirements, dumping that into a blender all chemistry-set-style (it even has oligosaccharides!), and calling it good, because he thinks eating like a human takes too much time and effort.
Maybe it will work out for him. I'm certainly interested to see what happens. But if what happens turns out to be some previously unknown (because everyone else has been busy eating at least some actual food) analogue of scurvy or something, I'm not going to be the least bit surprised. I'll probably even have nontrivial schadenfreude.
Simply, we do not know enough about nutrition at this point to be making this kind of optimization. It's therefore premature.
(Edited)
If consumption of "soylent" reveals some nutritional deficiency, then you should be surprised, because that means our hypothesis is incorrect! Your expectation should confirm the hypothesis, not negate it.
That is the most conservative thing I've heard in at least a year, and I live in the Midwest. With a mindset so diametrically opposed to that of the hacker, how can you stomach HN?
So I'm "conservative" and have "a mindset diametrically opposed to that of a hacker" because I think someone is more likely than not to get shit wrong in trying to replace the human diet, evolved over aeons, with something he makes in his blender?
I'm all for challenging convention, disruption, experimentation, growth, and such. More than a little revolution, more than merely now and then, is more than just a good thing, in my book. Frankly, I think there are more human institutions that are moribund at best — and more likely actively harmful to the human condition — and desperately in need of replacement than not.
IMO, diet — or at least a healthy diet, where one eats actual food — is not among those things. It seems pretty clear to me that eating plants, and to a lesser extent, things that eat plants, or things that eat things that eat plants... is what our bodies have evolved to do, and correlates very strongly with health and longevity. It's equally clear that eating processed things correlates incredibly highly with all kinds of malady and morbidity.
Now, along comes someone who thinks he knows better than that. I wish him luck. I really, honestly do. I just don't have high hopes for his experiment. And, yes, while I probably will have some schadenfreudey, "Well, you probably should have seen that coming" if he gets it wrong badly enough to suffer some harm, I most certainly don't actually wish that upon him.
We see on practically a weekly basis some new and exciting way in which our understanding of human nutrition has been wrong all along. "Soylent Dude" is basing his recipe on that understanding, which has been demonstrated over and over and over again to be incomplete, misguided, based on faulty information — and even deliberate misinformation — and just plain wrong.
Given all that, please tell me how he's not likely to be missing something, getting something wrong, and potentially doing serious harm to himself, because I just don't see it.
Thus he removes taste, texture, price, familiarity, ethical sourcing, halal-ness or kosher-ness, everything except the nutrient.
We know it's a premature optimisation because we already have liquid feeds, and use is restricted to a few niche communities. (Cancer patients; anorexics being force fed; dieters; body builders.) There's nothing stopping you walking into a shop and buying high quality liquid feed today. Very few people do it because it's a lousy way of getting nutrients. People like eating food.
Perhaps I just misunderstand what you mean about optimisation?
The rest of this post is just me ranting, and isn't directed at you, but HN threads about food drive me mental and I need to get this out and my "save to draft" plugin broke (and I haven't fixed it yet) so here it is.
I just have no idea why anyone thinks this guy is doing anything new or exciting.
Some people seem to think that creating a liquid food is neat. It's kind of neat, but he's clearly an idiot and his product is a ham-fisted attempt to recreate something that already exists.
Some people seem to think that living on liquid, and removing the need to eat, is neat. Well, I have a lot more sympathy for that view point because it's about their opinions and feelings and etc. If that's what they want then good on 'em. I'd gently suggest that if they want to try it they're probably better off buying something created in clean labs with known properties, rather than some guy's weird glop.
