This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again
> a 24-year-old software engineer
> ...
> Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced diet<p>What utter bollocks.  We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter.  It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods, but I doubt that anyone alive today knows how to do it.  He may see "good" results on some metrics due to a lack of any desire to go hypercaloric -- i.e. there's probably no artificially boosted food reward[1] mechanisms in his glop.  But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies.<p>So an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have whipped up a drink that eliminates all that.  A task that specialists have so far failed at.<p>> "I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient."<p>I've seen this enough to be sick of it; it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset gone badly wrong.  The supplement and meal replacement powder/drink industry is a multi-billion dollar market.  First sanity check: _no_ staff scientists for any of these companies thought to go look at a textbook and the intertubes and do the same thing?  DOH! Egg's on them!<p>Another example of this failure: when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science (e.g. human subjects) without _any_ training in how to do experiment design, data collection, or analysis.  "Just ask 'em some questions!"  The general form of the problem seems to be a blindness to the depths of domain knowledge required to be effective in other disciplines.