Dear Heebie,
Your link is broken.
xo,
EM
Posting from my iPad is super annoying.
Now it's working. Let me know if it reverts.
Per Dylan Matthews, this is a homemade version of what they feed you through IVs.
I don't get the appeal - food is a source of regular pleasure for me, even the routine stuff. To each his own, but I figure you'd have to do some kind of tooth-exercise.
It's okay as long as he adds enough taurine so his cats stay healthy when they eat his body. He's getting chilly and added a few pounds towards the end? What's his thyroid doing?
I can kind of see the appeal for some fraction of all meals, but not for completely replacing food. There are definitely days when I'm too tired/lazy to cook and don't really want to go out when this would be awfully convenient, though. (Those are also the times when I'm most likely to eat really unhealthy food.)
I don't get how it's different from Ensure. People can survive on Ensure long after they've lost all appetite for food or, indeed, life.
The Flowers for Algernon feel of some of the writing makes me wonder if he's trolling. And there's this
I am pretty young, generally in good health, and remain physically and mentally active.followed shortly after by this
On day 4 I noticed how much healthier my skin was. It's long been dry and rough, with splotches and red bumps but now it's soft, smooth and clear. Before I rarely had enough energy to go to the gym, but this day I had plenty so I decided to put the diet to the test. I'd been running off and on for several months, never able to do more than a mile straight...
Doesn't sound like he was in good health to begin with at all.
5.2 There's the Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra:
Stones: To live a rat must chew.
Flotsam: So must we all eat or die, eh?
Stones: I did not say eat, I said Chew!
Flotsam: Gesundheit.
. . .
Stones: You see, Glaxon, if they don't chew, then their teeth grow through their brains.
Flotsam: How very incisive!
I read through this a bit yesterday, and I'm not really convinced that he's onto something novel or sustainable. (Or safe, given that he decided he had an iron deficiency based on two days' worth of readings.) He's been doing it a month and he lost some weight. That's good, I guess, but his results look about the same as one of those non-sustainable juice fasts that are supposed to cleanse you of toxins. Marketing it as money and time saving and feminist is new, I guess.
I get into really monotonous food habits because nothing seems worth the effort (or cost). (ie I'd be perfectly happy to eat delicious food if someone else were prepping it.) Perhaps I should just keep Ensure around, but IIRC it has a faintly gummy texture that grossed me out.
So eliminating all that while getting beautiful skin and lots of energy sounds magical!
It seems absolutely crazy to me. Vitamins aren't absorbed by the body very well (I'm sure some are, but iron and B12, for example, are not). It's much better to each the original food source to get the vitamins. So he may be fine for a little while but in a few years he'll be suffering from all sorts of deficiencies.
Also, I would think he'd really miss having fiber in his diet. If he can tolerate eating the same thing at every meal, he'd be much better off by eating salads and nuts.
No way his increase in maximum running distance can happen like that unless he had been able to run much further than a mile in the not so distant past.
his results look about the same as one of those non-sustainable juice fasts that are supposed to cleanse you of toxins
Yeah, that was my first thought as well.
In any case, anyone who writes
I resented the time, money, and effort the purchase, preparation, consumption, and clean-up of food was consuming
is not speaking my language. Furthermore, I think you really do need the rest of the stuff present in actual food. I fear this guy is a ninny.
We are already over our grocery budget for the month by $100, and we don't buy organic or shop at Whole Foods. We did restock the freezer with a lot of meat and we're also making a lot of extra freezer foods to get us through the early post-partum days, but to be honest I'm not sure what I'd cut back on.
Shorter me: magic goo drink that probably doesn't solve your nutritional needs to me sounds like hell.
14: I would think he'd really miss having fiber in his diet
Heh. I did keep thinking: But my mom would say, "Where's the roughage [as she called it]? You need more roughage!"
The average american spends $604/month on food
Wow. The footnoted links seem to show that this is a messy figure: the Gallup poll doesn't seem to control for family size (the question is "How much does your family spend on food per week?")
The first footnote's link to USDA figures shows that the $600 figure would be for a couple (family of 2) on a "moderate cost" plan. So $300/month/individual -- which still seems high to me, but I'm, if not a thrifty, a low-cost type.
At least I think I'm reading those pages right.
he decided he had an iron deficiency based on two days' worth of readings.
Yeah, either he's making that up or he was in terrible health to begin with. Normal people don't go anemic in two days unless they're attacked by a vampire or something.
The main items on his ingredient list are "Carbohydrates" "Fat" and "protein," which are of course the major ingredients in food. Now you can't go to do store and simply buy a package labeled "protein." His protein must have come from a plant or animal source.
So in what sense is he not eating food?
17. There are a number of people who are, for one reason or another, entirely uninterested in what they eat as a sensory stimulus. Many of them are vegans. Many of them are moralistic twerps. These categories overlap.
I've moved to active dislike of this man. Under "Social Implications" we have:
I for one would not miss the stereotype of the housewife in the kitchen. Providing diverse, palatable, and nutritious meals for an entire family every day must be exhausting. What if taking a night off didn't mean unhealthy pizza or expensive take out? How wasteful society has been with its women! The endless hours spent cooking and cleaning in the kitchen could be replaced with socializing, study, or creative endeavors. And why beg children to eat vegetables? Soylent has every vitamin and mineral the body needs, and it's delicious.
What if taking a night off didn't mean pizza or take-out? What a terrible paucity of imagination, for lo, it might just mean another helping of the delicious black bean chili, or of the quiche or marinated vegetable salad or what have you.
"How wasteful society has been with its women!"
Good lord, what a bizarre paragraph the whole thing is.
24: I'm sure some people have no interest in what they eat; they are not my people.
It's a common symptom of several kinds of bad health.
I don't see how beer fits in this guy's world.
Per the link in 5, Dylan Matthews has offered to be a trial subject for Soylent. Huh. That'll be interesting.
So he's "reticent to provide exact brand names and instructions because I am not fully convinced of the diet's safety for a physiology different than mine", but he's willing to share the actual brew with anyone willing to be a guinea pig? Um, ok, that doesn't sound at all like a bad idea.
Apparently he's interested in producing it "at scale" if viable.
This is the stupidest goddamned thing I've seen in a long time.
re: 24
Yeah. A martial artist I know is like that. He was a raw food vegan for ages, although he now eats some cooked vegan food. His diet is horrible. I've watched him eat, and the food just looks terribly boring and often kind of odd. He'll pull out a container of grey liquid with nuts floating in it. He claims to have little interest in food except as fuel. He is also pretty moralistic about what others eat.
That said, he's in fantastic shape -- 190lbs, pretty much solid muscle -- so the bogging looking raw food diet isn't doing him any harm.
re: 32.last
And it won't be illusory. He's the sort of guy who'll have calculated to the nth degree exactly how much of each thing he'll need to eat of which thing to get exactly the recommended balance of proteins and amino acids, vitamins, etc.
Wait, this is real? Until I read the comments here, I was assuming the whole thing was made up and written to make some point I didn't understand.
The article linked in the OP is an endless source of fun:
Cooking should be a hobby, like hunting. People used to hunt for survival, now they just do it for fun.
17. There are a number of people who are, for one reason or another, entirely uninterested in what they eat as a sensory stimulus. Many of them are vegans. Many of them are moralistic twerps. These categories overlap.
I know a guy—who is a vegan, but not a twerp (and not all that moralistic; IIRC if he's organizing a meeting he won't provision it with non-vegan, or at least non-vegetarian, food, but that seems reasonable to me)—who's done things like make charts of the Most Nutritious Nuts (per ... cost, or per something, anyway), and the Most Nutritious Berries, and things like that, and then limits his eating to the top two. Bizarrely, he claims not to be one of the people who take no carnal pleasure in food.
Maybe he just doesn't understand what the carnal pleasure of food actually is?
This guy has no credibility, not just because he writes like a mental patient, but much more importantly, because he misuses the word "reticent".
he claims not to be one of the people who take no carnal pleasure in food
I have never heard of the people who truly take no carnal pleasure in food (other than those in the depths of illness). I really have never heard of this. Learn something new every day.
The parts about how this avoids the environmental and animal welfare impacts of traditional food are odd. Where does he think these nutritional supplements come from?
Esp. the cheapest dietary supplements. I'm sure cheap whey powder is like unto manna...
40: You're being charitable. The whole thing is a fanfic of Gyro Gearloose does Looney Tunes.
You're being charitable.
It's what I do.
43: Thus maintaining the cosmic balance.
So he calls this food Soylent, and he won't tell you what exactly is in it but will send you a supply to eat yourself? What could possibly go wrong?
When it turns out that people are eating mystery meat (dog, horse, cat, human?) his defense is going to be, "WTF did you expect, morons?"
It's true, in eighth grade I learned* that if a human eats human meat it's all digested and nothing turns to poop. That's why he doesn't need roughage!
*Not from adults.
46: The truth is a little more complicated.
45: Best case scenario: expired slimfast shakes.
I haven't clicked, but how is this different from MFK Fisher's sludge -- grain/cheap nasty vegetables/maybe cheap meat stew prepared without concern for palatability? If you don't care about variety or taste, coming up with a grocery-store available diet that'll keep you alive shouldn't be hard.
Horhumdoat is an unmistakeable meal.
50: The pictured drink seemed a bit too ecru for that to be the case.
I would eat whatever kind of food in exchange for as much sex as I wanted every day.
After clicking through, the link is obviously a joke. Immediately after starting to drink the stuff, he can run 3.14 miles, "an irrational improvement"? He's calling it soylent?
I just meant that if the benefits of not having to think about eating sounded that great, it's a solved problem that doesn't need shopping from chemical supply stores.
54: Most of us have upgraded to digital.
57: I like my women like I like my brewing equipment: antiseptic.
I like my women like my septic tanks: inordinately.
42: The whole thing is a fanfic of Gyro Gearloose does Looney Tunes.
Awesome! I had never heard of Gyro Gearloose.
In the book "soylent" is a combination of soy and lentils.
60: Parsi, when it comes to wasting neurons on things no one ever needs to remember, I'm a paragon of over-achievement.
Dear Biohazard, I intend to remember Gyro Gearloose from here on out, and to refer to him frequently as appropriate, even if he does need explanation.
Soy Lent is a fast for those who have already give up meat.
That is just awful but in a good way.
I find this strangely entertaining, I know not why.
I talked about this on Facebook and I still think that the fact that something is cheaper is not a bad indicator that producing it is less labor-intensive and probably environmentally impactful unless you have reason to think there are externalities involved in producing the cheap version not involved in producing the expensive version, or that the ingredients in the expensive version are much more scarce. Pointing out that nutritional supplements, etc., are made from food make the discrepant externality or discrepant ingredient situations less likely, not more. It would not be surprising to me that removing, for instance, a lot of the storage and preservation problem in food production makes the end product a lot cheaper.
His claim, and who knows if it is true, is that the drink is tasty and satisfying, which is not true of Ensure, presumably not true of vegetable sludge, etc. If it were actually the case that someone had made something that substituted for meals, tasted good, and actually made you not hungry, it would be unlike anything I had ever experienced. Maybe that's because I've never tried drinking IV fluid.
LB wins in 55, the "3.14...irrational" is the "hey, satire" flag people are supposed to get. A little subtle but given all the other satire being pushed as fact (did you hear Paul Krugman went bankrupt thanks to his personal Keynesian budgeting?) it's not surprising other people want a piece of the act.
(And it's because of my very intense investment in food -- people tell me they get vicarious pleasure from watching me eat; someone told me recently, after watching me eat a hamburger, that I looked like a "woman eating a hamburger commercial" -- that the idea of something that could free me from a little bit of that burden is appealing. I would love to feel satisfied except when I decided I was going to cook or eat for pleasure. This monkey is on my back all day, costing me time, attention at work, and money, and making weight management harder. On my OkCupid profile, when it asks "I spend a lot of time thinking about...", my very first answer is food.)
So $300/month/individual -- which still seems high to me, but I'm, if not a thrifty, a low-cost type.
Doesn't seem at all high to me. Admittedly I'm paying London prices, but I easily spend £10 a day on food, and that doesn't include going out.
To clarify, it includes "going out" for lunch, but not actually going to restaurants.
Add in the implausibility of the health/athletic claims. He can't run a mile and then right after he starts this stuff he can run three and a bit? That's nonsense, and right on top of the nonsense is the nerdy joke.
Also, soylent would be a nerdy joke if he referenced the movie. It might possibly be a coincidence if his stuff was made out of soy and lentils, but it isn't. Deadpan, with no reference to it as a joke, it's a hoax indicator.
He can't run a mile and then right after he starts this stuff he can run three and a bit?
Maybe it's all a joke, but this doesn't seem implausible to me. I experienced the switch from "I can't run very much at all" to "I can run a long way" in a fast-tipping, inflection point way. And people can always do a lot more physically than they think they can, so placebo effects could get someone from under a mile to running three.
In fact, my labmates at the time I was working on starting to run made some claim to me like, if you can run for ten minutes, you can run for a half hour. I can't remember the exact numbers they were using, but they were something like that, and their point was that there's a critical point around running one mile and after that substantially longer differences become natural, if not effortless. I accidentally ran six miles (around a small loop) a few days after I had first continuously run more than one.
A martial artist I know is like that.... He claims to have little interest in food except as fuel.
I remember a guy in college who managed to stay on a diet like this using mostly (if not exclusively) dining hall food. He would take six boiled eggs for breakfast and remove all the yolks, pour himself a quarter cup of olive oil from the salad bar, and drink a cup of skimmed milk, etc. Presumably he was taking some kind of supplements to get vitamins and minerals. I think he was either a rower or a wrestler.
W/R/T the OP, I can't decide if I'm in the "satire" or "hoax" camp.
My tendons still won't let me run more than three miles.
or, no, wait, it must have been five miles accidentally, because the first time I did a real ten k (more than a year later) it was a moderately-sized deal to me. I could find the old Facebook status to check.
Eh. It's not that you're not right about the fact that most people can do a whole lot more physically than they think they can. But it's still weird, and the joke is something that's unlikely to have occurred accidentally -- he just happened to both be tracking his run on some app that gave him distance to two decimal places and stop at 3.14 miles? And the soylent thing again looks like a hoax tag to me.
And it's just all factually absurd. Doctors would actually like to have a perfect (nutritionally complete, palatable) liquid meal replacement available, let alone one that miraculously made you healthy. That's why Ensure exists. This guy, mixing nutritional supplements in his kitchen, comes up with something much much better? Not impossible like a perpetual motion machine is impossible, but I'd bet my food budget for the month that that this is a joke -- I don't know whether you'd call it satire or hoax, but it's not true.
There's been a lot of internet stuff in the last couple of years that's weird hoaxes -- not funny enough that you'd naturally catch them, just sort of lying. The Daily Currant shows up with articles that people are linking to as true, and they're never funny enough that you'd have to be a moron to fall for them, they're just not actually true.
75: I'd agree with this, but for me the crossover point is more like three miles. Putting on distance, I have to claw my way painfully up to three, and then additional distance is easy to add so long as I don't try to go faster than an injured hamster.
82: I fell for the Dutch guy with wings a year or so ago.
76 I can't decide if I'm in the "satire" or "hoax" camp.
I saw Exit Through the Gift Shop yesterday (yes, I'm a couple years behind) and loved it but haven't quite decided which of these categories to put it in.
There's still time for that one to prove out real.
67.1 is hilariously wrong in almost every aspect.
Also that one golden eagle got much healthier by switching to an all-toddler diet.
83.last: That was my mistake, I think. I've had tendon issues but they always resolved quickly until I started trying to sprint.
Though further to 87, I actually can't quite parse the first part of 67.1, so maybe it's the opposite of hilariously wrong. But the point about preservatives I still quite disagree with.
3.14 miles
I'm not saying you're not right that it's a fake, LB -- I don't know one way or the other -- but this is just not that weird. 3.14 miles is .2 miles after a five k. If you were intending to stop at a five k and ran a few more steps you'd be at 3.14 miles. All the running apps I use do tend to track mileage to two decimal points. Also, if you're watching your odometer at the end of your run, as I did frequently back when I had a phone with working GPS, you might decide to stop at 3.14 just for the sake of the joke.
Incidentally, the calorie restried-diet nutjobs have done lots of working trying to come up with compact, low-ish calorie foods that meet all your nutritional needs. It is obviously not as simple as ordering a bunch of crap from chemical supply stores (have you looked at the ingredient list? NOT SO CONVINCING!), and you mostly end up with things like this.
Of course the "irrational" line is a joke. The idea that that's the hoax dog-whistle is borderline paranoid. Given that there are follow up posts, and no other indicators of it being a hoax, it seems a hell of a lot more likely to be a marketing campaign.
Also, if Dylan Matthews is ordering some, we'll know for sure, shortly.
"2) Thouroughly Mix Dry Ingreedients in Staniless Steel Bowl and Set Aside Do Not Add To Dry Ingredients!"
Don't add the dry ingredients to the dry ingredients? Don't add anything further to the dry ingredients?
There is precious little good data in nutrition science. Every study I've seen shows poor statistical methods, conflicts with other studies, or does not show statistically significant results, usually all three. It's a difficult field because there are simply too many variables and the parameters are difficult to control precisely. This is why diets are fads. I decided to ditch nutrition and focus on biology. The proportions in Soylent are loosely based off the recommendations of the FDA, though I added a couple extras and changed a few based on my testing.
Totally.
Also I agree entirely with 67.2. I think that's what I find tantalizing.
Those muffins contain more yeast than anything else except blueberries.
90: The point isn't about chemical preservatives, as far as I can tell, it's about things like shipping things that need refrigeration, shipping fresh food items together with a bunch of air gaps, etc.
Does 'soylent' make anyone happier as the hoax dog-whistle? Honestly, why would you call your meal replacement after food made from euthanized old people in a dystopian SF movie unless you were kidding?
I'll try to be clearer.
Things that make things cheap:
not using a lot of labor (per unit of product)
not consuming a lot of resources
not using ingredients that are very scarce
not pricing a lot of externalities into the cost of something
and I'll add: not having a status-driven market for the product, not paying labor, subsidizing some upstream aspect of production in a way that affects the final price.
So, if one thing is cheaper than another, and you don't have reason to believe that the production of the first product involves unpriced externalities more than the second, uncompensated labor more than the second, scarce resources more than the second, or a status-driven market more than the second, then it seems reasonable to me to think that less labor and/or fewer physical resources went into making it.
So really though, are people really taking "nutrition science has a lot of woo, so I'm going to ignore it in favor of a high-school level understanding of 'biology' [N.B. the word they're searching for is 'nutrition'] and some crap I read on the back of a pop-tart box" seriously? It's either a terrible joke or a terrible idea that's not intended to be a joke, but either way it's a fucking joke. Stop trying fad diets and instead try this random miracle food that I invented using bullshit! Come on.
I agree that the quoted section in 95 does not make a ton of sense. Some things about his reasoning definitely confused me.
99: no, still seems absurd. "Soylent" is a wink, in order to sell the stuff and appeal to people who will get the reference, because it's as magical as that stuff seemed to be.
96: And that's also how you know it's not true. If it were that easy, it'd exist already. (I know, I know, I'm saying that the economist is walking past a $20 bill on the street, but this is more like a $10,000 bill.)
102: of course it's a fad-diet. Crossed with a get-rich-quick-scheme.
104: That stuff didn't seem to be magical in the movie, it was the grim starvation rations people were staying alive on, even before they found out it was people.
105: right, I don't actually believe the product lives up to the blog post. But I would love such a hypothetical product.
Right, at best it's a joke on the fact that people are so alienated from food and its production that they'll excitedly sign up for a bowl full of chemicals marketed not as food but as the canonical dystopian food replacement.
Also, on the athletic claims, he's purporting to have gone from 'can't run a mile' to 'can run seven' in a month. That's implausible at a completely different level than going from one mile to three in a week. If you want to believe that it's not a hoax in the sense that he has actually made this stuff and is living on it, the fact that he's lying about the effects doesn't disprove that, but you can't actually believe that he's telling the truth generally.
107: I haven't seen the movie, and I bet most people haven't. The cultural vague memory is going to be something like "everyone ate the stuff and then it was PEOPLE!!" I assumed it must have been tasty and nutritious, as a plot point, and I bet that's a common mistake.
Honestly, why would you call your meal replacement after food made from euthanized old people in a dystopian SF movie unless you were kidding?
You have a sense of humor?
Sifu is certainly right regarding its being a joke in another way.
I mean, if you want a miraculous diet that's incredibly inexpensive but meets the vast majority of your nutritional needs and is perfectly tasty, reasonably environmentally sound, and is capable of being produced in almost every climate on the globe, eat mashed potatoes and drink a glass of milk for every meal.
yeah, to be clear, I never thought, oh, all his claims are going to be true for all people. But it didn't occur to me that he was joking, I was interested in trying some new thing that someone recommended that made him feel a little less food-obsessed, and I do think that in this scenario, lower price would indicate something how resource-intensive (including both physical and human resources) it was to produce.
No, I don't generally think he's telling the truth. Comity? I just think the hoax/satire motivation is ludicrous, compared to a profit motivation.
113: sure, if you want a miraculous diet that's incredibly inexpensive but meets the vast majority of your nutritional needs and is perfectly tasty, reasonably environmentally sound, and is capable of being produced in almost every climate on the globe AND WILL POISON YOU, eat a bunch of potatoes.
113: A post in the spirit of the holiday.
113: Or make the potatoes with butter.
If you want a diet that's the product of self-experimentation and that resulted, by all accounts, in significant weight loss, increase in physical fitness, reduced food obsession, and generally improved well-being for the originator, check out that ridiculous Shangri-La diet that involves drinking a ton of olive oil.
115: Not comity, in that I would bet my food budget for the month that the product does not actually exist as roughly described, and that he has not been living on it.
It is certainly true that mashed potatoes are "delish".
that resulted, by all accounts, in significant weight loss, increase in physical fitness, reduced food obsession, and generally improved well-being for the originator AND INCREASED RESPECT FOR IL DUCE!
123: it's like you don't pay any more attention to Halford than anybody else does.
Potatoes are poisonous?
I was alluding to Roberto Halfordo, but yes, potatoes are (or, rather, in the right circumstances, can be) poisonous.
You would want something more than mashed potatoes and milk fast. The tantalizing claim is that he didn't want anything else.
I know about the Shangri-la diet. Since there's a tradition of self-experimentation in nutrition, that made this guy's project more plausible to me. Maybe I will try the Shangri-la diet. But drinking olive oil sounds gross.
The parts of a potato that have been exposed to the sunlight and turned green contain high levels of solenoids, which, if ingested, will be synthesized by your gut bacteria in coilguns which really mess you up.
But drinking olive oil sounds gross.
Sounds amazing to me.
I had forgotten it was more than just grain.
I ate nothing but mashed potatoes with butter for three months and not only was I perfectly ruddy-faced and healthy at the end of it, I could bench-press a cow and I never craved anything but those sweet, sweet tubers.
Is it more tantalizing now?
That's what makes deadly nightshade so deadly, by the way: coilguns have no report, or at least no noticeable report compared to traditional sidearms, so it's much easier for the nightshade to do its work in secret.
I know someone who said she had some success with it, who substituted flaxseed? oil in capsules, so swallowing pills rather than a spoonful of oil.
I still associate ranting about potatoes being "Nightshade!" with macrobiotic people, that's at least three or four fads back from paleo.
Also, her alcohol tolerance is through the roof.
I'd like to try Seth Roberts's Climate Denialism diet.
131: If you also promise me a large West Village apartment, I will try your diet as a tester. But you have to send me all the potatoes for free.
I recall reading a report on recent studies that concluded that most of the health benefits of the "Mediterranean diet" come from the olive oil rather than any of the other stuff.
I'm still not sure I could handle drinking it though.
Is there no one who will have sex with me three times a day in exchange for controlling my diet?
(Whether I believed someone had gone from one to seven in a month would depend on whether they had any history as a runner. If they had, maybe. If not, then probably not.)
120: I don't get what you're arguing, then. Yes, I think he's lying. No, I don't think the "irrational" joke nor the "Soylent" joke are clues meant to tip off the careful reader.
139: Contact the Eulenspiegel Society; someone will no doubt be happy to work with you.
The options (that I can see) are that he's actually made some stuff that he's been living on for a month and he'll send you some for you to live on, but he's lying about how great it is, or that the whole thing is bullshit that he wrote while eating a chicken parmagiana hero (not wedded to the specific foodstuff here, but you take my point). I'm pretty committed to the idea that the whole thing is bullshit, rather than that it's merely inflated claims on behalf of something he's actually been living on.
143 was my first reaction (as per 34), and my main takeaway was curiosity what the point of the whole exercise was, since the social/political points seemed to be a sideline.
I recall reading a report on recent studies that concluded that most of the health benefits of the "Mediterranean diet" come from eating nuts rather than any of the other stuff.
bullshit that he wrote while eating a chicken parmagiana hero
Drinking. After putting it whole into a blender, because Future!
eating nuts rather than any of the other stuff.
Sure, you eat the nuts you get the nut oil. Olives are a nut.
144: It's not very cleverly written -- I don't think there is much of a point. My guess would be that the dude just got lucky with a hoax that happened to hit people on a 'that's interesting' spot.
It would be awesome if he revealed the full ingredient list and it turned out it really was people.
"Ah-ha, totally punk'd you!"
138 + 145: And I have read somewhere or other (not a scientific paper, maybe a cooking magazine, even) that it's the high vegetable content of the diet that provides the health benefits, or more specifically for Greeks at least, the large amounts of foraged greens.
The Greeks will be healthier than ever, with all the foraging going on after the end of their economy.
It's possible he was on this ridiculous diet for a while, made some excited claims, and prefers lying to publicly admitting he was nuts now that he's on a chicken parmagiana shake diet.
@145, 150
Maybe the real secret is lots of octopus.
My experimental diet for today is to eat only one meal at lunch time at the all you can eat sushi restaurant. (Speaking of things bad for the environment...). I will then play 2 hours of hockey 10 hours later. If the results in the morning are promising I will ask for volunteers to join my movement. Just needs a clever name capturing the Japanese-Canadaian fusion feel.
My father went on the one-meal diet for about a year, after which he needed to lose a bunch of weight.
||
My Mother died last week. She was not yet seventy. She will never again assure my brother or me that she loves us, nor will one of us say it to her. Mostly I regret the the hundreds of things we could have done together but now will never be able to do.
|>
Oh, TH, I am so sorry. Hopefully you're able to hang together with your brother as you get through it together.
Very sorry to hear about your mother. I'll keep you and your family in my thoughts.
My experimental diet for today is to eat only one meal at lunch time at the all you can eat sushi restaurant.
I only eat one meal at lunch time. And one at breakfast and one at dinner.
How awful, TH. I am so very sorry for your loss.
I'm not inclined to think that it's a hoax, only because self-experimentation is pretty common in the quantified self/nutrition geek groups. But it could be, along the lines of "what will these idiots believe now?" But the irrational/Soylent things I read as jokes.
along the lines of "what will these idiots believe now?"
Sifu gets it right at 109. In particular, at best it's a joke in that direction. At worst, of course, the guy really believes himself, and I tend to think that's the case: he really is that alienated from food. Dylan Matthews in the link in 5 said in comments that yeah, he really is.
My condolences, Tiny Hermaphrodite. That's so sad.
I'm really sorry for your loss, TH.
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Wait, soylent comes in different ethnicities? Who is green?
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Oh, Tiny H, that is so sad. "Not yet 70" seemed so old the first time I read it, and of course it's the age of my parents, and of their three friends who died far too soon in the last year. Hugs.
I had a nice long drunk chat with an obviously insane guy I'm not related to. I feel much better, but now I wonder why.
I think this means I'm officially homesick.
At your house homesick for the bar? Or at the bar homesick for your house?
I feel much better, but now I wonder why.
Did he give you a blowjob?
181: Homesick for my home thrain.
182: I didn't think to ask.
I didn't think to ask.
Probably for the best. They don't always turn out well.
I didn't think to ask.
Usually one knows when one is being given a blowjob.
Maybe you physicists do. You're always so logical about these things.
"Not yet 70" seemed so old the first time I read it
My mom wasn't yet 60.
(I'm not trying to play bereavement poker here. My reaction to the original mention of "not yet 70" was to think - not for the first time in the past month - that it's always too soon. It has never been "enough" time.)
My condolences, TH. It sucks.
it's always too soon. It has never been "enough" time.
Agreed.
My grandfather seems to be in his last days. It seems like he's had enough time. (age 93) But maybe I'd feel different if I'd been living a thousand miles away for the last 15 years, instead of visiting regularly.
Or maybe if you were Christina Crawford.
It may be different for people who get up into that age range.
Yeah, my grandmother was definitely of the opinion that she had had enough time. I recall at one point when she was, I suppose, 103 or 104 (she died at 105) that she said to me something like "but when will it all end?". She had wanted to get down either in writing or on tape her recollections of the history of the family (about which she was very well informed; she knew a lot about her extended family), and there would easily have been enough time to do that, too, if we had been more diligent about amanuensizing in years prior.
She had wanted to get down either in writing or on tape her recollections of the history of the family (about which she was very well informed; she knew a lot about her extended family), and there would easily have been enough time to do that, too, if we had been more diligent about amanuensizing in years prior.
I take it from your phrasing that neither she nor anyone else in the family managed to do this.
On a similar note, I've been working on putting together a family tree for my mom's family to present to people at the seder next week, at the request of the cousin who is hosting it. Luckily my mom did manage to interview her aunt, who knew more about the family history than anyone else, a few years before she died, so I'm working mostly from the notes from that. There's still a lot missing, which hopefully someone else in the family can eventually fill in, but I think there's enough information available to put together something reasonable.
Result of 154: Played good hockey game, dropped a pound compared to yesterday morning (which is within normal drift.) However I may have broken my thumb blocking a slapshot. I blame the low quality hamachi. Need to go have Xray this morning. I kept playing an additional 85 minutes after it happend and had two more goals and three more assists.
if you want a miraculous diet that's incredibly inexpensive but meets the vast majority of your nutritional needs and is perfectly tasty, reasonably environmentally sound, and is capable of being produced in almost every climate on the globe, eat mashed potatoes
This comment posted in St Patrick's Day.
Not broken, just bruised. This is the third time (over 12 years) that I've gone in for an Xray think I'd broken something (ankle, rib, thumb) and had it be negative. I can't imagine how much a real broken bone must hurt, I've never had one.
I have broken a bone and not quite realized that before. Once I broke my hand and decided it was just sprained, and then the next day I went for a bike ride and fell riding over some rainy train tracks (because, you know, I couldn't grip the handlebars very well, because my hand was broken) and injured it worse. For little bones (hand, foot) I don't think it actually hurts that much worse than a bad sprain. On the other hand when I broke my collarbone I knew exactly what was up.
My condolences as well. I've had hairline fractures in my tibia, or maybe fibula, but they didn't hurt much worse than shin splints. Some bruises are probably more painful.
For little bones (hand, foot) I don't think it actually hurts that much worse than a bad sprain.
When I broke my scaphoid, I thought it was sprained at first. I didn't bother going to the hospital until it came to five in the morning and I still couldn't sleep because of the pain.
Yeah, I've broken fingers and toes a couple of times. Or at least gone in and had the doctors go, 'Yup, looks broken.' They didn't x-ray in every case. I've also cracked ribs. I don't remember any of those being particularly painful within the pantheon of 'painful shit I've had happen'.* Certainly not many worse than a very bad bruise or sprain.
* one of the ones that had me literally tearing up with the pain was a tiny muscle spasm in my shoulder, brought on during an epic typing session. Much more painful than when I broke a finger. Although it went away quicker.
The most painful break I've ever had was my middle toe, which I smashed on a rock while wading. I really pulverised it and lost the nail. It faded quickly, but that was probably the most painful second of my life.
191: It seems like he's had enough time. (age 93) But maybe I'd feel different. . . That could very well be. When my mother died at 90 my brother, I, my son, and daughter all felt she was right (for her) in saying "Ninety is enough". My niece came apart and is still somewhat distraught. I haven't found any generally applicable rules to the grief thing except that extreme and unexpected swings in mood seem to be universal for the people I've talked to and the writers I've read. They do damp down considerably after a while but never seem to go away completely after a major loss.
I do feel like the grandparent/grandchild relationship is quite different than the parent/child relationship, and I also definitely feel like how the dying person feels about things can very quite tremendously from how those who survive feel about things; somebody can be ready to go and fulfilled with their life and leave a lot of people behind who will never feel like there was enough time. Nothing novel or unpwned there but anyhow.
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I don't think I'm behind the times, but what the fuck is up with this Michelle Shocked anti-gay screed business? I didn't even realize she was straight. Bizarre.
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I will note now that we're dozens of comments removed from sensitive feelings that it's quite odd we're discussing the death of old people in the Soylent thread.
207: I'm going to hold out hope that it's some kind of ill-advised performance art.
Thanks all you reprobates. I think my brother and I are holding up well. It just feels so arbitrary.