Eating tasteless frozen vegetables and starchy beans and rice, again and again day after day, sounds like hell to me. Eating is so effortful compared to soylent -- it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do to eat something like that.
You can just buy flavorings for soylent, or blend in some fruit, and it'll have a pleasant taste, and you won't spend time on it. Seems so much better than frozen anything.
Frozen mixed veggies (carrots, peas, corn, green beans and lima beans) are far from tasteless. Also, they're frozen soon after picking, so nutritional content is higher than most market produce. And the combination of corn, beans and rice supplies complete protein. Plus there's plenty of fiber.
Here's my "Indian" spicing, with largest quantities first: cumin, granulated garlic, black pepper, coriander, cinnamon, turmeric. First I start microwaving the veggies in a large Pyrex bowl. Then I fry the spices lightly in ghee, add canned black beans. If I'm using meat, I add that first and brown. Then I mix it all in a large pot, and simmer for a while. Finally I adjust spicing, and let cool.
I freeze in single-portion containers. It takes me an hour or two to prepare ~20 servings. When I'm hungry, it takes about 10 minutes from freezer to microwaving to eating.
I totally don't get the thing about chewing. I like chewing. I enjoy the process as flavors from each component blend with each other and the spicing. I can't imagine feeling satisfied after just drinking a meal.
I have never found frozen vegetables to have any taste other than the faint suggestion of their natural taste in a sea of mushy blandness.
When I was on a DIY blend and mixed batches of powder weekly, it took 20-30 minutes (depending how much I concentrated on it) to prepare a week's worth of meals. It took ~2 minutes to pour the powder into a pitcher at the beginning of the day, so 40 seconds/meal prep time.
Not to mention the time saved shopping, planning for shopping, driving to the store, etc., Which almost certainly takes at least 90 minutes/trip, which let's say you make biweekly. comes to 105-155 minutes of weekly overhead plus 10 minutes a meal for 315-365 minutes of total time wasted by consuming solid food a week. In comparison, DIY soylent is 62-72 minutes a week. If you're buying powder, that drops to just the time required to mix a day's batch, dropping the total time cost to 42 minutes a week! If you buy Soylent 2.0, you spend ZERO minutes on food preparation and can ALWAYS consume nutrients concurrently with any other task.
That is HOURS a week you are literally stealing from yourself. You could use that to scale your startup that much quicker, or if you're a freelancer you could just convert it directly to billable hours! (If you're a wage slave, why are you on HN?)
By design Soylent has a complete nutritional profile, so you're getting everything you need, complete proteins, fiber, whatever, and far better than your vegetables, which have variance that can't be measured or controlled. This also means you're always satisfied while on Soylent ("drinking a meal" is possible, but quixotic... Soylent allows you to liberate yourself from the concept of meals, and just consume calories as you need to throughout the day, which has the added advantage of eliminating food coma and keeping energy release steady).
I usually drink my soylent unflavored, because I've long since stopped caring about things like taste. The ROI just isn't there. Taste sensations are a fleeting experience that rarely generates a lasting memory (how did your lunch taste yesterday? The day before? The month before?), whereas the tangible benefits you can attain from saving that time tend to be persistent long into the future and generally compound. But, if you want to add ~30 seconds to prep time, you could mix in cinnamon, MSG, blend in some fruit, whatever, and you'll have a taste experience that is almost certainly on the same tier as reheated frozen vegetables.
> it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do
I have heard that argument several times when Soylent is mentioned. Don't dentists ever bring up the importance of chewing for gum and teeth health? I thought it's common knowledge.
Why do you think chewing is healthy at all? It allows organic matter to get into your teeth and physically wears them down. This is a hard question to google, because you get chewing tobacco and gum chewing results, but can you provide any evidence that chewing on its own is somehow healthy? What mechanism do you think it hits?
Eating tasteless frozen vegetables and starchy beans and rice, again and again day after day, sounds like hell to me. Eating is so effortful compared to soylent -- it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do to eat something like that.
You can just buy flavorings for soylent, or blend in some fruit, and it'll have a pleasant taste, and you won't spend time on it. Seems so much better than frozen anything.