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Izeinwinter comments on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Never mind it's safety, I do not like it's hedonics at all. Basic: If you currently are eating blandly enough that shifting to a liquid mono-diet for any reason other than dire medical necessity is not a major quality of life sacrifice, you need to reprioritize either your time or your money expeditures.
Loosing one of the major pleasures of life is not a rational sacrifice. Life is supposed to be enjoyable!
Preparing food is an annoying hassle which tends to interfere with my workflow and distract from doing something more enjoyable. Food does provide some amount of pleasure, but having to spend the time actually making food that's good enough to actually taste good (or having to leave the house to eat out) is enough of an annoyance that my quality of life would be much improved if I could just cease to eat entirely.
Perhaps eating isn't a major pleasure of life for everyone.
I'm imagining an analogous argument about exercise. Someone formulates (or claims to, anyway) a technique combining drugs and yoga that provides, in a sweatless ten minutes per week, equivalent health benefits to an hour of normal exercise per day. Some folks are horrified by the idea — they enjoy their workout, or their bicycle commute, or swimming laps; and they can't imagine that anyone would want to give up the euphoria of extended physical exertion in exchange for a bland ten-minute session.
To me, that seems like a failure of imagination. People don't all enjoy the same "pleasures of life". Some people like physical exercise; others hate it. Some people like tasty food; others don't care about it. Some people like sex; others simply lack any desire for it; still others experience the urge but find it annoying. And so on.
Strong agreement-- I've read enough from people who simply don't find food very interesting to believe that they're part of the human range.
More generally, people's sensoriums vary a lot.
It's a weak analogy as humans are biologically hardwired to eat but are not hardwired to exercise.
True, but two comments. First, let's also look at the prevalence. I'm willing to make a wild approximation that the number of people who truly don't care (and never will care) about food is about the same as the number of true asexuals and that's what, 1-2%?
Second, I suspect that many people don't care about food because of a variety of childhood conditioning and other psychological issues. In such cases you can treat it as a fixable pathology. And, of course, one's attitude towards food changes throughout life (teenagers are notoriously either picky or indifferent, adults tend to develop more discriminating tastes).
Additionally, if one's schedule is so tight that preparing simple home-made meals (nothing complicated, just stuff that can be prepared with 5 minutes of work) is out of the question, that seems like a fast route to burnout.
Soylent's creator argues that it increases the quality of life benefits of food, since the savings from the Soylent diet meant that when he chooses to eat out, he can afford very good quality food and preparation.
For myself, while I enjoy eating good food, I do not enjoy preparing food (good or otherwise), and in fact I enjoy eating significantly less than I dislike preparing food. So the total event (prepares good food -> eats good food) has negative utility to me, other than the nutritional necessity.
Here's the one pro-Soylent friend I have discussing why he likes it(tl;dr, he's bad at eating and figures it'll balance him out):
http://justinsamlal.blogspot.ca/2013/06/soylent-preliminary-stuff.html