I was thinking recently that if soylent kicks something off and ‘food replacement’ -type things become a big deal, it could have a massive side effect of putting a lot of people onto diets with heavily reduced animal and animal product content. Its possible success could inadvertently be a huge boon for animals and animal activists.
Personally, I’m somewhat sympathetic towards veganism for ethical reasons, but the combination of trivial inconvenience and lack of effect I can have as an individual has prevented me from pursuing such a diet. Soylent would allow me to do so easily, should I want to. Similarly, there are people who have no interest in animal welfare at all. If ‘food replacements’ become big, it could mean for the incidental conversion of those who might have otherwise never considered veganism or vegetarianism to a lifestyle that fits within those bounds, for only their personal cost or convenience reasons.
I anticipate artificial meat having a much bigger impact than meal-replacement products. I anticipate that demand for soylent-like meal replacement products among the technophile cluster will peak within the next three years, and will wager $75 to someone’s $100 that this is the case if someone can come up with a well-defined metric for checking this.
Note that the individual impact you can have by being a vegetarian is actually pretty big. Sure, it’s small in terms of _percentage_of the problem, but that’s the wrong way to measure effect. If you saw a kid tied to railroad tracks, you wouldn’t leave them there on account of all the children killed by other causes every day.
Let $X= the cost to me of being a vegetarian. I’m indifferent between donating $X to the best charity I can find or being a vegetarian. For what values of $X would you advise me to become a vegetarian assuming that if I don’t become a vegetarian I really will donate an extra $X to, say, MIRI?
Being a vegetarian does not have a positive monetary cost, unless it makes you so unhappy that you find yourself less motivated at work and therefore earn less money or some such. Meat may be heavily subsidized in the US, but it’s still expensive compared to other foods.
I would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Consequently, if my donating $8,000 to a charity would do more good for the rest of the world than my becoming a vegetarian would, it’s socially inefficient for me to become a vegetarian.
You can make a precommitment to do only one or the other, but if you become vegetarian you don’t actually lose the $8,000 and become unable to give it to MIRI. In this sense it is not a true tradeoff unless happiness and income are easily interconvertible for you.
I fight the hypothetical—there is no such tradeoff.
A more concrete hypothetical: Suppose that every morning when you wake up you’re presented with a button. If you press the button, an animal will be tortured for three days, but you can eat whatever you want that day. If you don’t press the button, there’s no torture, but you can’t eat meat. By the estimates in this paper, that’s essentially the choice we all make every day (3:1 ratio taken by a_m times l_m = at least 1000 animal-days of suffering avoided per year of vegetarianism ~= 3 days of torture per day of vegetarianism).
Anyway—you should not be a vegetarian iff you would press the button every day.
This is absurd. I really, really would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Do you think I’m lying or don’t understand my own preferences? (I’m an economist and so understand money and tradeoffs and I’m on a paleo diet and so understand my desire for meat.)
I would rather live in a world in which I donate $8,000 a year to MIRI and press the button to one in which I’m a vegetarian and donate nothing to charity.
There is no market for your proposed trade. In this case using money as a proxy for utility/preference doesn’t net you any insight because you can’t exchange vegetarianism or animal-years-of-torture for anything else. Of course you can convert to dollars if you really want to, but you have to convert both sides—how much would you have to be paid to allow an animal to be tortured for three days? (This is equivalent to the original question, we’ve just gone through some unnecessary conversions).
Have you/they thought about other environmental implications? Processing everything down to simple nutrients to make the drink doesn’t sound very energy efficient. Might compete with eating meat, but definately not with veganism.
Personally, I haven’t really thought of it. Might be an angle worth looking at the product from, you’re right.
I haven’t really been following their progress or anything, so I don’t know, but it’s possible they’ve touched on it at some point before. You could dig around on the soylent forum or even start the topic yourself if you really felt like it. I think the creators of the product are reasonably active on there.
One of the primary ingredients of soylent is whey protein, which is produced from cow’s milk. It is not a vegan product.
Whey is a byproduct of cheesemaking, which is why it is currently relatively inexpensive. If people started consuming whey protein en masse, it would shift the economics of whey production and dairy cow breeding in potentially highly unfavorable directions for both the cows and the soylent enthusiasts (because it would become more expensive).
Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any viable alternative to whey at this point (if there was, they’d use that, but there isn’t).
Previously the only factor preventing Soylent from being vegan was the use of whey protein. Whey is attractive due to its high absorption rate and complete amino acid profile, granting it a perfect PDCAAS score of 1.0. However, it is an animal product, some whey proteins can trigger allergic responses, and concerns were raised over the potential presence of lactose.
To allay these issues we have switched to a rice protein isolate / pea protein isolate blend. Rice protein is mostly complete except for a lack of Lysine and Leucine. This is why rice and beans became such a staple food, the beans make up for the Lysine deficiency of rice. In our staple food the blend of pea and rice protein isolate provide a complete amino acid profile with minimal risk of inflammation or allergic reactions.
soylent blog, 2013-07-24
We have found that Pea Protein is not available at the scale we demand. To compensate for this, we had to source and integrate pure Lysine into the formula, so everyone will get their complete amino acid profile.
Thanks for the info. While I suppose this is an improvement, I wonder about the scalability of this approach and the impact on the environment. Rice doesn’t exactly produce that much protein per acre of land. I’ll have to look at the numbers though.
I was thinking recently that if soylent kicks something off and ‘food replacement’ -type things become a big deal, it could have a massive side effect of putting a lot of people onto diets with heavily reduced animal and animal product content. Its possible success could inadvertently be a huge boon for animals and animal activists.
Personally, I’m somewhat sympathetic towards veganism for ethical reasons, but the combination of trivial inconvenience and lack of effect I can have as an individual has prevented me from pursuing such a diet. Soylent would allow me to do so easily, should I want to. Similarly, there are people who have no interest in animal welfare at all. If ‘food replacements’ become big, it could mean for the incidental conversion of those who might have otherwise never considered veganism or vegetarianism to a lifestyle that fits within those bounds, for only their personal cost or convenience reasons.
I anticipate artificial meat having a much bigger impact than meal-replacement products. I anticipate that demand for soylent-like meal replacement products among the technophile cluster will peak within the next three years, and will wager $75 to someone’s $100 that this is the case if someone can come up with a well-defined metric for checking this.
Note that the individual impact you can have by being a vegetarian is actually pretty big. Sure, it’s small in terms of _percentage_of the problem, but that’s the wrong way to measure effect. If you saw a kid tied to railroad tracks, you wouldn’t leave them there on account of all the children killed by other causes every day.
Let $X= the cost to me of being a vegetarian. I’m indifferent between donating $X to the best charity I can find or being a vegetarian. For what values of $X would you advise me to become a vegetarian assuming that if I don’t become a vegetarian I really will donate an extra $X to, say, MIRI?
Being a vegetarian does not have a positive monetary cost, unless it makes you so unhappy that you find yourself less motivated at work and therefore earn less money or some such. Meat may be heavily subsidized in the US, but it’s still expensive compared to other foods.
I would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Consequently, if my donating $8,000 to a charity would do more good for the rest of the world than my becoming a vegetarian would, it’s socially inefficient for me to become a vegetarian.
You can make a precommitment to do only one or the other, but if you become vegetarian you don’t actually lose the $8,000 and become unable to give it to MIRI. In this sense it is not a true tradeoff unless happiness and income are easily interconvertible for you.
I have a limited desire to incur costs to help sentients who are neither my friends nor family. This limited desire creates a “true tradeoff”.
I fight the hypothetical—there is no such tradeoff.
A more concrete hypothetical: Suppose that every morning when you wake up you’re presented with a button. If you press the button, an animal will be tortured for three days, but you can eat whatever you want that day. If you don’t press the button, there’s no torture, but you can’t eat meat. By the estimates in this paper, that’s essentially the choice we all make every day (3:1 ratio taken by a_m times l_m = at least 1000 animal-days of suffering avoided per year of vegetarianism ~= 3 days of torture per day of vegetarianism).
Anyway—you should not be a vegetarian iff you would press the button every day.
This is absurd. I really, really would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Do you think I’m lying or don’t understand my own preferences? (I’m an economist and so understand money and tradeoffs and I’m on a paleo diet and so understand my desire for meat.)
I would rather live in a world in which I donate $8,000 a year to MIRI and press the button to one in which I’m a vegetarian and donate nothing to charity.
There is no market for your proposed trade. In this case using money as a proxy for utility/preference doesn’t net you any insight because you can’t exchange vegetarianism or animal-years-of-torture for anything else. Of course you can convert to dollars if you really want to, but you have to convert both sides—how much would you have to be paid to allow an animal to be tortured for three days? (This is equivalent to the original question, we’ve just gone through some unnecessary conversions).
Have you/they thought about other environmental implications? Processing everything down to simple nutrients to make the drink doesn’t sound very energy efficient. Might compete with eating meat, but definately not with veganism.
I like my meat, btw.
Personally, I haven’t really thought of it. Might be an angle worth looking at the product from, you’re right.
I haven’t really been following their progress or anything, so I don’t know, but it’s possible they’ve touched on it at some point before. You could dig around on the soylent forum or even start the topic yourself if you really felt like it. I think the creators of the product are reasonably active on there.
One of the primary ingredients of soylent is whey protein, which is produced from cow’s milk. It is not a vegan product.
Whey is a byproduct of cheesemaking, which is why it is currently relatively inexpensive. If people started consuming whey protein en masse, it would shift the economics of whey production and dairy cow breeding in potentially highly unfavorable directions for both the cows and the soylent enthusiasts (because it would become more expensive).
Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any viable alternative to whey at this point (if there was, they’d use that, but there isn’t).
It doesn’t use whey for protein any more. Apparently the only issue for veganism (and vegetarianism) at the moment is fish oil for Omega 3s.
I didn’t know that. What does it use instead of whey?
Rice Protein, it seems.
Relevant blog posts:
soylent blog, 2013-07-24
soylent blog, 2013-08-27
link to blog
So it was whey, then it was rice protein and pea protein, now it’s just rice protein.
Their final ingredient list hasn’t been finalised yet, they seem to be getting close though. They said they’ll post it once it’s done.
Thanks for the info. While I suppose this is an improvement, I wonder about the scalability of this approach and the impact on the environment. Rice doesn’t exactly produce that much protein per acre of land. I’ll have to look at the numbers though.
I also wonder where they’re sourcing Lysine from.