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Soylent [food replacement] founder Rob Rhinehart shares his thoughts on extreme sustainability.
I am electrically self-reliant. My home life runs comfortably on a single 100W solar panel, which cost $150 and was available on Amazon Prime. I tracked down a few manufacturers in China who all said it costs around $40 to make. The US for some reason leverages massive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, so they ship them through Malaysian customs. Why do the politicians even bother?
For storage a $65 lead acid automobile battery does the trick. It's 12V so can be charged directly from the solar panel, and holds 420Wh, way more than I use in a day. That's $0.15 / Wh so I don't see why everyone is so excited about Tesla charging $0.43 / Wh for the Powerwall, sans inverter and installation.
He got rid of his fridge and other kitchen implements to make it work. What are the biggest energy users in your place? Could you pare things down as much as Rob?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday August 04 2015, @10:51PM
I might be in the minority, but I like cooking. I'm good at it.
I'm kind of feeling like Rhinehart is a little out of touch with anything outside his own limited world view. I check the weather in San Francisco. It's 66 degrees. Must be nice. It's 85 here, just down from the 91 it was earlier. His little lead acid setup doesn't really cover people who live elsewhere in the world. Likewise, guzzling something described as having the consistency of semen and a taste not much better doesn't really appeal to the vast majority of people.
I recall an article written from someone who tried it talking about how a diet of soylent was not really living, but surviving instead. That sounds like what he's talking about in general here. Even then, he's really halfassing it compared to the crazy guy who lives in cardboard box who sucks drunk guys off for nourishment. Not that I'd ever want to join him, but that guy at least impresses me.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:26PM
"I'm kind of feeling like Rhinehart is a little out of touch with anything outside his own limited world view."
Got that right.
I also like saving money. Cooking your own food can save you a bundle. If I eat out, three times a day, it can cost me around $20 per day. For that same amount of money I can buy enough raw ingredients to make a few simple meals for a few days. Heck, every now and then I buy a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and a small jar of grape jam. Cost as around $15 and I can feed myself for a whole week at work, breakfast (half a sandwich) and lunch. Probably a lot of sugar but tons of energy in nuts. The cost of a bag of rice, cheap chicken thighs/drumsticks, dozen eggs and some canned/frozen vegetables is pretty cheap compared to eating out. I can feed myself pretty well for a week on $50. Easily.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:12AM
If I eat out, three times a day, it can cost me around $20 per day.
Wow, that's some definition of "eat out" you have there. What kind of "restaurants" are you talking about there, Burger King?
If you eat out 3x a day at *real* restaurants, expect it to cost at least $50/day.
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:29AM
Forgive me your highness! My apologies. I am truly sorry that I confused a sandwich shop, pizza place, Chinese restaurant, Mexican restaurant, Greek Restaurant, Indian restaurant, and the dozens of other restaurants in my neighborhood for !!!***REAL***!!! restaurants. And here I was thinking I was eating at real restaurants. Those $8~$10 meals I get must be the scraps and droppings tossed out by REAL restaurants frequented by royalty such as yourself. Oh, forgive me sire!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:17AM
He just meant you're underselling your valid point. :)
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:16PM
He just meant you're underselling your valid point. :)
Well 8*3=24 so yeah, I'd say he's underselling it by about $4, before taxes, minimum.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:50PM
Since when did a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a small jar of Jam cost $15? Maybe, if you got all Organic, but man that's expensive.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:47AM
Not overestimated as I probably used the prices for large jars of PB and jam (skippy and welches).
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Thursday August 06 2015, @04:59PM
"Choosy mothers choose Jiff".
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:39PM
I find it hard to find real food at restaurants. Everything is corn syrup, salt, empty carbs, or grease.
If I want a steak I have to grill it myself. At a restaurant I can't get a steak without paying 4x markup and getting like 4 pounds of salad, garlic bread, applesauce, potatoes, all this shit I don't want and my waistline doesn't need.
Ditto stuff like a burger. I like a nice meaty hot off the grill burger on a bun. So what if the bread is empty carbs F it I'm entitled once a month or so. But at restaurants I can't buy that, cheap McBurger isn't even made with meat as near as I can tell, the bun is some gross wonderbread non-food, theres a quarter cup of red HFCS and another quarter cup of yellow food dye HFCS smeared on it, the cheese reminds me in texture and appearance of self polymerizing silicone insulator sheet and has no taste...
And of course everything in a restaurant comes with a 32 oz cup of corn syrup soda to wash it down.
Don't get me started on Chinese "food", the stuff they couldn't even make mcnuggets out of, fried and drowned in fluorescent red corn syrup, F that. I wouldn't even put that in my compost pile, would probably poison it. I admit a certain fondness for occasional Gen Tso Chicken but I realize its a junk food treat.
I mean, Fing restaurant food isn't even real food... The only difference between the expensive stuff and the cheap stuff is texture and flavoring and conspicuous consumption.
I've noticed this when I travel for business, for a week there's just nothing good to eat. Maybe I can find a buffet place and get a slice of meat and a pile of veg, but otherwise trying to live out of restaurant food is just gross. Messes up my digestive system something fierce too.
I had a filet of baked fish with lemon and a giant ass salad of all kinds of chopped up veggies last night... can't buy that at any restaurant.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:26PM
I think I am talking to people who don't have access to mom and pop restaurants. Are all of your restaurant experiences at chains?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:17PM
I think a lot of mom-and-pop restaurants just rip open a bag from Sams Club. I've had highly mixed results from those kind of places. At least at the chains I know what I'll get.
I will admit that if I have the time and patience and $$$ once you spend three figures you get a pretty good meal. That might be what the dude in the original article is doing.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:55PM
Have you taken a look at Chipotle or Qdoba? I prefer Qdoba, they have a rewards program. I get a free meal for about every 10 meals I purchase. As far as burger places go, it's hard to beat Mooyah as well. Mooyah has a great black bean burger and real meat burgers. As opposed to the places like McDonalds where they can get in trouble, if their meat patties aren't at least 15% meat or what have you.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:50PM
I prefer Qdoba because of Cholula sauce. I like their freshly made food and fresh ingredients. But let's not pretend that a 1200 calorie burrito is health food just because it is fresh. It is arguably better than the same number of calories from McDonalds... but a ton of calories is a ton of calories.
Also, my habit of using nearly half a bottle of Cholula isn't so good for the salt content, either.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:58PM
A ton of calories is a ton of calories, but at least it's real food. The main bad calories come with their queso(s), chips, fried taco salad bowl, white rice, and tortillas. The upshot, is that you can easily have a tasty, but more healthy option depending on your choices. You can get a Naked Burrito (No Tortilla) which drops the calories by about 300 and brings your 1k calorie meal down to a still very tasty 700 calorie meal. Qdoba can be a very good option for people with many different dietary needs. You'd just have to think about what you are getting and/or look at their Nutritional Chart to make smart decisions.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:19PM
The thing I like about the big burrito model the most is that you only get ingredients you directly ask for. So I only have myself to blame for that (delicious delicious) pile of calories.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:56PM
> I check the weather in San Francisco. It's 66 degrees. Must be nice. It's 85 here, just down from the 91 it was earlier
He lives in Los Angeles, not San Francisco. 93 degrees in Woodland Hills, the LA burb where I live. Humidity is only 17% so that helps a lot.
> Even then, he's really halfassing it compared to the crazy guy who lives in cardboard box who sucks drunk guys off for nourishment.
It's comments like that which make me think all the criticism of the guy is based on gut reaction rather than any sort of rational thinking.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:10AM
Most people aren't good at cooking. Cooking is a science, after all, and most people aren't good at that either. (Now, a lot more people can follow a recipe, but that's as much cooking as following a step-by-step make-your-own-silly-putty is science.)
I like cooking, like you, but I would not look forward to cooking every day, two or three times a day, seven days a week. At that point it becomes a chore. I doubt even the most hardcore chocolate lover would enjoy a diet consisting only of chocolate.
>guzzling something described as having the consistency of semen
Soylent doesn't have the consistency of semen, it's more like a smoothie.
>a taste not much better
Semen tastes good or bad, depending on who you ask and whose semen you're talking about. I hear a fruit-based diet makes your semen sweet, for example.
>I recall an article written from someone who tried it talking about how a diet of soylent was not really living, but surviving instead.
I recall an article written by someone who thought a diet of soylent was pretty good. Oh wait, here it is: http://arstechnica.com/series/ars-does-soylent/ [arstechnica.com]
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:03AM
I found the one I was thinking of. http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5893221/soylent-survivor-one-month-living-on-lab-made-liquid-nourishment [theverge.com]
Seems it's a literal matter of taste.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @09:05AM
There are some tricks to cooking that take a little while to pick up, but it doesn't take long at all to get the hang of it and become decent at it. The one downside is if you get good enough you stop wanting to eat out because they don't cook as well as you do.
There are also ways to not cook several times per day. Leftovers is a time-honored one. Cook enough for dinner that you can eat the leftovers for lunch the next day. There's also cooking big batches and freezing what you don't want to eat right away.
Of course that doesn't fit in with TFA, so the way my grandparents did it would be more fitting. They would bring in their harvest and do a big batch of canning and preserving, and then stock everything away in their root cellar, which is what people used before modern refrigeration. When my grandfather was still young enough to fish, he would smoke the majority of his catch in a little shed. The result was delicious.
They were nearly always working on something, though. That part is true. They were rarely idle. They had homesteaded with their parents as kids, though, so doing that was as natural as breathing. They could not understand for the life of them how we grandkids could lay around playing Pong and later Atari.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:59PM
There's also cooking big batches and freezing what you don't want to eat right away.
Prep too. Dump contents into slow cooker, come home to stew, soup, pulled pork, chili, who knows.
I also used to make my own taco seasoning which some people considered insane but its fun to vary the mix to your personal preference, no different than the secret chili recipe attitude. I got out of that hobby because I got a bad chipoltle pepper addiction, like the smokey spicy. I also used to make my own bbq dry rub for chopped chicken and that slow cooks up pretty well. Spending 30 minutes looking for ingredients and measuring and mixing them for one meal is a drag, but spending 31 minutes to make ten batches is no big deal and it divides down to 3 minutes per meal instead of 30. Its also usually hugely cheaper.
If you marinate meat for 10 hours while at work it'll turn into baby food, but you can mix up a homemade fajita marinade the day before, so cooking when you get home is like 5 minutes of work. And I never had a problem freezing citrus marinade so I'd make enough for like six meals at a time, buy a whole bag of limes at a time, etc.
Prep work is a drag. I don't mind cooking homemade applesauce... its the two hours of peeling apple prep work thats no fun. Its worth trying separating prep work from cooking, suddenly cooking is fun.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:50PM
Lots of prep work at a time is an excellent tip.
My wife laughed at me when I got one of these [webstaurantstore.com] from Ikea, but it's one of the best kitchen tools I ever bought. It's a must-have for fans of apples. Works on pears too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:43AM
> I like cooking.
> I ♥ moose wang!
Forgive me if I decline the dinner invitation.