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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: 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.