750 Word Draft
In 1943, Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist who lived from 1908 to 1970, famously created a pyramid assessing everyday needs with level of actual requirement, creating a hierarchy of needs.This hierarchy of needs placed basic physiological needs at the bottom of the pyramid, with safety and security next, love and belonging after that, then followed by self-esteem with finally self-actualization as the “least-needed” need. Now, debate has ensued around exactly whether it is fair to stack the needs in that order or whether there is a real hierarchy present at all, but those base needs listed in the pyramid are needs that can be commonly agreed on as simply being needed to survive, regardless. Those needs are quite literally the things we need to survive such as water, oxygen, shelter, warmth, rest and food. In our modern world, we have further and further reduced our dependency on these basic needs, having such things as supermarkets, apartment complexes, and water treatment plants to alleviate the burden basic resources take on our lives. But conversely, that experience is not shared across the world, as many go without clean water, housing, and food all across the globe, and the greatest challenge with these needs is that there isn’t a proverbial silver bullet that can solve world hunger or the like. However, a certain man named Rob Rhinehart created something that could be akin to just that. He created a product, dubbed soylent, packed with all the vitamins and minerals that one could need in a day, in just a few bottles of this product. However, that doesn’t mean it can be a complete replacement for food. In this essay, I’ll illuminate that while soylent could actually be a huge advancement towards being able to solve hunger, that doesn’t mean that it can replace the experience of eating altogether.
The article The End of Food by Lizzie Widdicombe is all about this man, Rob Rhinehart, and his quest to find something that could take away his hunger when he couldn’t cook a proper meal. Thus, he boiled down his meals to their base components of vitamins and nutrients and created a superfood to end all superfoods: Soylent. With soylent, he could live unhindered by his natural need for food and live his life without thinking about his next meal. With this, you could in theory end world hunger as all meals would be accounted for, whether you actually ate food or simply drank soylent. But, Rhinehart wants to go further than that. As opposed to using soylent primarily as a meal substitute, Rhinehart wants to go further with it: that one could “live on Soylent alone.” (Pg.9) But to make such a bold claim that soylent could replace all food that isn’t exactly backed up with health precisely. In fact, the author spoke to doctors who agreed that one “could subsist on Soylent”, but the real question is “would it be a good idea?” (Pg.9) After all, there are certain substances and compounds in real food that, while not deemed essential to survival, could potentially increase the quality of life for the person and have certain benefits that simply aren’t quite and can’t quite be known yet. However, even though there are these compounds that could potentially make the liquid healthier all around as opposed to being strictly survival-based nutrition, Rhinehart won’t add these phytochemicals, asking how “ many humans in history were even getting broccoli and tomatoes?” and found no conclusive evidence in the tests that he observed, even though that was already the dilemma the researchers were dealing with in the first place. (Pg.9) Aside from that, he claims that if Soylent keeps progressing on the trajectory that he wants it to, then they “won’t need farms” to produce Soylent, as well by utilizing algae they “won’t need factories” to produce it either, effectively eliminating all other foods. (Pg. 17) It is very, very true that large animal farms, especially cattle farms, do produce an appalling amount of methane that is steadily ruining the environment, so finding a way to cycle away from those types of farms are indeed key to our survival, as well as the massive amounts of water that utterly huge vegetable farms utilize also needs to be limited, the eradication of all farms in favor of Soylent is a jarring, if not slightly terrifying prospect as agriculture has been with us ever since we became “civilized” and farming is simply a part of our society. Aside from that, the introduction of algae into Soylent made customers so violently ill that they bagged the algae powder altogether, a reminder that Soylent isn’t naturally a food product, but an experiment that does indeed have certain unforeseen side-effects with extreme consequences.
Another point I’ll make about soy food may appear more frivolous, but I believe it is key, is its desirability. For a meal to really work and be desirable, it has to have certain appealing attributes. From my favorite meal essay, I state that “the effort, care and taste” put into the dish really make it my favorite meal, and if it didn’t have those attributes it wouldn’t be my favorite meal, let alone even close. Conversely, Rob Rhinehart directly states the “general ethos of natural, fresh, organic, bright- [Soylent] is the opposite.” (Pg. 8) The reason why my favorite meal is my favorite meal is because of its natural elements and its general appeal. For Rhinehart to toss out those simple things that make a meal generally appealing just ultimately makes it quite understandable. I will concede that this point may seem purely cosmetic, but for a meal to be more than simply nutrients and something that one actually eats for every meal every day, it should take a note more from synthetic meats as opposed to making a gray, flavorless liquid and calling it good. This brings in another futuristic food pioneer, Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat, who had a different solution to the problem. While Brown was also looking to make something nutritious and less harmful for the environment, he doesn’t share the same ethos of Rhinehart of simply packing in all your nutrients in there and calling it good. Instead, Brown made a product that taps into the human side of eating. As Brown states, humans “have been eating meat for two million years,” thus we’re going to be more receptive to food that actually looks and tastes like food.
1000 Word Draft
In 1943, Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist who lived from 1908 to 1970, famously created a pyramid assessing everyday needs with level of actual requirement, creating a hierarchy of needs.This hierarchy of needs placed basic physiological needs at the bottom of the pyramid, with safety and security next, love and belonging after that, then followed by self-esteem with finally self-actualization as the “least-needed” need. Now, debate has ensued around exactly whether it is fair to stack the needs in that order or whether there is a real hierarchy present at all, but those base needs listed in the pyramid are needs that can be commonly agreed on as simply being needed to survive, regardless. Those needs are quite literally the things we need to survive such as water, oxygen, shelter, warmth, rest and food. In our modern world, we have further and further reduced our dependency on these basic needs, having such things as supermarkets, apartment complexes, and water treatment plants to alleviate the burden basic resources take on our lives. But conversely, that experience is not shared across the world, as many go without clean water, housing, and food all across the globe, and the greatest challenge with these needs is that there isn’t a proverbial silver bullet that can solve world hunger or the like. However, a certain man named Rob Rhinehart created something that could be akin to just that. He created a product, dubbed soylent, packed with all the vitamins and minerals that one could need in a day, in just a few bottles of this product. However, that doesn’t mean it can be a complete replacement for food. In this essay, I’ll illuminate that while soylent could actually be a huge advancement towards being able to solve hunger, that doesn’t mean that it can replace the experience of eating altogether.
The article The End of Food by Lizzie Widdicombe is all about this man, Rob Rhinehart, and his quest to find something that could take away his hunger when he couldn’t cook a proper meal. Thus, he boiled down his meals to their base components of vitamins and nutrients and created a superfood to end all superfoods: Soylent. With soylent, he could live unhindered by his natural need for food and live his life without thinking about his next meal. With this, you could in theory end world hunger as all meals would be accounted for, whether you actually ate food or simply drank soylent. But, Rhinehart wants to go further than that. As opposed to using soylent primarily as a meal substitute, Rhinehart wants to go further with it: that one could “live on Soylent alone.” (Pg.9) But to make such a bold claim that soylent could replace all food that isn’t exactly backed up with health precisely. In fact, the author spoke to doctors who agreed that one “could subsist on Soylent”, but the real question is “would it be a good idea?” (Pg.9) After all, there are certain substances and compounds in real food that, while not deemed essential to survival, could potentially increase the quality of life for the person and have certain benefits that simply aren’t quite and can’t quite be known yet. However, even though there are these compounds that could potentially make the liquid healthier all around as opposed to being strictly survival-based nutrition, Rhinehart won’t add these phytochemicals, asking how “ many humans in history were even getting broccoli and tomatoes?” and found no conclusive evidence in the tests that he observed, even though that was already the dilemma the researchers were dealing with in the first place. (Pg.9) Aside from that, he claims that if Soylent keeps progressing on the trajectory that he wants it to, then they “won’t need farms” to produce Soylent, as well by utilizing algae they “won’t need factories” to produce it either, effectively eliminating all other foods. (Pg. 17) It is very, very true that large animal farms, especially cattle farms, do produce an appalling amount of methane that is steadily ruining the environment, so finding a way to cycle away from those types of farms are indeed key to our survival, as well as the massive amounts of water that utterly huge vegetable farms utilize also needs to be limited, the eradication of all farms in favor of Soylent is a jarring, if not slightly terrifying prospect as agriculture has been with us ever since we became “civilized” and farming is simply a part of our society. Aside from that, the introduction of algae into Soylent made customers so violently ill that they bagged the algae powder altogether, a reminder that Soylent isn’t naturally a food product, but an experiment that does indeed have certain unforeseen side-effects with extreme consequences.
Another point I’ll make about soy food may appear more frivolous, but I believe it is key, is its desirability. For a meal to really work and be desirable, it has to have certain appealing attributes. From my favorite meal essay, I state that “the effort, care and taste” put into the dish really make it my favorite meal, and if it didn’t have those attributes it wouldn’t be my favorite meal, let alone even close. Conversely, Rob Rhinehart directly states the “general ethos of natural, fresh, organic, bright- [Soylent] is the opposite.” (Pg. 8) The reason why my favorite meal is my favorite meal is because of its natural elements and its general appeal. For Rhinehart to toss out those simple things that make a meal generally appealing just ultimately makes it quite undesirable. I will concede that this point may seem purely cosmetic, but for a meal to be more than simply nutrients and something that one actually eats for every meal every day, it should take a note more from synthetic meats as opposed to making a gray, flavorless liquid and calling it good. This brings in another futuristic food pioneer, Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat, who is briefly interviewed in the essay. He had a different solution to the problem. While Brown was also looking to make something nutritious and less harmful for the environment, he doesn’t share the same ethos of Rhinehart of simply packing in all your nutrients in there and calling it good. Instead, Brown made a product that taps into the human side of eating. As Brown states, humans “have been eating meat for two million years,” thus we’re going to be more receptive to food that actually looks and tastes like food.
Final Draft:
Favorite Meal Essay:
