Food is a waste of time (yes really)

My girlfriend sent me this article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/12/140512fa_fact_widdicombe?currentPage=all

The article is long and long-winded — the usual type of journalism that many like and which I hate. I like get to the point-stuff, but then again according to said girlfriend I’m a huge aspie.

The content of the article is:

  1. Eating is a nuisance. Takes time, costs money. It can be approached as a engineering problem. What do we need, how to produce a product that gets us that as cheaply and easily as possible. (I had this idea years ago. The same is true for sleeping and thirst. They are recurrent quasi-illnesses.)
  2. It is quite easy and cheap to make a liquid that meets all the requirements.
  3. One can live of it without easily identifiable problems.

It is quite obvious to do this and has already been done for astronauts, for the reason that sending stuff into space is very pricey per gram. Hence, send the minimal weight up there.

Added benefits are that it is easy to manage weight like this and it’s cheaper. Following the whole DYI/open source culture, one can easily make one’s own versions. See: http://diy.soylent.me/

I’m mostly concerned about the feeling of hunger.

They divide food into nutritious food and recreational food. The idea is there already. Recreational food is stuff you eat/drink because it is pleasant. We have already succeeded in creating drinks that taste good but have ~zero energy in them. We call it “light”. The next goal is to do the same for e.g. meat. We need to create 100% (energy) light editions of delicious food. And alcohol. Alcohol has a high energy amount. But perhaps society will just switch away from that particular drug once full legalization is achieved. A similar idea is to switch to a drug with similar effects but no energy content. David Nutt discusses such a drug in his book Drugs: Without the hot air.

I would certainly do this if the hunger isn’t a problem and it’s available in Denmark. I’ve thought food was a waste of time and money for years.

Rhinehart is not a fan of farms, which he refers to as “very inefficient factories.” He believes that farming should become more industrialized, not less. “It’s really the labor that gets me,” he said. “Agriculture’s one of the most dangerous and dirty jobs out there, and it’s traditionally done by the underclass. There’s so much walking and manual labor, counting and measuring. Surely it should be automated.”

Apparently, he hasn’t heard of in vitro meat.

Btw, the movie is here: http://fastpiratebay.eu/thepiratebay.se/torrent/6244689