Japanese Company Makes Low-Calorie Noodles Out of Wood
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Edit: Here's the wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysteine#Industrial_sources
Still interesting, but probably outdated.
cf Soylent.
I wonder why aren't there VC firms dumping huge amounts of funding in stuff like this (or maybe I'm just not aware of)?
On a separate note, why would someone eat Soylent? Oily farty flavorless sand milkshake? I wouldn't eat it even if it was free! Now this wooden noodles stuff? Sign me up!
I tried DIY Soylent (as the 'real' stuff wasn't available in Europe) but after one batch of disgusting sawdust I gave up. It was a shame as I could see the benefits.
[0] http://drytech.no/?lang=en is my personal favorite, but there are dozens of others.
You seem to be reacting to version 1.0; the current shipping versions are 1.5 (in powder packs) and 2.0 (in liquid bottles)
Soylent being an engineered food which is versioned, it gradually improves over time as issues are discovered and solutions found.
The "oily" attribute only applied to the first couple versions of the product when you had to add oil separately and it didn't mix well. (Now that the oil is sourced in powdered form this is no longer an issue.) The "farty" and "gritty" attributes were similarly resolved by tweaking other ingredients.
The "neutral flavor profile" is a deliberate product feature that makes it easy to add your own flavoring if you care to. but if adding a little cocoa powder or peanut butter or cinnamon when you mix it up is just too hard I'm sure they'll eventually come out with pre-flavored variants. (Though I personally like the bland version)
(1.4 was probably the biggest change. Here's a review of it: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/soylent-1-4-formula-c... )
Having tried konnyaku (skewered blocks though, not noodles), my issue was not so much taste (which is pretty much non-existent, all the flavor came from the sauce) as texture, superficially very slimy jelly with surprisingly firm internal consistency, it was somewhat gag-inducing.
I'd be interested in learning how the texture changes by introducing cellulose mix into konnyaku.
I've lately begun seeing it show up as the base of various "gluten-free diet wonder-food" products in our local wholefood supermarket (in the UK), at about five times the price it is in your typical Chinese/Asian foods supermarket ...
Personally I see nothing wrong with it, in fact, it seems like a pretty clever "food hack". We have sugar substitutes, so why not this?
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cardboard_bun_hoax
This was an enormous problem during the American industrial revolution, where already food-insecure families were buying products covertly made from "Potato flour", the insoluble fiber left once all nutrition was dissolved from potatoes. "Potato flour" was added to everything from sausage to bread as a filler and substitue for more expensive ingredients. This resulted in the poor watching their children and families starve despite seeming to eat regular full meals.
In a perfect world, there would be a net benefit from the choice to eat a non-nutritive carb substitute if that choice was made clear by strict labeling standards.
However, in our imperfect world, infrastructure that can produce food based on non-nutritive fiber has historically been used to rip off the most needy. In a world with actual fake egg and "gutter oil" problems, creating industrial processes to shape cellulose into something that looks like food is going to have severe negative effects for a lot of people.
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.ht...
also the USDA's own site has some nice graphs on the subject, but I cannot find the questions being asked.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo...
Sorry, can you explain your logic here? Enrollment is handled by the states, and procedures in different states are very different. (There are also federal funding incentives for states to reduce enrollment.) You would expect different states to have very different participation rates.
as others write, US, especially its poor, have exactly opposite problem as you describe
> Personally I see nothing wrong with it, in fact, it seems like a pretty clever "food hack". We have sugar substitutes, so why not this?
There's nothing wrong with it when it's advertised as what it is. There's everything wrong with it when it's used to covertly bulk up food and make more money because you're selling 50% wood pulp 50% bread for the price of 100% bread to people expecting the caloric intake of bread.
What fraction of consumers are we talking about here?
In order to counter skyrocketing calorie levels and the lack of fiber in ordinary cheaply produced food, and following hysterical trends like being afraid of fats or carbs or gluten, companies are busy inventing new food that doesn't have any nutritional value.
Although this is basically just garbage manufactured into pseudo-food, with some clever marketing it's bound to be a hit on the market, and people who have no clue what they're doing will probably ruin their health in new interesting ways.
At the same time, billions of people in the global lower class don't have access to even barely decent food.
If this sounds insane to you, that's because it is in fact completely insane.
What makes you think that?
People jump into new lifestyle trends as if it were their new religion, failing to balance their diet reasonably.
Although food like kale does have 10x the amount of calories, I have a sneaky suspicion you would be much better off eating that. The problem (in my view) that is the cause of obesity is the tendency to eat foods that are more processed rather than less..
When the alternative is more energy-dense food and you've already more than filled your caloric budget, it's healthier to eat this. Plus konjac and wood pulp are high in dietary fiber.
We get wood pulp from trees that are farmed, not by clearcutting old-growth rainforest. If we used less tree pulp, the obvious result would be that we'd plant fewer acres of forest. If anything, finding more uses for wood helps the environment as it's using a resource that literally grows on trees in lieu of other resource that don't.
That's not exactly new, there's a ton of low-calorie stuff out there.
> instead of low $/calorie
Obesity epidemics are caused by the over-availability and over-consumption of low $/calorie.
Ok but why? Many in the western world literally suffer from an over-intake of calories, why do ways to try and manage that (or ways to attain caloric deficit) strike you as "unhealthy"? Do you also find calorie/weight management courses "incredibly unhealthy"?
> So sue me for having an opinion.
That's an incredibly aggressive reply to what's at best questions and at worst a difference of opinion.
I don't think this is going to help anyone lose weight any more than a therapist, salads, lentils, etc. etc. I see this as a cool food engineering experiment, but ultimately a waste of money.
> That's an incredibly aggressive reply to what's at best questions and at worst a difference of opinion.
I found your terse response ignoring the subjective content to be quite aggressive in itself, especially considering the conciliatory tone of my original message. If you're going to respond to an opinion, at least put some effort into not being so argumentative.
Why are you putting it in opposition to those? Konjac is already being used thus, and is more flexible than other options, providing e.g. noodles ("shirataki"), seafood substitute, gelling for culinary uses and fruit jellies, etc…, surely more options and variety is a good thing?
Ahh, the mantra of modern society. Somehow the massive landfills aren't considered a problem.