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Comment by ghxst | Hacker News Reader

My main concern is people having to skip meals and kids facing developmental issues due to malnutrition. I get that the idea of feeding people something like Soylent isn’t exactly appealing, but if we could bring the cost down to nearly free for those in need, it could be a really effective safety net, (maybe not Soylent as it exists now but a product like that).

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We don't really have a problem with quantity, or quality, of food. We have a logistics problem. Which is nice way of saying that starvation can be a policy.

Example most people don't know about: Sudan. There is a civil war there, for two years now, millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands dead, terror, whole villages wiped out. And now the refugees starve. And why?

Because the fighting sides don't let aid trucks across their lines.

Evil has many faces, many motives, many methods.

Compassion is the cure, but not passive compassion, active ass-kicking WWII-Allies-style compassion.

There is a peanut butter thing like this that has been very successful in the developing world.

https://www.unicef.org.au/stories/plumpy-nut-peanut-butter#:....

> just $65 can provide a child with six weeks' worth of this therapeutic food.

That comes down to a little over $1.50 a day, that's great!

Seems like it comes in packets of about 500 calories each, containing 40grams of carbs, 30.3 grams of fat and 12.8gram of protein.

Unsure what fiber contents are like but Wikipedia does list that it includes vitamins and minerals.

> as of 2018 Plumpy'nut patents have expired in the US, UK and the European Union

Also says it's manufactured in the US, I wonder if these are available at food banks and such, maybe even in schools and if parents know about it.

Edit: additional fiber is included as well according to Wikipedia.

As the sibling comment says, that's a distributional poverty issue which is downstream of a lot of other policy, rather than something fundamental to food.

You're presenting it as a solution, but if dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything it'll become the cheap standardised food for the poor while the rich get to eat proper food.

I mean Soylent's naming couldn't be more on the nose. At least it's not made of people (as far as I know).

World hunger is not caused by lack of food. It's caused by lack of will.

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