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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

"This automobile business is all good and interesting, but - no. I really like riding in a horse buggy. Not for the speed, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like candle light and wearing a top hat even though, technically, I could do as well with a baseball cap.

To each his own, but some things are just too unorthodox."

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You are very forward thinking. Soylent is in the aisle one.

Comfort and pleasure are subjective irrational metrics that have a lot of inertia, but that change with time. I'm sure it's plausible that people would love soylent just as much as a freshly baked croissant, but it takes time. The way things stand right now, soylent solves a problem that few people have and it comes at a price that is awful. So, yeah, it's unorthodox.

Even freshly baked croissants were once an odd novelty.

I encourage you to research what a croissant is and then find and devour one. This comment makes me feel like you're missing out on that.

A croissant is also about the most amount of butter you can possibly fit into a pastry.

This should be the OED definition.

I think that dubious honour probably belongs to the "buttery" from North East Scotland:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttery_%28bread%29

They are basically lumps of butter and salt held together with a trace amount of flour. The versions available from mainstream stores (e.g. M&S) or from recipes online are fairly tame - for the real effect they need to be purchased from a small local baker in some remote fishing village.

Best butteries I've ever had were actually on a trawler in the North Sea - where they were served hot awash in molten salted butter.

You'd be hard pushed to find a buttery actually made of butter these days. Even the local bakers are using vegetable oil and fat. Still, they are beautiful, flaky rolls of salty tastiness.

Don't forget about the Iowian "Deep Fried Butter on a stick"

mm, i don't think that's an apt comparison. cuisine doesn't develop in the same way that mechanical conveyance does. there's no objective basis for saying one example of food is superior wrt that basis than another, at least not one that isn't trivial. with a car you can say you can go this many miles per hour, or this many miles per dollar, that you require only this area to house the car, that its emissions are relatively benign compared to horse shit, etc. what people look for in food is the subjective, aesthetic experience. even when someone's eating for utilitarian reasons, they'll still make aesthetic choices, like the article about the north korean refugee who described the variety of foods made mostly from rice that you could buy at the market in a time of mass starvation, where all eating was utilitarian.

you know what'll happen if this catches on (which i don't think it will but anyway)? people will tinker with it, trying to make it more palatable, making different varieties for different occasions, or moods, or just for the sake of variety. this idea for replacing food will just become new kind of cuisine, at best. a style of cooking that seeks to provide all or most of the nutrients a body needs would be cool, but markedly different to the shift from horse drawn carriages and automobiles.

when automobiles came along, they replaced horse buggys rather than becoming a new kind of horse buggy.

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