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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

I share your worries but "I will happily stay a relic of the olden days, when we ate food not only for being able to hack the next day" has never really been true. It's only very recently -- say last 100 years -- that people in the West have been able to eat for pleasure on a more massive scale instead of eating so you don't starve or get enough energy to work. Things like meat or variety in diet were mostly reserved for the upper classes.

Lots of people on the planet are still going hungry or even starving and for those people Soylent - provided it's actually cheaper and proven to be safe - could mean having access to regular nutritious meals for the first time in their lives.

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Epicurus might disagree with your assertion that the pleasure of eating is only a recent thing or the fare only of the rich.

Although he's much misunderstood upon the layman as meaning luxurious foods and pleasures, it's understood he really meant to enjoy basic foods (usually grown in the communal garden) amongst friends.

Soylent would be great for many reasons; third world, developing world, a trip to Mars. But I also share the thought that food is a pleasure and I won't want to give that up.

For Epicurus, pleasure was the absence of discomfort. The pleasure of eating, for example, came from the fact that he was no longer hungry. His feasts were famously simple. Vegetables and cheese.

Epicurus, if he were alive today, might be an early adopter of Soylent.

I think that is a stretch, but he's not here for us to ask.

Oh, no doubt eating for pleasure has a very long history in the West (and East, and other regions) but Epicurus was something as rare as a man who didn't do manual work in antiquity where 99% were farmers, soldiers or slaves who either didn't have their own plots of land, or did so and still ate poorly or even starved because that was the reality of life. I think it's safe to say that Epicurus lived a very privileged life - how many Greeks could study philosophy let alone start his own school? - and that his dietary ruminations never reached nor could be implemented by the waste majority.

Of course the olden days have to be taken with a grain of salt. I am aware that it was (and still is) true only for a small number of privileged people, and I am thankful to fall in that category.

If Soylent plays a part in reducing the hunger in the world, then I am a big fan. I reserve the hypocrisy for me to not be a fan of it in my own diet.

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