Delivered ready-meal slop corporations are a hilarious self-parody.

[omnidisplay]

By now, the entire internet familiar with Soylent, and the general idea of food-analogue nutrient slurries. The meme of goyslop is commonplace, and we all know the stereotype of the individual who can't even make a sandwich on their own.
Today however, arguably the most disturbing trend in recent years is the rise of these ready-meal delivery services. I'm not talking about doordash or similar, at least those are bringing you food that was just made (even if it's still garbage). No-no, as I'll highlight in this post, there's services now that have weekly/monthly subscriptions to have microwave dinners shipped right to your door! How convenient! This works great with my lifestyle as a work-from-home job as the vice assistant advisor to the secretary for the director of commerce at MetAmaZoogleX™! You'll never have to leave your house again!
Better yet is the collective lying about the healthiness and true-and-honest nutritionist research that goes into these meals! Don't worry that meal your microwaving is actually good for you!

I wanted to share a personal dive I did into some of these slop companies, due to how much of a comical self-parody their branding and identity is. Soylent is far from the only one, and arguably they aren't even the worst. There's some hilarious trends within these brands that exacerbate the most miserable and dystopic parts of internet and consumer culture today.

To keep this opening post somewhat brief, I'm gonna focus on these brands.
- Soylent (the og)
- Factor
- Huel (potentially the most disturbing)

Another honorable mention is Cook Unity but they have less of the most egregious issues mentioned below.


Some Common Trends

What is a 20XX corporation without minimalism?

Every single one of these brands utilize the same design language;​

• Bold, sans serif font on a plain background.
• Monochrome or limited colour palette.
• Typical "flat design" - as in, the type of shit you could design in Google Draw in 30 seconds.
• Lots of cheap vector art.

TRUST THE SCIENCE

'Experts agree!' type advertising and claims. Our nutrient paste is CREATED WITH SCIENCE!!! That's how you know you can trust the garbage gobbling up!​

​

Factor75​

​

Soylent​

​

​

Huel. This one is a great image since it's next to what literally looks like vomit.​

​

They all also feature a bunch of meaningless citations that tangentially say X may be good for you (observational study). Since our food contains the shit mentioned in the article it must be healthy!!!!!​

Factor​

​

Huel​

​

ITS GOT MINERALS!!!!!!!!
Here at Slop™ we take care to shove as many random chemicals into our food because they're healthy vitamins (at 300% daily recommended intake) that any growing consumer needs! Why bother eating balanced healthy meals that provide those nutrients when you could get all those essential vitamins from our nutrient powder we mix into our food?

Huel meal sheet

Soylent

Factor


Soyboy testimonials!
Our slop™ is beloved by many! Just listen to what our (totally not automata) fans have to say!



Other Misc Stuff

• Many have a typical "low waste, good for the enviorment" whatever kind of shit. Which feels rich coming from companies that mail out meals in single use plastic containers and bags.
• Typical "no GMO" or anything else you'd expect. Basically any type of modern food psyop you can think of.
• They all have these insane 'quizzes' for determining what product is just right for you! Because I definitely trust a corporate algorithm to tell me what food I should be guzzling down.
• They all, as you can imagine, rely heavily on pushing low-cost (for production) foods. This is easily boiled down to maximizing profit margins, soy and oats and other livestock-feed is comically cheap to produce. If you can brand it as super healthy, and with all the above insane claims, then you can sell extremely cheap food at an insanely high markup!

---

Funny per-company shit

I really like this diagram Soylent has. Canola Oil and Sucralose is good for you!!!!! Because SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!!!

Insane claims on the behalf of Huel!

---

Enough with the screenshots / Some Specifics.
I swear I can do an effortpost that isn't just a bunch of screenshots to laugh at. Here's some general statistic and observations I have for these three companies.

Soylent
Particularly egregious when it comes to that late 20th century American 'healthy food' (corporate lobbied science), which is par-for-the-course when it's all plant-based, of course. Notable is all their talk about reducing "cholesterol" (with no distinction between types), meaning they justify objectively terrible oils and chemicals for you (as shown above with the canola oil diagram). Soylent also just, fully embraces their insane claims by pushing their chemical slurry as the future of food that everyone should be consuming in excess to live better lives. Insane shit like;

The synergy of our ingredients makes Soylent, the world's most perfect food - with no trade offs. we reject fad diets and marketing gimmicks in favor of evidence-based nutrition.

we believe in more than just theory. Soylent has actively participated in numerous clinical trials, including an extensive 4-year study with UCLA Health positively demonstrating both physical and mental health benefits from regular use.

These insane claims go from "typical health brand garbage" to actively predatory, such as sharing a claim that "Soylent complete meal shakes help cancer patients maintain weight and quality of life." link

Their 12-bottle monthly subscription is 42 dollars a month.

Factor(75)
Somewhat comical in their food depictions in photos. Beyond the typical "packaging always looks better than the product," this shit doesn't even look possible as fake edited food;

Factor focuses a lot more on trying to prove their legitimacy as food rather than relying super hard on deh science. More claims like "chef crafted."

All things considered though, factor is probably the most boring out of this list.

For a 10-meal weekly delivery it's $124.

Huel
Potentially the most disgusting one on this list. I find their branding uniquely hilarious because "Huel" is a fucking disgusting word, literally sounds like someone throwing up.
And to keep the trend going, their food looks like vomit too! Consistently! They don't even try to hide it.


Beyond that, Huel checks every box mentioned above (not going to rehash examples), but they also have a couple different but equally hilarious claims and principles.

• "Plant-based-protein" right next to "no soy"
• Consistent mentioning that it's "nutrient-complete," essentially trying to claim that their slop has everything you need to survive. Why eat anything else!!!
• Randomly name-dropping a bunch of technical nutrient-terms and ideas to make their oat drink sound more legit. They basically throw the powder of every plant in existence in this shit to claim it has any benefit possible.

Huel's modern slavery statement is disturbingly hilarious, filled with question-dodging their own section titles.
For example;

Our supply chain​

Our products are 100% composed of plant-derived ingredients, primarily in the form of powders and liquids, which are sourced globally either directly from suppliers, or via agents and distributors. Our key source countries for ingredients are the UK, Europe, China and the US. Our primary and secondary packaging is sourced from the UK, Europe, and US. Packaging materials include paper, cardboard, aluminium cans and plastic. Product manufacturing is carried out by selected third-party manufacturing partners, the locations of which are based on proximity to our downstream distribution centres, as well as their capability to meet our quality requirements, manufacturing standards, and available production capacity.

Our direct and indirect supply chains include services that are not specifically used in our products but support the operation of our business such as marketing agencies, professional advisor fees, and third-party warehouses. These service providers are located primarily within the countries where our offices are located but can extend globally for any specialist items or service which cannot be obtained domestically.

Huel also seems really into their (boring and dystopic) branding, selling merchandise and branded bottles among other things. Who the hell would buy this shit?

The founder, Julian Hearn, apparently already made a ton of money from earlier ventures, so Huel wasn't profit-motivated (link). Yeah right.

Their 7 meals subscription is 18 pounds per month.

---

(Back to screenshots)
Last thing to mention. If you want to laugh at the people who actually buy this shit, there's subr*ddits for each of these companies respectively, as well as a general "ReadyMeals" one. They are all exactly what you'd expect.

>getting married
>can't make their own food

 

[Some_porcupine]

Airup and those... Curtis Koner got some sponsorships and others too with these but forgot names. Maybe there is some "libs watchlist" hazing them fir being hypocritical (on basis of claims you also pinpointed)

 

[punisheddead]

How on earth did we go from making fun of the now humble TV dinner to embracing "ready made meals"? To me food is one of the great human experiences, like music or art, it's definitely a part of what makes life good.

Now I know that not everyone agrees me with me, a particular tech bugman archetype of a person particularly hates just eating for whatever reason. "Too busy saving the world with my ai slop #>reddit!" types and the busy people. Everyone is so busy these days, especially the work from home freelancer types. Time is money they say as the chug their soylent while watching their tiktoks. The dystopian corporate memphis tier advertising works very well with those types.

Disgust aside, I really don't have much to add that isn't just me repeating what I said in the safe diet thread. Bugman shakes don't work because we're not all the same person. You can cram all the minerals and vitamins you want in it but it doesn't matter, people absorb certain minerals and vitamins differently meaning that they might need more or less of a certain mineral. "Daily recommended values" are borderline meaningless considering how nutrient deficient our soils have become. Artificial vitamins and minerals just don't get absorbed as well as the natural stuff. There's a reason most soylent consumers end up as weaklings that can't even open their own bottles. This applies to everything besides arguably factor.

Factor, I don't hate but I don't like either. It's just home delivered TV dinners, it's door dash meets tv dinner. TV dinners for those that haven't fully embraced the bugman life style but still are far far too busy to make a meal of their own. Factor to me is only barely above just having a fast food burger, but hey at least you can pretend you made something and that you got that "adulting" thing down!

Appetizing, ain't it? Not cherry picked either, literally one of the first results you get on google images.

 

[Anto]

All of these soyim-targeting companies use clever buzzwords and marketing to try to get an audience from average consoomers who can't be bothered to learn how to actually cook. They have a stove, an oven, a grill (probably), and a microwave and they choose the easiest option. As >huel puts it, "...minimum effort". Unfortunately, minimum effort does not create good meals. Sure, you can create a hearty meal with only a handful of ingredients, but you still need to actually prepare them beforehand (exceptions for those absolute GIGATHADS who eats only raw beef and whole heads of lettuce; I salute you!).

It's just home delivered TV dinners, it's door dash meets tv dinner.

Any consoomer would be living so much healthier if they only consoomed Kid Cuisine and egg nog. It's unfortunately impossible to find ready-to-eat meals bereft of seed oils.

 

[Some_porcupine]

also, forgot, there is this one i forgot name of, kurtis got it on his video as sponsor (again), - they get you ingredients and you cook it by recipe they get you. wtf? are they... delegating their work to you, and you pay them for it? thats... genial marketing, and so illogical it might actually work! /cyn

 

[Anto]

also, forgot, there is this one i forgot name of, kurtis got it on his video as sponsor (again), - they get you ingredients and you cook it by recipe they get you. wtf? are they... delegating their work to you, and you pay them for it? thats... genial marketing, and so illogical it might actually work! /cyn

Not sure if it's the exact company, but there are some like HelloFresh that deliver exact serving sizes of ingredients to your house along with a meal guide. It's still MUCH cheaper to buy ingredients in bulk and actually prepare a large meal that can garner leftovers for a few days.

 

[omnidisplay]

but there are some like HelloFresh

I don't mind services like HelloFresh actually, I think it's a cool idea. Especially if you're just learning how to cook and want stuff preportioned with a recipe. Also since you can just, save the recipes and then buy the ingredients yourself later on, it's kinda a nice 'trial' for meals you can make.

---

To somewhat reiterate, the aspect of this all that is disturbing is that it's not only TV dinners, but ones that are delivered with a subscription service. It's a truly nightmarish culmination. People so lazy they can't cook, so agoraphobic (or lazy) they can't even go out and buy the TV dinners, and so mindless that they'd rather have these meals picked for them - often those subscriptions either have those stupid recommendation quizzes or straight up tailor your slop without much user choice.

I understand the "I'm too busy to cook", or in extreme, "I'm too busy to even figure out what to eat." But if people are in that state to the degree of needing a subscription service of predetermined nutrient paste, then the health impact of their meals should be the least of their concerns.
Hell, in that case just make some cup noodles like the rest of us and get on with it... Unless they only know how to use a microwave and can't even boil water.

 

[Digital Cheese]

Actual goyslop. I've seen quite a few goyslop-tier meals like this myself, but never anyone actually eating them outside of reddit. I also must admit, a ton of the "hecking soyence" stuff is particularly funny, given there's no way this is healthy for obvious reasons, if you do even 5 minutes of thinking, if that. "Yea bro it's safe to just consoom all your minerals in some weird drink that totally doesn't give you cancer or some weird illness at 50 like the rest of our glorious slop".

What is a 20XX corporation without minimalism?
Every single one of these brands utilize the same design language;

• Bold, sans serif font on a plain background.
• Monochrome or limited colour palette.
• Typical "flat design" - as in, the type of shit you could design in Google Draw in 30 seconds.
• Lots of cheap vector art.

You VILL live in ze pods, you VILL eat ze bugs, you VILL own nothing, and you VILL be happy.

TRUST THE SCIENCE
'Experts agree!' type advertising and claims. Our nutrient paste is CREATED WITH SCIENCE!!! That's how you know you can trust the garbage gobbling up!Factor75

Even this one is still clearly goyslop, because the meals never look like that in real-life. At best, they are still rather goyish.

Soylent

These two in particular reveal that they are designed specifically for redditors. "Soylent fuels science. because it is science" someone teach these people how to spell, at least put a comma instead of a period in the middle of "science" and "because", or capitalize the "because". And the whole appeal to soyence, something only a Redditor could take seriously despite what they sell.

Huel. This one is a great image since it's next to what literally looks like vomit.

I'll stick to living off of $8 Little Caesars pizzas in the pod revolution.

ITS GOT MINERALS!!!!!!!!
Here at Slop™ we take care to shove as many random chemicals into our food because they're healthy vitamins (at 300% daily recommended intake) that any growing consumer needs! Why bother eating balanced healthy meals that provide those nutrients when you could get all those essential vitamins from our nutrient powder we mix into our food?

"Bro just consoom the goyslop bro, I promise this isn't going to kill you at 50, consoom it pwease :[ our corporat- uh I mean heckin environment relies on it."

Soyboy testimonials!
Our slop™ is beloved by many! Just listen to what our (totally not automata) fans have to say!

Looked exactly as I expected him to look, but I'll give him credit for beating another race in their own continent. Even on goyslop, we're supreme apparently.

Many have a typical "low waste, good for the enviorment" whatever kind of shit. Which feels rich coming from companies that mail out meals in single use plastic containers and bags.

I always hate whenever so-called "environmentally friendly" corporations use plastic for things which clearly don't require it. I would argue microplastics are similarly bad to whatever they're also putting in this type of food.

>soy protein
You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

Soylent
Particularly egregious when it comes to that late 20th century American 'healthy food' (corporate lobbied science), which is par-for-the-course when it's all plant-based, of course. Notable is all their talk about reducing "cholesterol" (with no distinction between types), meaning they justify objectively terrible oils and chemicals for you (as shown above with the canola oil diagram). Soylent also just, fully embraces their insane claims by pushing their chemical slurry as the future of food that everyone should be consuming in excess to live better lives. Insane shit like;
These insane claims go from "typical health brand garbage" to actively predatory, such as sharing a claim that "Soylent complete meal shakes help cancer patients maintain weight and quality of life." link

I doubt an American could make a singular drink that could cure things like cancer, seems like something Japan would do that the health-schizos on Twitter would know about, not us. We can't even keep things like seed-oils out of our food kek.

Their 12-bottle monthly subscription is 42 dollars a month.

$3.50, at least it is cheap goyslop but still ew.

Factor(75)
Somewhat comical in their food depictions in photos. Beyond the typical "packaging always looks better than the product," this shit doesn't even look possible as fake edited food;

Factor focuses a lot more on trying to prove their legitimacy as food rather than relying super hard on deh science. More claims like "chef crafted."

All things considered though, factor is probably the most boring out of this list.

For a 10-meal weekly delivery it's $124.

At $12.40 per meal, I might as well just cook my own meal. Even if it costed slightly more, I'd either feed multiple people or have leftovers, if not both.

Huel
Potentially the most disgusting one on this list. I find their branding uniquely hilarious because "Huel" is a fucking disgusting word, literally sounds like someone throwing up.
And to keep the trend going, their food looks like vomit too! Consistently! They don't even try to hide it.


Beyond that, Huel checks every box mentioned above (not going to rehash examples), but they also have a couple different but equally hilarious claims and principles.

• "Plant-based-protein" right next to "no soy"
• Consistent mentioning that it's "nutrient-complete," essentially trying to claim that their slop has everything you need to survive. Why eat anything else!!!
• Randomly name-dropping a bunch of technical nutrient-terms and ideas to make their oat drink sound more legit. They basically throw the powder of every plant in existence in this shit to claim it has any benefit possible.

Peak goyslop, kneel to Fauci, o algo.

Huel's modern slavery statement is disturbingly hilarious, filled with question-dodging their own section titles.
For example;

Huel also seems really into their (boring and dystopic) branding, selling merchandise and branded bottles among other things. Who the hell would buy this shit?

The founder, Julian Hearn, apparently already made a ton of money from earlier ventures, so Huel wasn't profit-motivated (link). Yeah right.

Turning brands into religions, celebrities into "gods"/idols, etc.

Their 7 meals subscription is 18 pounds per month.

$2.58~ per meal, but definitely not enough food to make it through a month on two meals per week unless this is goyslop except more fair.

>getting married
>can't make their own food

I am sometimes concerned that redditors will reproduce, but then I remember, they're all like this and worse, and many of them just get vasectomies meaning they will essentially remove themselves from the gene-pool.

Other than the fact you can tell this is from 2018 due to the meme-format, that is a lot of soy.

XD.

And here I thought I had rather weak arms, at least my arms/hands are stronger from not eating this goyslop especially in the past 5 or so years.

All of these soyim-targeting companies use clever buzzwords and marketing to try to get an audience from average consoomers who can't be bothered to learn how to actually cook. They have a stove, an oven, a grill (probably), and a microwave and they choose the easiest option. As >huel puts it, "...minimum effort". Unfortunately, minimum effort does not create good meals. Sure, you can create a hearty meal with only a handful of ingredients, but you still need to actually prepare them beforehand (exceptions for those absolute GIGATHADS who eats only raw beef and whole heads of lettuce; I salute you!).

If it comes down to eating the goyslop or eating raw beef, I'll just figure out how to "safely" eat raw-beef, move to Mexico, then build a 10 foot wall around my property. In the long-run, that would be significantly better than living in an American city consooming goyslop.

 

[Some_porcupine]

Not sure if it's the exact company, but there are some like HelloFresh that deliver exact serving sizes of ingredients to your house along with a meal guide. It's still MUCH cheaper to buy ingredients in bulk and actually prepare a large meal that can garner leftovers for a few days.

I don't mind services like HelloFresh actually, I think it's a cool idea. Especially if you're just learning how to cook and want stuff preportioned with a recipe. Also since you can just, save the recipes and then buy the ingredients yourself later on, it's kinda a nice 'trial' for meals you can make.

---

To somewhat reiterate, the aspect of this all that is disturbing is that it's not only TV dinners, but ones that are delivered with a subscription service. It's a truly nightmarish culmination. People so lazy they can't cook, so agoraphobic (or lazy) they can't even go out and buy the TV dinners, and so mindless that they'd rather have these meals picked for them - often those subscriptions either have those stupid recommendation quizzes or straight up tailor your slop without much user choice.

I understand the "I'm too busy to cook", or in extreme, "I'm too busy to even figure out what to eat." But if people are in that state to the degree of needing a subscription service of predetermined nutrient paste, then the health impact of their meals should be the least of their concerns.
Hell, in that case just make some cup noodles like the rest of us and get on with it... Unless they only know how to use a microwave and can't even boil water.

then my bad.
it is just funny to me, but if it cheaper than normal shopping, then thats a bonus

 

[remember_summer_days]

All right, tits or gtfo. Send picks of the hearty meals ya'll cooking.

These companies are clearly marketing towards gamers, neets, and college students who are too lazy or depressed to learn how to cook, and if they know how to cook, they won't bother because they are too lazy or depressed. Getting away from frozen foods once you've become used to them is harder than it looks. You become accustomed to trading a vital and nourishing human experience, enjoying a homely, good and filling meal which is crafted for you as an individual, for mass produced slop for the masses. When you eat premade food, you are trading bits of your dignity for utilitarian ends. In such an state, it is likely one is treating oneself, your body and your needs, as a means to an end.

It also betrays a common pattern, a malaise of the modern man, of being used to relegating his choices and opinions to an abstracted idea of "the experts." Because life is seen as an existential responsibility you alone have to burden; because science and post-modern dialectics has shown life to be too complicated; because slave morality is easier than the anxiety of choice, the modern, urban, and well-educated man is self-aware about his crippling limitations and the only ones in a position to make a choice for him, because he believes they truly know him, are the experts.

Many in our spheres scoff at the idea of putting so much faith in an expert, priestly class. But how much of a leap is it to trust nutrition to experts when people are accustomed to delegating knowledge of the self to psychologists? If you can't even know yourself, how can you be expected to know anything else at all? Of course you are gonna trust soy science to tell you what to eat.

 

[omnidisplay]

All right, tits or gtfo. Send picks of the hearty meals ya'll cooking.

Not claiming people should all be master chefs, I'm certainly not one.
I'm saying if you're a NEET or college student then you should learn to make a sandwich

Not that hard to throw some meat and veggies in a pan and put it over some rice either. That's usually what I eat.




Or skip the cooking outright. My typical breakfast is just an open-face sandwich with;

• Polarbrød
• Cream-cheese with some fresh chives mixed in
• Onion and bell pepper
• Smoked salmon

Takes like 5 minutes to make, and even less if you cut up the veggies beforehand.

 

[remember_summer_days]

Not claiming people should all be master chefs, I'm certainly not one.
I'm saying if you're a NEET or college student then you should learn to make a sandwich

Not that hard to throw some meat and veggies in a pan and put it over some rice either. That's usually what I eat.
View attachment 136111
View attachment 136112


Or skip the cooking outright. My typical breakfast is just an open-face sandwich with;

• Polarbrød
• Cream-cheese with some fresh chives mixed in
• Onion and bell pepper
• Smoked salmon

View attachment 136113
Takes like 5 minutes to make, and even less if you cut up the veggies beforehand.

First one looks really tasty, what sauce is the chicken in?

 

[Ross_Я]

It's unfortunately impossible to find ready-to-eat meals bereft of seed oils.

One thing 4chan successfully brainwashed me about is seed oils. For the past 3-4 years I only used olive or avocado oil. Or butter.
Do not know if it is right, but it did sound rather convincing.

To keep this opening post somewhat brief, I'm gonna focus on these brands.
- Soylent (the og)
- Factor
- Huel (potentially the most disturbing)

Feels good to not having any of those around, anyhow available.
I still can't believe they named it Soylent. For real. Damn.

 

[grap]

Lol at everything. How did we not already have this thread?

Maybe these services are all useless -- hype by retards, for retards. But they make me curious about whether a new kind of consumer has emerged. I comprehend completely the guy in the >reddit screenshot from OP's post: he needs enough microwave dinners to make it to his wedding day. But that guy isn't the anxiety-disorder/professional-managerial-class/self-diagnosed-autist modern type that makes these so disturbing; that's a classical type of guy, a holdover from simpler times, a man remarkably untriggered by late-capitalist and online feminism. Ah! To be a man who thinks cooking is gay, and not an agoraphobic crypto evangelist! But these are not our times. What are the new forms of consumerism at play here?

I don't think anyone thinking about this should make light of the fact that these are US-based companies, and that the "Nutrition Facts" label has only appeared on American packaged foods for 30 years. Younger millennials and older zoomers (almost certainly the target audience here, no?) have, in consequence, grown up thinking it's a fact of life that "Protein" or "Fat" is abstractly interchangeable between a can of beans and a post-workout shake. Maybe it is, I sure don't know, being one myself. But the concepts of "nutrients" or "macros" move ad dollars -- and not unjustifiably, as they also organize the neurotic fantasies of a few generations. You couldn't have vegans or keto or Jordan Peterson without these obsessions. They may just be TV dinners, but that they're TV dinners "with nutrition" is the emergent phenomenon.

This is why I think it actually makes more sense to group HelloFresh with Huel and Factor, and to treat Soylent as the outlier. Soylent is quite obviously and transparently an application of the big-tech efficiency mindset -- and DTC marketing -- to the "problem" of nourishment. Meal-replacement drinks have a long-ish history that precedes Soylent by several decades, but these were marketed as weight-loss solutions -- weight-loss at any price, not "efficient" nutrition. Soylent is absolutely for the person who is too busy to look for joy in the everyday, who thinks tube-feeding would be a more effective solution to human need than a few daily rituals. But that person might just as well order delivery for every meal, and often does, I think.

As Soylent is to DoorDash, so HelloFresh is to Huel: the consumer impulse is the same, though one fulfils it more effectively than the other (in my opinion). The fantasy is not one of efficient joylessness, but of luxurious self-care on a daily basis, as dreamt by people who are deeply unhappy, deepy invested in self-improvement, and utterly befuddled by contradictory expert messaging on health and wellness. It is economically untenable to eat at the Michelin star restaurant on the reality TV program every day, but what if the combined expertise of chefs and nutritionists was available to you? The target audience is not people who would wish away the joys of an expert-cooked -- I mean home-cooked -- meal, but those who want to experience such luxury all the time.

In the post-War period, Betty Crocker developed a wonderfully vertically-integrated business model for home cooks, often women, who were either working more or de-skilled in the kitchen or both. By combining a lineup of packaged foods with cookbooks intructing you how to prepare them, the company offered two things: 1) eliminating the creative labor of planning meals, collecting recipes, and so on; 2) reducing inefficiencies in the collection of ingredients. This was transparently the objective. Today, I'm not so sure that's what's going on; millenials with stupid white-collar work-from-home spreadsheet jobs have leisure time. But they're incredibly anxious about doing it "right," for some reason, and sperging about macros and chefs and protein is one possible avenue for them to indulge this obsession.

 

[omnidisplay]

One thing 4chan successfully brainwashed me about is seed oils. For the past 3-4 years I only used olive or avocado oil. Or butter.
Do not know if it is right, but it did sound rather convincing.

Wouldn't call it brainwashing. Cold-pressed real oils all the way. I cook only with olive oil or butter.

This YouTube channel has some nice documentaries about modern food psyops (and why they exist, namely financially). I (mostly*) recommend if you can tolerate his extremely annoying voice.

First one looks really tasty, what sauce is the chicken in?

Teriyaki.

But they're incredibly anxious about doing it "right," for some reason, and sperging about macros and chefs and protein is one possible avenue for them to indulge this obsession.

Any notion of having to manage nutrition with such anal precision is an extremely modern science and extremely silly. And as a modern science it's perverted by corporatism and nascent ignorance.

Of course, there's the obvious tenets of what you need for your body to literally function - that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the extreme psyop of anyone simply associating this and that with being either "healthy" or "unhealthy" - you see it too in any natural circles. Oh avocados have [random shit]! You should buy my avocados because they'll make you live longer!!!
We've gone from portioning food out based on the chemicals they contain, to just, dishing out the chemicals directly and deeming it better than food.

It's become so blatant and commonplace that words like vitamins and minerals have become utterly meaningless. Energy-drink cans have random shit like that listed all the time. Genuinely who cares about the 300% daily intake vitamin B12 in an energy drink? People just want a caffeinated soda.

People seem quick to forget that these are ultimately products. Snake oil, but now as a 'meal' instead of 'elixirs'.

---

*Some of the recent videos are specifically inflammatory and conveniently sponsored by red-meat-type companies, so there's ofc some conflict of interest now.

 

[evenlymatched95]

View attachment 136062

The bit that got me is that they even make it with artificial sweeteners. For some reason I had it in my head that it was made with real sugar.
Slop is almost too cute of a name for this stuff. It's literally concentrated industrial filler.

 

[GENOSAD]

TRUST THE SCIENCE
'Experts agree!' type advertising and claims. Our nutrient paste is CREATED WITH SCIENCE!!! That's how you know you can trust the garbage gobbling up!Factor75

Soylent

Huel. This one is a great image since it's next to what literally looks like vomit.

The whole "SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN!!!!" angle is hilarious to me because it's very clear that they're just hamming up something that every other processed food manufacturer does. Of course they're going to have nutrition standards, otherwise the FDA wouldn't let them sell this shit. Of course they're going to make it taste as good as possible, they're making fucking food. Anyone who considers this a step above Salisbury steak in terms of nutritional quality clearly has no clue that standards are in place for food manufacturing. A hard-to-believe statement, I know, but think about how grossed out a homeless American will get if you show him Indian street food videos.

You know what? I think people should buy TV dinners. I think they should buy as many as they want and eat them to their tumors' content... so long as they're actually going to a store to buy them.
I wholly, wholly despise the concept of getting food delivered to your home unless it's something for you and the boize to eat while you hang out or get drunk out of your minds. Across cultures and traditions worldwide, eating is a community experience that you share with others around you. Even if you're not eating, just sitting next to someone else at the dinner table is social enough to be a community-building experience, and these sorts of things are few and far between these days.
The human species is a social one, even if we were never that good at it. The depravity and weakness that comes from social isolation (as I'm sure anyone here can attest to) is painful and tragic, and today's world is doing absolutely nothing to fix that. In the name of convenience, we push people further away from the door. We throw food at them and turn away as if they were prisoners. We tell them that looking someone else in the eyes is tiresome and stressful, so why even bother with that?

I feel like I've lost the point of whatever I was going to say when I started writing this, but yeah, this is definitely more soap being poured on the stairs that humanity's been running down for the past couple decades. Don't do this shit. Don't get food delivered to you. Walk to the store, the bodega, wherever, and get Hamburger Helper instead; it's a good "step one" for making your own meals.

 

[kimn]

I think we've gotta remember these home-delivered microwave-meal things probably aren't as popular as we think, as much as the image of the bugman that eats them is hilarious.

Sure, we see them advertised everywhere, but it doesn't mean that anybody is actually eating them. All it means is that some "serial entrepreneur" pitched this, and some venture capitalist saw a quick buck and decided to write a blank cheque for these things to be advertised. Nobody actually bought a Casper mattress now, did they?

The nutrient-paste shakes themselves? Now, they've actually managed to carve themselves out a niche. People do choose to eat them instead of a tesco meal deal (I'm ambivilent to this - it's bugman slop either way, just in different shapes).

But honestly? I think maybe a few exceptionally impressionable and stupid people will buy them just because they're getting shilled so much, but nowhere near enough people to bring this to profitability. I think it'll be a failed experiment, and the marketers will realise that while the consumer will put up with some complete garbage, this is a step too far.

 

[omnidisplay]

probably aren't as popular as we think

Wishful thinking IMO.

According to Huel themselves;

(of course that number could be inflated, but it's still not worth scoffing at).

Not trying to be pessimistic, but at the same time if it truly was a failed industry it would've died already. Huel is 10 years old, for example.

At the same time, it's not like this industry is stopping you from personally cooking. Fun to mock anyways.

---

Slop is almost too cute of a name for this stuff.

I agree. Slop is part of my own internet lexicon. I even have a shit-posting page dedicated to it.

---

They knew.......

 

[kimn]

ishful thinking IMO.

According to Huel themselves;

(of course that number could be inflated, but it's still not worth scoffing at).

All true! Perhaps I wasn't clear - the meal replacement shakes are clearly popular. They're popular enough that several national convenience store chains here stock them. They're perishable goods (as far as I know), so they must have enough demand for them to not rot on the shelves. I even know people in real life who eat them, much to my dismay.

It's just this new wave of hand-delivered microwave meals that I think is all shill, no buy.