Canucks have beef with Soylent as to whether or not it's a real meal deal

Re: We'll stick to real food, thanks

Does Poutine count as real food?

Re: We'll stick to real food, thanks

"Canadian Bacon" is a Yank term for a lean cut of back bacon, usually the tenderloin. It is usually wet cured & smoked, and is more like a city ham than bacon. The term is almost never used north of the 49th parallel.

Re: We'll stick to real food, thanks

That's french fries with gravy, curd cheese, montreal smoked meat, canadian bacon and fried eggs...all in a big pile.

You forgot the maple syrup on top.

Re: We'll stick to real food, thanks

"...all in a big pile"

I misread that as "all in a big pie".

Worth a try, I reckon.

Re: We'll stick to real food, thanks

Fellow bacon loving Canuck here, I do enjoy a good hearty meal and generally have eggs and meat/fish every day. However, when things are hectic at work I sometime enjoy a quick Soylent or the local competing Biolent which is a oatmeal based rather tasty drink.

Whenever these things are discussed people tend to forget that it doesn't have to cover your entire diet or that people can do whatever the heck they want and good for them.

Re: Soylent Green

Rather I think they did. Remember their audience. Unless you think their product is actually people? :-)

"or"?

Shirley you meant to type "and" ... multiple courses, multiple brews/vintages.

@Michael

Well yes that's the ideal meal. It seems a bit draconian to ban the import of Soylent for not living up to that high standard though.

Is the import of any food not accompanied by wine forbidden?

Are people with no friends who are therefore not able to enjoy the meal with good company not allowed to import any food?

Re: Canadian Smuggling Time

Minor correction ... Haggis is available here in the US, but it has to be made here, not imported. Thankfully plenty of Scots emigrated in this direction, so we have the proper recipe. Also, some of us make our own. It's not exactly rocket science.

Re: Canadian Smuggling Time

There are already smugglers in Canada, getting haggis to the needy consumers of the USA

Can't you just take a truckfull of them to the US border and set them free to make their own way there?

Re: Whack-a-mole

There are genuine meal replacements that have been available for years. Complan, for example. Used by people on heavy chemotherapy for example who weren't able to keep proper food down. I don't know if they were originally for dieting or medical use, or a bit of both.

They often fall into the legal grey area between medical, food and vitamin supplement regs - so rules are probably going to be radically different between countries.

Anyway I assume that by claiming to be a "meal replacement" they've ticked some regulatory box that means they have to comply with some legislation that they don't - and haven't bothered to check, because Silicon Valley is too important to bother complying with petty stuff like the law.

If Huel market themselves the same way, then they'll fall afoul of the same law.

I doubt Canada are going to trouble themselves to search all vehicles at the border for the stuff, but if the company wants to take payments from Canadians on its website, then the Canadian government have legal leverage.

Re: Mystifying...

Personally, I don't use any of these things. But it doesn't mean I wouldn't. I just don't see the point in paying more than it would cost to make a meal, to have a crap meal.

But... part of what makes us human is the ability to create and enjoy a whole myriad of things. Sure, like carpentry. Nobody BUYS a chair any more, we all sit and make our own right? Nobody uses central heating, we build a fire every night, don't we? Nobody buys a package holiday, we all go out to the park or to the seaside and enjoy a "real" thing, right?

See how silly that sounds? Now consider this... I really couldn't care what my food tastes like. Though I have a sense of taste, I really don't care what I'm eating. To me, a £2 ready meal tastes just the same as the meals that were prepared from scratch by my ex-wife (a professional cook at one point in her life). That's not to say nobody else could. I'm sure they can, the same way they can see the difference between 4K, HD and SD which also escapes me. I'm sure that organic carrot sauteed in some very expensive concoction tastes wonderful to you. It tastes like a wet carrot to me. My sense of smell/taste is perfectly intact. I can tell you what I'm eating, I can taste "differences", etc. I actually don't like spicy food at all. But it's so far from being a factor in my life that if I lived alone, I'd only bother with cheap microwave meals. Maybe a roast at Christmas, but more for the procedures of doing so than any noticeable difference.

Ever eaten in a gastro pub? You think they cook all that from the finest venison caught fresh that morning? Or do you think it's a set range of meals that their caterers deliver in freeze-bags earlier in the month before you get there? Sure, I'm certain that some places do have all that. But most people wouldn't even notice. A lot of food taste is purely psychological (e.g. the blue-baked-beans thing) and the placebo of thinking it LOOKS like a place that would cook all fresh stuff makes you think it tastes better.

To be honest, I'd be perfectly happy to live off this stuff if it was cheap enough. The loss of experience of the "taste" would be more than made up for by the time it saves and the money in my pocket that I can spend on something that I *can* enjoy. I can't really say that I've ever really *enjoyed* food. I eat it. I like certain foods more. But I've never cooed over some rare blue cheese or gone doolally over a horse steak. It's all just food to me. People talk to me about wine as if they can taste the difference between different years of grapes, let alone between a bottle of red and white (hint: almost everybody CANNOT in a proper double-blind test). It just doesn't register to me. I know Coke from Pepsi and both from random colas. But... to be honest... who cares? I might have preference but it's barely figuring in my life if I get served the other unless I specifically asked for something in particular. And I never would.

As such, some people don't really care about the "human experience" of food. I'm one of them. I'll happily choose a McDonald's breakfast over the most elaborate meal at The Ritz any day. Not because it tastes better but - to me - it doesn't taste different enough to care. And I don't have to dress up to go to the drive-thru.

There's a reason people have microwaves. You think nobody ever uses them, except to heat up water? Of course they do. And virtually every household has one. Because most of the time it's absolutely fine and nobody can tell the difference. But when they first come out everyone decried them as "artificial", etc.

I had a look on Amazon the other day... there's a "breakfast maker" thing that's a microwave/grill, with a hotplate/hob on top and a toaster on the side, etc. It's a small box. That small box would do EVERY piece of cooking I would ever need to be able to do in my entire life. As such, some food supplement / food replacement / synthetic meat / unusual meat substitute / unaccustomed animal steak / etc. really doesn't figure in my life past the pence-per-kilo figure.

Re: Mystifying...

'I fail to understand how products like this actually gain any traction at all in the first place.'

That's the wonderful think about liberty and a free market. You don't need to understand.

Re: Mystifying...

See "The Machine Stops" - E. M. Forster 1909/1928

Re: Mystifying...

@Ramses Niblick...

I think you forgot to end your comment with "No, you can't have your ball back kids, and stay off my damn lawn!"

It's a true sign that you've gotten old and irrelevant when you start blasting the "kids these days" for their "new fangled ways".

This new generation aren't "disengaging" or "playing" when they are on their mobile devices. Have you ever asked them what they are actually doing? They are COMMUNICATING with each other. This generation is the most connected we have ever seen. As a result, they are far more empathetic and more likely to care about the plight of people they have never even met. Stephen Pinker proposes that humanity has become far more peaceful than ever in history in part due to the development of low-cost printing and narrative story telling. People could see the plight of others and actually started caring. This connected generation is a huge step further down that path. I, for one, welcome our future millennial overlords, and I'm barely a Gen-Y.

It seems to me you have your own definition of what makes communication and interaction "real", and that you are unable to see things from the perspective of a new generation raised in a connected world. The "ideal" you seem to pine for is where people are only friendly with, and concerned about the plight of, those who they personally know and spend time with in person. This is a myopic view of community that limits the potential of humanity to truly become a global community that values all lives equally.

None of them are cheap compared to a sandwich, which is not a complete meal. Its relatively expensive to eat a complete meal without a kitchen and a larder and to be cooking for a large group of people.

I find complete shakes do a better job at fending of hunger than other fast food. If I'm eating a limited diet I still feel hungry after eating. I eat too much.

They *are* quick and easy to prepare, took them yachting. Being in the galley when the boat is in motion is nauseating. Food you can prepare on deck is handy.

Top cure for a hangover too.

People seem to think it you drink one of these shakes that means you *never* eat real food (like chip butties).

I eat real food all the time, and I don't eat chip butties. This is something that I must urgently change! Particularly as my Mum gave me her old deep fat fryer, so I can now eat deliciously crispy chips whenever I want them.

Re: Only word adjustment needed

Unfortunately, Soylent would have to make this wording change across the whole world, in all of its markets, just to accommodate Canada. This is because when you market a product online, you can't have one message for Canada and another message for the rest of the world. Everyone is on the same internet (more or less).

They are successful selling it as a "meal replacement" everywhere else, they're not going to abandon that just to get around Canadian regulations.