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Forget Food Pills: What's this about Resveritrol?
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Hrm, that does sound like a better idea...
Yes.
Instead of food pills, what we could do is install little machines inside a person's stomach and quantumly teleport a flow of food into them at regular intervals. People would subscribe to some kind of food provider and get good healthy meals at the right times, forever until they die or cancel subscription.
This is the future.
Can we teleport poop out? As much as I hate preparing food for myself, I hate pooping ten times as much.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Food is only the beginning.
There's a couple of problems with this though. Mainly because you quench your hunger by filling up your belly and the reflex takes about 17 minutes or so to kick in. So just as you can chug down on absurd amounts of chocolate bars and soda you could do the exact same thing with this slightly more healthy variant.
I mean that's a problem with "supercharged" food today. I've eaten freeze dried "ranger" packages in the army which consisted of a one breakfast (some kind of cereal with assorted things) and a risotto. That shit is delicious because of the absurd amounts of suger and fat. It's also about 7500 calories if you it the entire package with the extra candy and chocolate.
Since our platoon didn't really have anything to do that exercise I ate about 1,5 - 2 packages per day because I was bored and had access to unlimited food. Needles to say I gained a bit of weight because of it.
But food that you eat as quickly as possible and without cooking it is becoming more and more common so I guess that's something we have to deal with eventually.
"...but you're still hungry"
*growl*
Coming from the place in the planet with the best restaurants and food culture (Spain, if you're not keeping track of the worldwide leaderboards) I'd say what we need is pretty mcuh the opposite. Cheap, eco-friendly food of which we can eat more, not less.
And, as others have pointed out, we already have very space-efficient ways of delivering nutrients and calories for times of need. Food is pleasure and culture beyond that, so I don't want food pills for the same reasons I don't want to have books downloaded into my brain without having to read them.
Right now I'm scowling at you over my steak and potatoes.
That's why I hate soup. Soup should make a statement. Either solid or liquid. Either swalow or chew. You can't have it both ways, soup.
I think it's pretty much a given that we will find a way to cram every nutrient needed for a given day plus the sensation of being full into a small, easily-consumed form at some time in the future.
As for when, and what exactly it'll be, I don't know. But I think it'd be foolish to think we won't eventually find a way to solve one of the biggest issues facing us since the dawn of man.
I make soup you can float a horseshoe in.
So, you make stew.
On the shuttle, they also have trays of prepared foods similar to the contents of MREs, sealed with plastic film. It's not all freeze-dried stuff.
Still a bit difficult to keep down, but only because the esophagus and digestive track don't move food as well in microgravity.
Sprocket manufacturing. It's hard, grueling work, though. Four hours a week. You might have to push the button as many as five times in a shift.
I don't see how you could gram 30 grams of dietary fiber and 50 grams of protein into a pill. Even if we were generous - let's say five doses per day, two pills per dose. That's 10 pills per day, at 8 grams a pill. 8 grams is a really, really, really dense pill. Just to give you an idea, the largest gelatin capsule available on the market today can hold 1.37 ml of product. So we're talking about a pill that's 5-6 times as dense as water... that's well in the range of being as dense as some metals.
And that's before taking into account the actual vitamins and minerals. And, oh, don't forget that many vitamins are only useful if ingested with fat, so we need to include some fat in each pill, too.
So you're talking about taking two of these heavy horse pills every 3 hours. Even if that's not a choking hazard, even if it wouldn't be harmful to the alimentary canal to be ingesting these things, would you really want to?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That's why I think we'll find a way, but I don't expect it'll be a pill.
I would guess we'll at least be able to buy NutriBlox! or something like that, which would be a simple block of nutrients along with anything else we might need to be consumed a few times a day, along with some liquid substance to easily flavor the block like food we might enjoy.
The protein bars I eat everyday have 30g of protein in them, and they're pretty fucking dense as they are.
That being said, they already have pills for fiber and vitamins/minerals. It's the macronutrients that would be difficult to get into pill form.
What if it gave you ten orgasms when you popped it? Would you reconsider?
You can't see the appeal in eating a perfectly balanced meal all the time, every time?
I dunno, maybe it's because I'm a fatty, but a simple, easy way to get all the nutrients I need and none of the shit I don't would make my day.
"Dinner's ready, everyone! Yes, Timmy, you have to be middle spoon again. Alright, pills down!"
Families would be closer than ever.
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
Plus there's no reason the turkey ham can't give you ten orgasms too, if that's what you want.
Yeah, exactly.
Fiber pills are meant to be supplements. I don't think I've ever seen a pill that contains more than 1 gram of fiber. Maybe 2? I guess you could take 2 of those 4 times a day and get a good amount of fiber. Still, we'd need to pack in all the protein and fat and simple carbohydrates and vitamins and minerals you'd need.
Anyway, I can't think of an application for "food pills" that isn't already served by MREs or dehydrated "astronaut" food. Maybe if we were talking about something where storage space were at an absolute premium, say deep space exploration, why not just store the food in pill form and then expand them prior to eating (using reclaimed water or something like that)? Then you don't need to think about what's going to happen when a pill hits your stomach and expands to 5+ times its original size, or what'll happen to the esophagus when you ingest something with the density of metal ore several times a day.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
*head explodes* What? How is that possible?
I just looked this stuff up. So, it can prevent and treat cancer, diabetes, and heart disease? Why aren't people guzzling down red wine then?
We are using fertilizers and other raw resources to intensify agriculture so that land is producing more food then is sustainable. And populations are rising.
The easiest way I see humans feeding our overpopulated world is with some crazy algae mixture into witch would be mixed everything you want in this pill that isn't in algae. We could go with kelp, but everyone is already sick of that stuff being wrapped around our sushi.
It's something that always bugs me about some SF-types. Bacofoil jumpsuits? Uncomfortable!
I would buy that for the convenience alone. Not as a complete substitute, but whenever there isn't enough time (or effort) to be had for a balanced meal. It could also do wonders for those that want to feed a family healthily on a tight budget.
Seriously, is human food that much more difficult to produce than dog food? Can we not digest dry food?
Seriously, most dog food sucks.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Because people's favorite flavors don't include 'ass,' and that's what it would taste like. Think about how hard they've worked on Diet Soda, and it's still not quite right. Making solid food that tastes good while being wonderfully healthy is like then thousand times harder than that.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables.
I think we will reach a point where you can get the majority of your nutrition from a few sources and won't have to eat nearly as much though. And we are pretty close to that now.
I think a good portion of my nutrition comes from supplements now. I've got a slew of pills that are nothing but powered vegetables/fruit compressed into a pill form, i've got vitamins, omega 3 fat pills, fiber pills, calcium pills, ect. It's kind of helpful to just wolf a handful of pills in the morning and be done with it.
I also recall in the military that a lot of our food was "nutrient fortified" which basically means they altered things so you'd get some level of nutrition even if your eating habbits sucked.
You could live off those slimfast shakes, they are a complete meal in a can. I had a friend who lived off that and ramen noodles.
You could eat primarily raw fruits and vegetables, but that's probably not what you want because although carrots and cucumbers are cheap and nutritious, eventually you've had one too many fucking carrots.
Actually, that's what I already do, but with hummus. I also eat spinach for Iron, take supplements, and consume enough protein.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation