1. Turn on the kitchen burner to …
2. Put 3 liters of water into a 4-liter pot.
3. Place the pot on the kitchen burner you have already turned on.
4. Add a teaspoon of salt to the pot.
5. Wait until the water boils.
6. Take the pasta out of the package.
7. Put the pasta into the pot.
8. Stir the pasta for 10 minutes.
9. Turn off the kitchen burner you turned on.
10. Remove the pot from the kitchen burner.
11. Drain the pasta from the pot into a colander.
12. Rinse the pasta with cold water from the tap for 20 seconds.
13. Let the pasta drain for 2 minutes.
14. Serve the pasta on the plate.
15. Add 3 tablespoons of grated cheese to each plate.
Pasta preparation algorithm from the 3rd grade middle school book for the Computer Science lesson
The preparation of mac and cheese, a meal that we sometimes quickly make to “eat something” – perhaps simpler and with less hassle than fried eggs, which might dirty the kitchen, forcing us perhaps to clean – in its simple form (without sauce, just with ready-made grated cheese) already seems like a somewhat complex algorithm. It takes 15 steps… Imagine having a cart full of chores and needing to perform 15 steps to prepare macaroni with grated cheese! It’s preferable to just order something, which certainly doesn’t require so many steps. To help, we provide the corresponding algorithm with comments that aid in understanding it.
1. Open a browser to access the internet;
2. Search using the keyword “food”;
(On the first page, a result will already appear with a delivery site “fere-fai.gr”)
3. Select a relevant delivery result;
4. Choose the type of food you want to consume from the menu;
5. Select a store;
6. View the offers and choose the one you prefer;
7. Locate the phone number on the page;
8. Take your mobile phone;
9. Dial the number you see on your screen;
10. Tell the person who answers your choice to place the order;
11. Provide your address;
12. Wait for your food to arrive;
13. When the delivery arrives, open the door;
14. Pay to receive your food;
We showed that we can accomplish this in fewer steps than preparing mac and cheese with pre-shredded cheese. We’ve achieved this for now, even if it costs a euro or two more. But as you may have noticed, considerable complexity is introduced in steps 3 to 6, which involve searching through a wide range of options. To simplify, instead of ordering “food” (a general category… including anything from frog legs to beef filet mignon), we recommend ordering specifically “gyros,” which requires only a phone call to a familiar gyro shop in the area and completing the process with the phrase “one gyro with everything” and providing the address where the order should be delivered.
However, a new problem clearly arises at this point: it’s difficult for a gyro-ordering algorithm to solve the modern human’s daily nutrition problem for every day, and for all meals of the day.
In this problem, even though it took several years, in 2013 science itself arrived through an entrepreneurial initiative to provide the appropriate answer. With an abstract view that treats food as fuel, so that a modern person can perform all their functions throughout the day, the following feeding algorithm is introduced, with the ability to cover all meals, without any restriction on the number of days it can be repeated:
1. Put the contents of the sachet into the shaker;
2. Fill the rest with water until the shaker is full;
3. Close the shaker;
4. Shake the shaker for 30 seconds;
5. Put the shaker in the refrigerator overnight.
With these five simple steps you have all your meals ready for the entire next day. The next evening repeat the process and continue at the same pace for each subsequent day.
The contents of the bag, the magic food, is called soylent and you can order it online in quantities that can cover your nutritional needs for up to one month per order.
Algorithmic cooking
It is logical from the above to reasonably raise a question: why is cooking taught in the computer science lesson? As a free hour or perhaps they have nothing to teach the students in this subject after all?
The teaching of this particular example1 aims at understanding the concept of algorithm, implying the natural way people execute algorithms in their daily lives: Algorithms are everywhere, from cooking to the way we go to school or later to work every day. Extending this hint, one could conclude that our life is an algorithmic life. Algorithms emerged from human thought. Machines are designed by humans in order to execute algorithms. Therefore, humans, since they think and function algorithmically, could also be seen as machines. By explaining what an algorithm is, the lesson manages to introduce children to how one can think in order to lead a comprehensible automated life composed of automated movements, stripped of any emotion or thought (irrelevant or relevant) that may occur during a daily activity.
This is an absolute ideological reversal of reality: algorithms – from the production line to computer software – are the analysis and segmentation of human activities or thought into individual movements or symbols, in order to achieve the detachment of human/social knowledge with the goal of reproducing it as machine functionality. Neither this, nor why it happened and continues to happen, is taught at school and certainly not from our side as workers and laborers.
With the words of the Game Over assembly2:
We believe that the doctrine which supports that “we think like algorithms and computers” is pure ideology and that one of the basic criteria on which its supporters rely is effectiveness. That the algorithm “works”, namely. Our opinion is that those who have the ability to promote and use effectiveness as a central argument are the same ones who want to define what the problem is, how it is, as well as why something constitutes a problem from the beginning. [..] We consider, by no means unfounded, that this has deep social consequences. [..] Thought itself is automated in order to fit into the algorithm’s coding, in order to be able to interact, to be classified.
A food that truly fits an algorithm
In a myschool forum regarding the school subject “Application Development in a Programming Environment”, a discussion is taking place among computer science teachers about the cooking example for teaching the concept of an algorithm. Some participants in the discussion raise the following concern regarding the validity of the example:
…
A: As for beans and recipes, they are not algorithms unless they are defined exactly as the definition and criteria of an algorithm prescribe. If this is done, then the algorithm can be executed by a cooking robot. 😀
Anyway, I’m tired of this cooking recipe example… there are better/more appropriate examples for introducing the concept of an algorithm. Come on, try to be taken seriously when you start talking about beans and pasta…B: The most accurate thing for me, colleague, is to say: An algorithm can also be a cooking recipe, as long as it satisfies the properties of algorithms.
Otherwise, pages 178 and 179 of the Gymnasium book should be revised.
After all, didn’t these properties emerge from experience?
I’ll give an example. If someone has lived abroad, (in the Netherlands, for instance) when waiting for the bus at the stop, they know exactly when it will arrive, down to the second, thanks to the information provided by the digital displays at the stop.
Why does this happen?
Not because someone suddenly appeared and declared that the bus would arrive at that exact time, but because some machines made time measurements and, subsequently, statistical analysis led to this accuracy.
Similarly, the same applies to the execution and continuous modification of candidate cooking algorithms by my mother. Someday, the right moment will come when the temporal, quantitative, and qualitative requirements of these candidate algorithms will yield the ideal solution. That is precisely where a cooking algorithm is born. And that’s why there are all these utensils with scales and timers used in cooking.
…
The creators of the “food” called soylent share this view: the quantities of ingredients in the food we consume should be calculated precisely, and the preparation times, likewise. Something like this would make it possible even for a robot to execute the cooking algorithm.
Considering the human body as a machine that needs energy to function, the issue of finding an efficient fuel is defined as a problem that needs solving. The fuel should be universal, covering all the body’s nutritional needs, and its preparation process should not be more time-consuming than a visit to a gas station. For the food preparation algorithm to operate, it must be translated into machine language, thus becoming a program. The “food preparation” program is currently executed during daily life by a human machine.
Soylent, officially characterized as a food product, is in powder form and consists of a series of mainly artificial—laboratory-made—and genetically modified ingredients. The mental story of how “future food,” which will constitute the “end of food,” emerged goes something like this… In 2012, three young kids were trying to set up a tech start-up company while living miserably in a claustrophobic room in San Francisco. These poor kids received a funding of $170,000 from an institution (Y Combinator), a start-up company incubator, but they weren’t doing well with their project. They had no social life, and while working maniacally, their budget was running out and they were left with only $70. As they counted and recounted their money, they saw that the big problem, the big black hole in their wallet, was food. And they weren’t even eating well. They mostly got junk food from outside. Then one of the kids, 25-year-old Rob Rhinehart, who had studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, got angry about the situation and decided to address the issue as an engineering problem. “We need amino acids and lipids, not the milk itself,” he said. “We need carbohydrates, not the bread itself,” he exclaimed. Fruits and vegetables provide the necessary vitamins and inorganic components, but they are “mostly water.” He began to see food as an unproductive way to survive and thought he could get the chemical components directly. The kid started studying biochemistry and eventually came up with a list of 35 nutritional components necessary for survival. Instead of going to a greengrocer, he ordered them directly from the internet in powder form. He put them in a blender with water and since then, he has been living on the concoction. The other kids were worried, but after a month of experimenting, Rob wrote an article on his blog titled “How I Stopped Eating Food,” where he narrates his story and how he managed to eliminate food from his life. He begins his text with a rebellious attitude:
…Food is fossil fuel for human energy. It is a massive market full of waste, regulatory frameworks, and biased distribution with serious geopolitical consequences. And we depend deeply on it. In some countries, people die from obesity, others from hunger. […] I haven’t eaten a bite of food in 30 days, and this has changed my life.
…and then provides detailed information about his experiments and the formula that nourished him for a month.
Then Rob became a role model and good people showed interest and embraced his effort, because they understood that he has a purpose in his life. Then the other kids who were looking for what good to do with the $70,000 left the software and entered the synthetic food business. And they were asking people for a buck to make their dream come true, the poor kids. This happened through a crowdfunding campaign on the internet, where they expected to raise $100,000 in a month to start producing soylent for humanity. Those who funded the project would get soylent for a week for $65 or for a month by giving $230. They raised the $100,000 in 2 hours and in four days they collected $300,000 from 2,424 supporters. By March 2014 they had received $3 million from more than 20,000 buyers. Soon after, venture capital funding of $1.5 million was added to these. And so soylent packages began circulating and being consumed in the U.S.
We are now at version 1.5 of soylent. Its composition has changed and it is no longer manufactured by Rob himself and his friends, but is mass-produced in a factory under the close guidance of Professor of Pharmacy at Columbia University College, F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer.
The product’s moto is “free your body” and this is exactly the way it is marketed for consumption: this artificial food frees the human body from the time-consuming and tedious process of preparing daily meals, giving much more time for work, productivity and personal pursuits.
It also solves the “problem” of choosing foods that will provide all the nutrients, as a group of experts undertakes to make the right choices. Thus, soylent is also marketed as a food for those who want to have a healthy lifestyle. Entrepreneurs claim that the consumer can know the ingredients they consume through soylent, while in reality they cannot know what a tomato or the pasta they will eat contains. This is the job of a specialist, unsuitable for the time and knowledge that the average person possesses.
Rob writes the following in another one of his articles:
The first computers could only be used by programmers. The first cars were useless unless someone was a mechanic. Today, essentially, one must be a nutritionist to manage a balanced diet, and that’s an awful lot of work. It should be automated. Billions of people collect recipes, buy ingredients, cook and clean, all in parallel, not for pleasure, but for survival. What a waste. Imagine chefs doing welding to build their own smartphones or architects knitting their own clothes. Cooking is a pleasant art for some, but it would be better if someone had the choice, without putting their health or wallet at risk.
It is not a lie at all that daily nutrition is a time-consuming process, which moreover is socially imposed, especially on women, mothers, grandmothers. Cooking requires kitchen care and concern so that all the raw materials needed for food preparation are available. In the new capitalist model, such a thing is considered outdated and secondary. Workers and workers should be able to devote an increasingly large part of their lives to work, without old-fashioned occupations. Thus, at least in Europe, it is common for employees who work 9:00 – 17:00 (and more…), to shop from supermarkets for ready-made food that simply needs to be placed in a microwave oven to be consumed, in the best case – junk food in the worst case. Cooking food under conditions of pressurized hours can also be considered a “luxury” now. However, there are not many who would deny that eating cooked food is an extremely essential need. The loss of such a possibility is an extreme degradation of the quality of life. Food certainly also has a strongly social dimension, which is an equally essential need. But even if, at a daily level, this dimension does not always exist, it is preferable for someone to eat something cooked. This is what the experience of stomachs says. The fact that for many people there is no economic possibility or time for something like this, due to the intensity of daily work and the burden of obligations, this is the real problem. And obviously not food itself. We, on our part, do not need any algorithm to answer what the solution to the problem is: it is the reduction of working time and the increase of the basic salary!
On overpopulation and global hunger
The name soylent is inspired by a 1966 science fiction novel, “Make Room! Make Room!”, written by Harry Harrison. The story says that at the beginning of the 21st century the population of the U.S.A. reaches 344 million. The author tries to draw the public’s attention to the issue of overpopulation that leads to food shortages, collapsing infrastructure and environmental pollution. In Harrison’s world, people are fed with a food called soylent, made from lentils and soy, in the form of a steak. In an interview, Harrison says the following about the inspiration for his idea:
Through scientific journals, I became increasingly sensitized to the threat of overpopulation worldwide. This was before popular books on overpopulation were published. I researched population growth curves, oil depletion, food increase, etc. at the British Library, and created the data I use in the book.
The 1973 movie, which was inspired by the book, is called “Soylent Green.” Soylent green is green food tablets that Soylent Corporation advertises as high-energy plankton from the oceans. The movie presents as a dystopian scenario the lack of organic food and its replacement by a single artificial food product. Soylent is produced in factories with “raw materials”… (we’ll avoid the spoiler!). The protagonist Charlton Heston reveals the truth, shouting.
In response to questions he has received regarding the issue, Rob Rhinehart has clarified that Soylent is not made from the raw material that makes Heston scream, and the name helps “overcome prejudice.” To provide a clear explanation of the inspiration behind the name, the following text is published on the product’s website:
Our name is inspired by Harry Harrison’s novel, which explores the impact that a population boom could have on the resources of this world.
Our product [..] is inspired by the idea that we must turn our minds to sustainable food sources, as the planet’s population growth increasingly burdens our resources at an accelerating rate.
We must say here that the “overpopulation problem” is a fascist perception that has its origins in Malthusian theory (1798), giving those who have the power the right to speak about us—and of course, without us—and to declare that our number on this planet is becoming too large and should be reduced. Capitalist barbarism can therefore act under the pretext of “ecological problems” or in the name of combating misery and poverty. This is a doctrine which, despite all the tenderness and concern for humanity with which it is surrounded, is accompanied by initiatives to reduce world hunger. Soylent is a food that could “help” with this issue, according to opinions circulating in Silicon Valley. Characteristically, a page that supports soylent as a product that could provide a solution to the problem of world hunger is that of the non-profit, philanthropic organization “The Borgen Project.” The organization is run by prominent— and invariably well-intentioned—rich individuals from the developed world. We will not elaborate further on this matter. It suffices to quote here the words written on their homepage:
We fight for the vulnerable
We have taken the battle to the highest possible level. The Borgen Project is an innovative national campaign that works with U.S. leaders to improve their response to the global poverty crisis.
Three ways Poverty Reduction helps the U.S.:
– Creates jobs
– Improves national security
– Stops overpopulation
The page is filled with images of dark-skinned people and hungry children. These people could be fed an artificial – cheap food imposed on them without their free choice of a worldly dinner on the weekend. In the article published by the humanitarian organization titled “What Soylent Could Mean for Global Hunger,” it is explained that the food packages currently sent to impoverished areas are intended only for salvation from the brink of death by starvation, without however providing the essential nutrients that Soylent can offer.
Food for cyborgs
As for the “free your body” part, we have something to add that entrepreneurs haven’t emphasized so far. Perhaps they missed it, but it’s great advertising! All other things might be a promise, but there is one thing that gets immediately liberated if someone starts eating soylent, and that is teeth. They are absolutely free and, since the food is liquid, they don’t have to do any work at all, except in extreme cases. What to do with them? They all get ruined and need fixing! That is definitely a relief. Many soylent consumers already report that they chew gum from time to time just to keep their idle teeth occupied. However, there is something else that could resonate even better in the market. It hasn’t been explored enough yet, but perhaps in the future: soylent, as an artificial, liquid food, makes the stomach itself somewhat unnecessary. In the future, we could remove it as a useless organ and get our fuel through intravenous feeding! Why not? That would be salvation. The stomach only causes problems: sometimes it hurts, other times it’s hungry, sometimes it gets upset, constantly demanding attention. Why should we carry it around for a lifetime? This way, we’ll truly make the phrase “free your body” a reality! We’re eagerly waiting for that time…
Apart from freeing the body’s organs from their endless overtime, as Rob claims in an interview with the online magazine Motherboard, consuming soylent frees humanity from the need to rely on nature for nourishment.
We try to get the optimal amount of various nutrients and from there we proceed to optimize their selection in terms of bioavailability, cost, sustainability, which is also the reason we went for a vegan version. In the end, we would like to have something as independent as possible from agriculture. […] When you want to produce a specific chemical substance, the method doesn’t matter.
Many people view food as something necessary, sacred, unchangeable, but I don’t think this is actually based on proven evidence. I don’t think it’s correct to believe that just because something comes from nature, it will be better. Usually the opposite happens today. The things we design are the most useful.
We started with whatever nature gave us, because it was quite good, and then, when we understood what we really want from it, we began producing more advanced versions. In the past, people used horses for transportation and later, we designed cars. Many things have come from nature so far, but this is being removed more and more as we understand the processes, and thus we make things better for ourselves.
With such reasoning, the use of synthetic and genetically modified ingredients in soylent is supported, so that its advocates also adopt and passionately defend in countless online discussions the ideology of human logic’s dominance over anything natural – that is, “unselected.” An automated citizen, after all, cannot eat just anything! For example, a tomato of unknown chemical composition.
Regarding the ideologies accompanying the post-diet, an excerpt from a text on the company’s page is interesting, which uses the ideological identification of living organisms with machines, to defend the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs):
DNA is the source code of nature. Just as in the source code of a computer program, all the characteristics and functions of life on Earth are encoded in DNA. The challenge is that when changes are made to an organism’s “source code,” unintended consequences may sometimes arise – for example, an organism could produce lower or higher-than-normal levels of nutrients, or it could produce foreign chemical compounds that are not normally found in the organism. However, such outcomes can arise both from scientific modification of the genetic code and from conventional breeding methods.
The technology of genetically modified organisms is now considered archaeology, as the technology being developed in recent years, with its products already circulating in the food market – for example, artificial flavoring agents – is that of synthetic biology or Synbio, which deals with designing and developing new organisms that can function more efficiently than their natural counterparts.3
In the artificial food industry, soylent is not alone. An entirely synthetic edible burger was produced in 2013 in a laboratory in the Netherlands, funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The patty was laboratory-constructed from cell cultures taken from cows.
Beyond Meat is another company that manufactures and markets plant-based meat (chicken and beef) made from soy and pea proteins, which has the texture, smell, and taste of real meat. One of its investors is Bill Gates, who supports on his blog that this contributes to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, water consumption, and land use. If Mr. Gates is so concerned about water consumption, for example, he could look more carefully towards the integrated circuits industry.4
All this using the same justifications of course for the environment, for addressing overpopulation, for world hunger and the usual… While the obvious reason: that it can constitute a cheap solution for mass food production, which will yield higher profits -if mentioned anywhere- is in fine print.
A food, suitable for the information age
In the world of the internet now, there is always unlimited so-called freedom and choices. The formula of soylent is published with every new version. Consumers can have an opinion on the composition and publicly discuss it on the forum that the company has created for the community. For example, in version 1.0, the artificial sweetener sucralose was added. This upset many who went to the forum and complained because it gives flavor, while soylent promises a neutral taste for functional reasons. Also, an artificial sweetener is not a necessary ingredient for nutrition, which does not align with the vision of pure effectiveness. Everyone was waiting for Rob’s response. When he finally appeared, he stated that such an addition was deemed necessary in order to cover the taste from fish oils, otherwise the whole dream would collapse, since most people would not be able to consume it. After such a response, everyone thanked their food creator and silenced their reactions, letting him pursue his noble dream for humanity.
Additionally, the company has created a platform for making D.I.Y. soylent recipes. To this day, thousands of d.i.y. recipes have been created with different ingredients in liquid form or powder. Users of the platform can choose an already existing recipe, see its composition and nutritional analysis, and if they want, modify it. Instead of food, they can prepare such a chemical cocktail and consume it for the sake of productivity. Subsequently, they can discuss the effects of the chemical cocktail and the modifications they have made based on their experience, as self-made chemists experimenting on their own bodies—often with extremely harmful consequences: atony, nausea, vomiting, headaches, etc. What they do to solve such problems is change the chemical composition.
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, who has also invested in Soylent, says that releasing the formula was “the smartest marketing strategy”: The legions of people experimenting with their own types of soylent at home have become a fan base that helps improve the product and spread it, The New Yorker magazine explains.
No matter how strange or even terrifying the behavior of soylent fans may seem, it is not unprecedented. The truth is that it does not differ significantly from that of Western citizens who are obsessed with supplements and chemical cocktails of various kinds in order to achieve an ideal body, lose weight, gain muscle mass, and generally optimize their bodies with the help of chemistry. The construction of disciplined bodies that follow consumer patterns has been and continues to be within the repertoire of capitalist imperatives. Those who embrace the culture of mechanization and all the ideologies surrounding it willingly offer even their own bodies for experimentation for the benefit of a company’s profits, embracing the apparent freedom offered by a computational platform for their fuel.
Shelley Dee
cyborg #03 – 06/2015
- You can find more about the (dis)analogy of algorithms with cooking in Sarajevo 57, the aroma of life: the craftswoman. ↩︎
- From the second day report of the 2014 Game Over festival: Algorithm: the mechanization of thought. ↩︎
- From the Synthetic Biology Center page of MIT: The goal of synthetic biology is to make the construction of new biological systems a practical and useful field of engineering[..] Biological systems can serve as the foundation for practical programmable materials, providing an engineering substrate for exceptional control over the chemical world[..] The range of potential applications is enormous and includes, but is not limited to: diagnostics, therapy, sensors, environmental remediation, energy production, and a range of other possibilities for the molecular and chemical industry. ↩︎
- From the book “Water under pressure, the construction of water scarcity, commodification, the privatization of urban water supply”, editions antischolio, December 2010: …Intel, which has factories in Santa Clara, is the largest water consumer in Hillsboro, drawing 1,382,000 tons of water per year. […] Wafer Technologies, a silicon wafer factory and the largest water consumer in the city of Portland, needs 2,934,000 tons of water per year. ↩︎