I was thinking of striking a balance between these requirements:
* Cheap
* 100% Nutritionally complete AND healthy ( much healthier than
Typical American Diet )
* Ability to use measuring cups to measure out a day's rations easily
* Palatable - Maybe a variety of flavors but importantly they must all
have identical nutritional specs, so that they may be eaten
interchangeably.
* Dry kibble - put in tupperware and it keeps as well as dry dog food.
There must be many dieters that would eat this stuff - people who
don't want to think about what they are eating. And many people who
would take their breakfast and lunch of kibble in a bag to snack on
all day at work, knowing they are treating their bodies well while
enjoying more convienence than is even offered by ramen noodles. You
don't even have to cook kibble!
I'm sure there are many who would eat this three meals a day and
snacks too until they reach their ideal body weight.
This COULD be produced for real cheap since it keeps so well, and
doesn't require produce that meets appearance standards, and can be
made by machines in a huge factory. Protein is protein. They could
use any bycatch or whatever, because it would be ground up into
kibble. I'm sure the marketroids would put it in potato chip bags
and sell it at a premium, with special gimmicky 'secret nutritional
ingredients' like blueberries or pomegranate.
But isn't healthy treats (or high calorie candy bars with healthy
plastered all over them) really small potatoes compared with someone's
staple diet? Market this as cheap, and as good or better for you than
anything you were going to eat out or take the time to cook yourself,
and deliver on the health promises.
How to determine the formula, how to know it's nutritionally
complete? Does such a concept even really exist? If it were lacking
somehow, then you'd be liable to be sued. Still I can't believe there
aren't people qualified to do this, and food scientists with the
knowhow to make many yummy flavors of human kibble, and genius
marketers able to get people over the stigma of eating what would
appear superficially to be dogfood.
Heck if I made this stuff, I'd probably even eat my own dogfood, er,
peoplefood.