Chris Gaiomali

When you make cheese, its liquid byproduct is whey, which has historically been treated as a refuse that was like either dumped in the rivers or fed to pigs and cattle.

Once the whey is discarded, at least, it kind of has nowhere to go.

And there was one cheese plant in 1942 that actually used to dump all its whey product into an old drinking well.

The substance produced so much gas that at one point the well's cover blew off.

Things really started to change in the 1970s when a couple of things started happening in tandem.

The big one was there was kind of this swell of environmental legislation that came out that sort of just made dumping away not the move.

All these manufacturers had to find a use for this stuff that was essentially garbage.

And

Meanwhile, there were technological breakthroughs in fields like microfiltration, which made it easier to transform the whey into a powder that you could actually mix with water and drink down.

So that's kind of how we got to this point where you're able to drink whey protein as we know it today.

And then the other thing that happened was in 1977, there was this big documentary that came out called Pumping Iron.

And now we come to the heavyweights.

Over 200 pounds.

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was kind of a mind-blowing thing at the time.

Like, this guy came out of nowhere and had biceps on top of his biceps.

It kind of kicked off a real bodybuilding boom.

And from there, people just really wanted protein and to look like the Terminator.

Whey protein, like that kind of set the model for a lot of different plant proteins.

It was basically the same model where it was like, you know, we have all this excess trash and mush, like especially from the soybean oil industry.