Gavin Whedon

I think it helps to mark out the distinction between the idea that protein is something we need, which is true, but it's in everything we eat, and the idea that it might be something that we want, that we affect certain kinds of desire to.

You have, after the Second World War in America, this rapid industrialization of agriculture, able to produce abundant quantities of milk and cheese in the dairy industry.

One of the unintended offshoots of that is the production of an abundance of excess whey, because whey is the excess of milk and cheese production.

It's what gets left over.

This wasn't an issue for thousands of years of farming because when you're making not much milk or cheese, there's not much way.

You can redistribute it as fertilizer.

You can feed it to other animals.

You can use it in artisanal recipes.

But when you produce it on industrial scales, it presents a problem and did present a problem, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.

And presented dairy farming at the time in the US with the question of what to do with it.

And the initial response was to dump it.

It was dumping in rivers and sewers and in streams.

And this was environmentally devastating, you can imagine.

That's partly because of whey's consistency and its potency.

It's dense in nitrogen.

In that raw form, it's 175 times more toxic than human sewage.

And so when you start dumping it in rivers and streams, oh, and it really smells.

So it drew the attention and the ire of local communities whose rivers and streams were being dumped in.

So this leads to a phase of activism, of investigative journalism, legislation, and ultimately the pressure on the dairy industry to do something else with this abundance.

One option, of course, would be to produce less milk or cheese, but that's degrowth is seldom an option.