Gavin Whedon

It's probably whey.

The last time we looked on the Walmart website for the number of protein-affiliated products, it was over 1,000.

Wow.

But if you dug into the ingredients…

You wouldn't find anything like that scale of variety, nor if you look at the number of food conglomerates that were actually selling these things.

I think it's something that actually unifies the protein moments.

And I'm not sure that we write that, but having this conversation brings that to light.

Because, yeah, you do see that in different, you know, what was possible in science at different moments.

You see that effort at...

nutrition being the way that we think about food, come to the fore in these different historical moments.

And I think one thing we've tried to convey whenever we talk about this is that we think it's a real profound and tragic waste of energy and care

To put so much of the love people have for food into this metricized understanding of how many grams of powder or flesh or whatever substance they should be consuming to meet or maximize these externally imposed directives, which will always be contested in any case.

And when that...

That love, that care and energy that people have for food, it could be for things that really matter, right?

Eating together, the trans-historical human experience of eating together, eating ethically wherever one can, and bigger structural changes around a food system that nobody asked for, nobody designed, and most people agree is broken.

So I think that really does get to the heart of something that cuts across these protein booms and is something that we try and emphasize rather than contributing or risking contributing to the debate about differences.

Which is why we also find it tragic that the question we are most often asked is, this all sounds really interesting, but how much protein do you think I should eat?

The classic one would be, you know, if this isn't all it's cracked up to be, then whose interest is it serving?

That's a historical moments question too.

I mean, at the moment, protein offers food marketers and producers a way of upping prices and profits on food stuff in a way that makes it stand out as ostensibly healthy compared to the stuff that it's alongside without fundamentally changing its substance or consistency.