Kai Risdahl

There was a huge problem in places that do a lot of cheese production with like these horribly polluted rivers and fish would die from whey pollution.

It was a big problem.

Nobody wanted whey.

The biggest problem that farmers had with whey until quite recently was getting rid of it cheaply and safely and legally.

Right.

And now the problem is that they do not have enough of it.

So let's get to the industrial production side of this, because this was the amazing thing in this piece that popped out to me.

And again, I apologize for all the damage that me and my protein friends are doing.

You write in this piece that had somebody broken ground on a protein production plant, a whey protein production plant, when this protein maxing thing first really caught on like three-ish years ago.

We would still not have supply coming from that plant.

And oh, by the way, it would probably cost like a billion dollars to build a thing.

Yeah, this was the thing that was most interesting to me about reporting this story.

I had kind of assumed the problem was the cows, that we didn't have enough cows.

That is not true.

America is drowning in cows.

The problem is the infrastructure.

So whey processing is this tremendously complicated, hugely costly endeavor.

You're taking 101 degree liquid from a living animal on a farm and turning it into this shelf-stable, highly potent powder.

Building a whey processing plant is just not a quick thing for anyone to do.

And so those plants are coming online, but it takes a really long time.