Samantha King

And it was known as a fiasco because all of this research was pretty dicey.

But it nonetheless fueled this drive to get more protein into the bodies of poor black residents of the global south.

Massive amounts of resources and time and energy had been put into trying to fix this gap to the detriment of the very communities that the West was ostensibly trying to help.

If you're encouraging people to rehydrate a sachet of milk or eat some kind of protein bar, right, in place of a meal that is made from food that you've

grown yourself, that's cooked in a communal way, that you sit down and enjoy as a family and or with your broader community as a relationship builder.

I mean, all the kinds of things that we associate with food when we don't reduce it to a biochemical formula.

Yes, you're right that there's a class dimension to every protein boom.

One of the things that's different about the more recent one is that it is focused much more on the middle and upper classes.

This isn't about fixing malnutrition necessarily or...

maximizing a workforce, making a healthier population.

It's about a lifestyle of optimization.

I guess the other part, Gavin speaking to the cultural drivers of the present protein boom, and then there's also, I think, economic drivers related to the culture of overwork and burnout and pervading anxiety about many things, not just food and diet, but cost of living, global conflicts, etc.,

And protein rich foods are presented as offering, you know, vigor and vitality and a quick fix for energy and strength.

And they can be marketed and they are marketed in that way without any change in the scientific status, right, or the biochemical knowledge that we have about protein.

People can only eat so much.

And so supplementing foods with protein and making claims about the health benefits of that and being able to charge more for that is a way to get people to spend more on food than they otherwise would.

I think at one level we anticipated it, right?

I mean, I think especially the contestations over the place of meat in our diets in the context of the climate crisis

Protein has kind of provided an escape valve for that conversation.

And I think it makes sense that it's growing in the way that it has.