Pro-tein or Con-tein?
THAT is the question
2026 marks my 40th year here on this mortal plane. Save the birthday wishes till May (Taurus Supremacy) but this milestone of sorts is naturally causing me to do a lil reflection.
As someone who is a bit obsessed with food (making AND eating) it scans that I might have a bit of a complex relationship with it as well. Also, I just told you that I am about to turn 40, which, if you do the math, means I was a teenage girl roughly between the years of 1999 and 2006. Do you guys remember the turn of the century? A lot of history making stuff happened in that time span but when I think about that era of my life, I think about my relationship to my body (bad) and subsequently my relationship to food (started good, took a left turn). Why was I, as a child, counting calories? Why was I obsessed with the Atkins diet? Why did I start running at 6am every morning even though it tortured me? All of this to never get the flat stomach that was so in vogue, but mostly to fundamentally alter how I felt about feeding and ultimately nourishing myself.
Now, I tell you all of this to say, our current era is giving me some unpleasant flashbacks. There is of course, the ozempic of it all, but I am NOT wading into that discourse at this time, in order to maintain what is left of my sanity. But what I am thinking about currently is protein. I am not the first and will certainly not be the last person to share my thoughts on protein but I figured, hey, this is a food blog, why don’t I talk about a food thing that is grinding my gears at the moment.
Protein itself, wow, you really do gotta love it. It’s the building blocks for us being alive! It is an absolutely essential macronutrient that we all need to consume and it is made up from one or more chains of amino acids. Okay I am not a scientist so this is going to be a really simple breakdown but basically there are like, 500 amino acids but only 20 of them make up what we know as protein and of those 20 there are 9 that are known as essential amino acids and that is because we can’t make them ourselves and need to get them from food. Any food that has all 20 amino acids is called a complete protein, and complete proteins are things like meat (fish, poultry, beef, and pork), or dairy products (this is why everyone wants you to eat cottage cheese), or whole sources of soy (tofu, tempeh, and edamame). If you think about our diets here in the west, it may be immediately obvious to you that we get a lot of protein already. Our diets are very high in meat and dairy consumption, and most people who know about and study the diets of people who live in North America, Europe, etc say that it is very rare that anyone here is experiencing a protein deficiency. Now, I want to pause here to say that we live in a very wealthy society that cares only about the needs of the land owning class and there are people all around us experiencing issues with access to good, healthy, and nutritious food, and it is possible, in this wasteful and greedy society that we have created that there are people not getting enough protein because of this. Preaching to the choir here but it is worth acknowledging. It is also, I think, worth acknowledging that people on weight loss drugs often also experience protein deficiencies, which is doubly interesting when thinking about our current framing around the need for increasing protein intake.
I suppose this brings us to it: why the fuck is everyone obsessed with protein right now? This trend has been going on for a while but has really been coming to a head recently (Tim Hortons protein coffee anyone?) We are, of course, a society obsessed with thinness, this much is obvious. But, the framing around protein is not just weight loss (which is absolutely part of it) but about building muscle mass and getting ripped. Diet culture is so often about being small, which makes sense when you think about who the target audience is. Women are supposed to be small, men are supposed to be swole, and that’s that on that. So, right off the bat we have this interesting dynamic, here is a super mainstream diet culture thing, and it is being marketed as aggressively to men as it is to women. I am not sure I have encountered something like this in my 30 years of being forced to engage with diet culture.
As we see this shift towards the right, towards fascism, towards whatever nightmare end stage capitalism has in store for us, it makes sense to me that the pendulum would swing away from the body positive movement (problematic in and of itself, a conversation for another time) to our current obsession with the aesthetics of thinness and an idolization of a specific muscularity (there are dialectics everywhere for those with eyes to see). Strict adherence to this gendered binary of what is and is not an acceptable body type is a fascism indicator, and it’s not like we need any more of those. And if I may put my tin foil hat on for a moment, there is also something interesting about using the power of capitalism to sell a body type that is ideal for manual labour and you know, something like military or police combat. I wonder why the people who are obsessed with AI taking over white collar jobs are also obsessed with selling us all protein powder, who’s to say really.
Okay, sorry, did I get a little too deep into my conspiracy bag there? I don’t want to sound all hits blunt about it but, you can see why I might have my suspicions. I mean, it doesn’t help that part of the protein scam of it all is selling you something that is already high in protein (yogurt) but charging more for the yogurt with the packaging that says “high in protein” on it when it has the exact same amount as the original packaging……it’s all a bit crazy making.
Probably, we should all just try to know more about what we are eating, why we need to eat it, where it comes from, and who is trying to sell you something that you need to survive and why that is. Not looking good for that during our current media literacy and critical thinking drought but, we gotta keep yelling about it even when it feels futile.
Okay well on that note, thanks for reading and I’ll be back with another one soon! Also, try to up your fiber intake. Fiber deficiency is the real enemy.
xo