Smells Like Protein Spirit

Anyone who pursues strength training, or knows someone who does, is familiar with the importance of protein. But now the macronutrient has achieved escape velocity. It’s deified by self-styled influencers on various social networks extolling its virtues and prescribing near-comical levels of intake. It’s crammed into foods where it has no earthly place. And even as someone who assiduously hits his gram-per-pound-of-lean-body-weight amount, I can tell you that it’s out of control. With an (amino) acid tongue, Jordan Michelman cuts through the madness for Taste.

This trend, which echoes and rhymes with various food and dietary fads over the last 25 years, is reaching something like an observable popular crescendo now, impacting our grocery shelves, our refrigerators, and our conception of the self as informed by the symbiotic relationship we’ve formed with our phones. Dubbed by Modern Retail as “the proteinization of food,” we’re living through a moment in which no comestible is left unfortified, unmixed with whey isolate, or un-boosted with pea protein. Thirty grams in a bag of processed chicken chips, 16 grams in a can of protein-spiked seltzer, 40 grams or more in the allulose-sweetened health sludge I paid $8 for at Whole Foods.