I don’t think my ancestors would recognize what I ate for breakfast yesterday. I can’t imagine my great-great grandmother peering at my plate and perceiving anything on there as food. Moved by morbid fascination and self-apathy, I paid extra for the new Tim Hortons protein bagel with cream cheese. Like many other trendy foods, this bagel promised to be healthier, with its 20 grams of extra protein. It promised a form of bodily redemption with a hole in the middle. However, redemption shouldn’t taste as bad as this bagel did.
The pastry itself was pimply, rough, more eczema than egg-wash — probably owing to some added whey substance. It had an odd milky smell that acted almost as a prologue to the baked good nearly curdling in my mouth. I can’t believe I have to write this, but a bagel is not brioche, and milk should stay as far away from bread as it should from a kosher burger.
I never thought I’d throw away a bagel. I feel the same familiar nostalgia towards bagels as I do synagogues or kippahs. They’re the homely iconography in delis and shops that fed the tired immigrants running from shtetls. Tim Hortons took that symbol and stripped it of all its joy and flavour in favour of nutrients.
Added protein. More and more, I’m seeing fast foods and snacks promise as much polypeptide content as a chicken breast. It's a billion-dollar industry that is growing every year. Celebrities saw it, too, and are crawling their way onto our shelves to hitch a ride on the bandwagon. Khloé Kardashian launched a popcorn that has seven grams of protein per serving. In an interview, she said other protein products don’t “taste well” (which semantically implies the food was tasting her) and that she wanted to create a product that she could snack on to fulfill her protein intake. She now has a new line of protein-infused chips and her popular popcorn tastes, to one reviewer, like “wet chalk.”
The more I think about it, the more otherworldly it seems. My brain, evolved from paleolithic forefathers, understands that protein lies in meat or beans or processed soy. The fact that a drink can be meat-like is spiritually terrifying, even as a chemist. How did we get here? Why are we like this now? Why are we pushing protein so much into all of our foods, turning the process of eating into a video game where you have to shove the “right” combination of stuff into you to be a proper person?
Part of my brain screams in agony when I see how people talk about food. In our current climate, an online recipe cannot stand on its own and must instead offer something to the unwitting and dopamine-starved viewer: convenience, efficiency or a magical way to fix eating habits. My great-grandmother didn’t care about her macros and still made food my mother extols. Where did the “meal” go?
Michael Pollan, a journalist who specializes in food, lays out how Americans (and by unpatriotic proxy, Canadians) became obsessed with food-based health in his 2008 book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The way we think about food — how so many of us see it as merely a sum of chemicals and vitamins instead of the sustenance it has always been — is an incredibly recent invention, coined by Australian food politics researcher Gyorgy Scrinis as “nutritionism.”
Pollan credits the Western shift toward nutritionism to a 1977 report by the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The report found meat contributed to a lot of food-based health problems (including heart disease). However, due to a strong-arm campaign by meat and dairy industries, the committee had to urge Americans to “decrease consumption of animal fat, and choose meats, poultry and fish [that would] reduce saturated fat intake.” This effectively shifted the blame away from certain foods and toward certain chemicals — chemicals that could be selectively taken out of processed foods by companies and sold back to the American people for a profit.
Thus began America’s fear of fat in the 20th century, which turned to a fear of carbohydrates in the 21st. Pollan’s book argues that all of this fear around “bad nutrients” stems from a misguided belief that food is the sum of its microscopic parts instead of something distinct from its individual chemical content. He cited a review from 2003 that found many associations between eating less-refined grains and beneficial health effects, such as a 17 per cent mortality reduction based on whole-cereal fibre consumption, or improvements in men with coronary heart disease when whole grains were added to their diets.
Pollan describes his philosophy as “eat food, mostly plants, not too much.” If you follow these laws — avoid eating incredibly processed things, eat more leafy vegetables and don’t get too full during every meal — apparently you’ll find the secret to a healthy life.
It seems to me, in a Pollanistic view, that this protein craze is an extension of the “nutritionism” we saw rearing its head in the mid 1970s. Is there really a difference between a candy today saying it's “high protein” and one 40 years ago saying it’s “low fat”? It’s all seemingly pushing us towards the same ideal: you will be good if you eat these good things we are selling you. Pollan references epidemiologist John Powles, who posits that Americans’ eating habits are passed down by the Puritans that founded their nation, putting the whole thing into a context of a fear of bodily hell. You can’t enjoy your dessert because enjoyment is the love of the devil, and thus you will be condemned.
There are people who famously need to prioritize healthy foods and protein levels. There are those that, for the sake of their ever-increasing gains, need to treat food like fuel: weightlifters. Do these people turn to engineered snack-products to hit absurd protein goals?
Wilson Zhan is a kinesiology major and the president of UBC’s Weightlifting and Powerlifting Club. His qualifications in discussing what an athlete’s body needs are self-explanatory. In an interview, he talked about different, necessary human amino acids and vitamins with the confidence of someone who knows they can lift a total of 650 kilograms. That, for reference, is the average mass of an adult polar bear.
For a bodybuilder like Zhan, protein is so essential that he disagrees with the current medically-recommended median protein intake. Mayo Clinic says that the average adult requires 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram mass. Zhan, in contrast, ingests 2.5 grams per kilogram, and recommends most people eat closer to 1.2 to avoid muscle atrophy later in life. His diet is what one would expect — protein shakes, carrot and beef stews and the darling of every protein baker I’ve seen plastered across my feed: Greek yogurt.
All of this protein is compounded by whey, the ingredient my local Tims used to pull the protein bagel from the primordial and otherworldly ooze. It’s a milk protein isolate derived as a byproduct from cheese processing — used in all of the protein enhancements that send shivers down my spine. In the past year, the price of whey powder has increased 250 per cent in the US because companies can’t keep their bioengineering hands away from it.
To Zahn, these products just aren’t worth the calories. Classic carbohydrates already contain some proteins but they don’t have all the necessary components that make them “complete.” He told me that “high-protein carb sources are predominantly IQ tax. It's [basically] a marketing scheme. So like, ‘high protein, this must be good,’ but in reality, it doesn't really benefit that much. I would say don't waste your money on that. Just buy normal rice, buy normal bagels, buy normal bread. Eat eggs [and] meat.”
So, it's all bunk and I don’t know how to feel about it. We’ve diluted the process of eating into trying to maximize and optimize whatever meal is in front of us. Companies, either through strong-arming political reports or pushing nutritionist philosophies onto us, have redefined one of the most human endeavours.
When “food” becomes “meal,” that's where I see a spark of humanity. Melodramatic as it may be, it's because so much of my life revolves around eating. I grocery shop to prepare for the week. I find new restaurants to shock and amaze me. I beg people to come over for dinner. When I go to a new town, the first thing I look for is a bite to eat. If it wasn’t obvious, I’m quite afraid of what happens when food becomes a number. Food should be familial recollection, community bonding, healthy and tasty, or just something delicious. There is no hell you can go to for being human like that.
Because Pollan isn’t in the room with me as I write this, I can make some addendums to his motto: eat food, some plants, have ice cream, not too much, and don’t eat the Tims protein bagel.
