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How Protein Ate Our Grocery Stores

Everyone from RFK Jr. to social media influencers are telling us that the nutrient needs to be maximized in our diet as much as possible. But is that actually good for our bodies?

Imagine that you’ve woken up one morning as a protein-“maxxing” influencer—an online personality focused on maximizing your health and body aesthetics by dialing up your protein intake. Your daily video stream might start with a protein electrolyte water followed by some weightlifting. For breakfast, you might eat several eggs with squash and avocado (to make sure you’re also maxxing healthy fat and beta-carotene), or you might keep it simple with a pound of fried ground beef. Lunch might be a human-brain-size glob of chopped raw tuna, a big juicy steak, or a Japanese fried-rice-and-tempeh dish sponsored by your vegan coaching company. At some point, you will likely consume a protein shake, a perfect opportunity to promote your self-branded protein powder. Dinner might be meat again, or perhaps a chicken quesadilla split into multiple protein-bearing sections. Or, stripping off the thin veneer of normalcy that separates man from goblin, you could feast on raw organ meats just like Liver King, a fitness influencer who claims to emulate the “ancestral lifestyle” of our Paleolithic forebears.

Even if you aren’t plugged into the online proteinverse, you have certainly observed the nutrient’s takeover of your local grocery store. You’ve seen the bars and shakes, the supplements and powders. You’ve ogled the protein water and perhaps even noticed that your favorite brand of heavy cream boasts “uttermost protein.” Pizza crust, Cup Noodles, even cocktails (witness the Espresso Proteini)—no food or drink, it seems, is safe from Big Protein, a multibillion-dollar enterprise since at least 2020. By now, protein is just one more metric to maxx in our never-ending pursuit of the optimal self.

What low fat was to the 1980s and ’90s, and low carb was to the 2000s, high protein is to our current era. As media outlets analyze America’s love affair with this macronutrient, noted protein-enjoyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is helping to revise government nutrition policy. With its top-heavy look, RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid recalls the V-shaped male torso idealized by the online self-improvement community of “looksmaxxers.” The discourse, like the processed-food and supplement industries, has itself become protein-rich—and, in the case of the food pyramid, helps signal the Trump administration’s alignment with the masculinist right.

More than an Internet fad, more even than the food industry’s latest effort to wrest profit from an increasingly fickle and economically stressed public, proteinmaxxing is part of the deep-rooted social pathology of nutritionism: the idea that a whole food is no more and no less than the sum of its parts. This reductive approach to eating marks proteinmaxxing as part of what might be called the Great Unbundling, which atomizes our bodies and minds as surely as bag-check fees have been separated out from base airfares. In the Great Unbundling, we experience the logical end point of a culture that regards an overwhelming array of choices as capitalism’s greatest gift. Whether you’re ordering takeout or choosing a healthcare plan, the thinking goes, you’ll be happiest if you can select from multiple options, tailor-making your own bliss.

On the food front, the Great Unbundling has convinced Americans that healthy diets are made up of discrete nutrients that can be chemically disaggregated from their source foods and ingested in optimal doses. Food science has made it possible to isolate, say, an apple’s natural antioxidants and process them into any number of “apple-inspired” derivatives. The problem is that the resulting App’lGlop™ may not be as nourishing as an apple—or it may be so addictive that you can’t stop yourself from consuming 47 pouches, at 7,000 percent of your recommended dietary allowance of sugar. These defects are obscured by marketing and advertising, enabled by the government’s laissez-faire attitude toward the food industry’s health claims.

This regulatory environment pushes consumers into what the 1990s-era conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper called “doing your own research,” or scouring the Internet for clues about which supplement or superfood may be right for them. The gamified logic that has transformed us into a nation of food-science Indiana Joneses also animates our drive for self-optimization. We constantly have to convince ourselves that we’re having a peak experience rather than an impoverished one: Hey, you’re not slowly killing yourself by subsisting exclusively on frozen pizza—you’re getting 32 grams of protein!

In the end, what gets unbundled along with our purchases is our self-perception. We begin to understand ourselves not as an integrated whole but as a collection of swappable parts that can be tuned up ad infinitum. Yet no matter how much time, money, or protein powder we invest in, the human condition guarantees that perfection will remain out of reach.

America has long been a nation of dietary obsessives, our food habits shaped less by our own tastes than by others’ religious beliefs or profit motives. Long before megacorporations like Sysco were reducing restaurant menus to standardized blandness, Americans had learned to elevate convenience and uniformity over enjoyment, freshness, and regional specificity. In the 19th century, the domestic-science movement led a broad shift away from homemade foods based on family tradition toward processed ones. As the food historian Laura Shapiro has written, domestic scientists—drawn from an emerging class of mostly white, East Coast professionals—believed that “if they could reform American eating habits, they could reform Americans” themselves. The nation’s fate, it seemed, hung on the willingness of home cooks, whether ladies of the house or hired hands, to step into the bright, sanitized world of measuring spoons and packaged yeast. Only after the housewife was cleansed of irrational attachments—to her hard-won intuitions, to her country or ethnicity of origin, to her very senses—could she adequately support her family’s pursuit of the American dream.

Enter the cooking schools, which aimed to supplant guesswork with measurement and to cure cognitive overload with planning. Smothering all variations in season, region, and taste beneath a prim, starched, Bostonian sameness, cooking-school instructors helped establish a food culture that proved durable precisely because it was boring. The women........

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