The Protein Shortage Is Coming

In retrospect, maybe the protein Pop-Tarts were a bit much. Americans, broadly speaking, are in a state of protein mania. We are eating it at breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and just about anytime in between. We like it in chips, candy, soda, water. We like protein so much, in fact, that we’ve been eating it all up.Whey-protein prices are surging, and a shortage may be imminent. “Demand is strengthening,” the USDA warned in a recent report, and “inventories remain tight.” Some manufacturers have already sold their supplies for the full year. Since January, wholesale prices for food-grade whey powder have risen by more than 50 percent, to the highest level on record, according to the commodity-pricing experts at DCA Market Intelligence.Retail prices are going up, too: Six months ago, a two-pound jug of Optimum Nutrition’s “delicious strawberry”–flavored whey protein powder went for about $40 on Amazon; now it’s $54.03. “We’ve absolutely felt it,” Stephen Zieminski, the CEO of the supplement company Naked Nutrition, said of the shortage in an email to me (though he noted that his company had not raised prices). “Demand is up and supply is tighter than it has ever been.”[Read: America has entered late-stage protein]Historically and currently, much of the protein that has made its way into packaged foods and smoothies and those big tubs of protein powder comes from whey. Raw milk is treated with heat, acid, or enzymes to coagulate it into two distinct substances: curds, which become cheese, and whey, which was, at least until recently, the cheesemaking process’s unlovely by-product.Almost as long as industrialized agriculture has existed, the problem with whey wasn’t scarcity at all, but the opposite. Farmers did anything they could do to get rid of it as cheaply as possible: fed it to livestock, sprayed it onto fields (“although the smell and salt often proved to be troublesome,” as one food scientist put it), dumped it into rivers and sewers. For much of our nation