I grew up in a family where protein was the most important nutrient. And while I want a certain historical sequence to this short essay, it seems smart to start after I turned 18 and leave discussions of my father’s heart disease and my thoughts about generational taste buds either to the ending portions of this or to another essay.
In school a friend taught me to bake bread and make tofu. The same friend also introduced me to a series of books including, Diet for a Small Planet, The Book of Tofu, and The Book of Miso. Another friend had me read The Limits to Growth. Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Lappé was about how to sustain humans with limited resources and how it coul be done using less land, and less energy by emphasizing plant protein. The book of Tofu and to some extent The Book of Miso just restated the arguments in Diet for a Small Planet (DSP) to promote particular products normally made from soybeans.
Proteins are made up of Amino Acids. There are nine amino acids that people need that the human body cannot make itself. They must be consumed . Meats are considered “complete”
proteins because meat constains all of these amino acids and that you can consider a diet with sufficient protein from meat to have sufficient supplies of each of these amino acids. Plant sources are not complete or less complete. They do not have the balance of amino acids needed. Much of DSP was involved in discussion how to mix vegetable sources to get a balanced amount of amino acids. My take away was that a small amount of beans with a large amount of traditional grains was a good easy mix that met these requirements. A generation of people were inspired by this book to get more protein from vegetable sources. Only a few of my friends became vegetarians.
The amount of protein needed by an adult male is aobut 50 grams minimum. If you are big, you need more. If you are working hard you need more. It is not a firm line.There is also a maximum amount. If you exceed it you start to have kidney and other problems.
If you eat a varied diet that is not based on certain protein poor sources you likely are getting enough protein. In 1981, ten years after the books initial publication, she said,
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- In 1971 I stressed protein complementarity because I assumed that the only way to get enough protein … was to create a protein as usable by the body as animal protein. In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high-quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought.
- With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet. The exceptions are diets very heavily dependent on [1] fruit or on [2] some tubers, such as sweet potatoes or cassava, or on [3] junk food (refined flours, sugars, and fat). Fortunately, relatively few people in the world try to survive on diets in which these foods are virtually the sole source of calories. In all other diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.
“
By 1981 I was having blood sugar problems and my diet rich in wheat flour needed changing. Having consumed way too much sugar as a child my blood sugar was out of control and I started having large mood swings, fitful naps in the middle of the afternoon that left me feeling worse rather than better, and headaches. I started to wean myself of large amounts of grain, with the exception of oats. They seem to digest slow enough to not cause a spike in my blood sugar. I should note that almost all of my consumption was whole grain, brown rice and whole wheat flour.
The advice from my doctor was to increase my protein intake. This worked OK but only for a week. What took long for me to understand was that what needed doing was not only reducing my high glycemic index foods (simple carbs and sugars) but increase my fiber. It is the increase in fiber that made the difference. Ten years later I started a 15 year period where I could eat a more normal diet, that is without my allergens of milk and potatoes.
One of the more interesting things that came up was that the normal meat and grease heavy breakfast, really did not work for me. Eating Eggs, bacon, hashbrowns worked for an hour or two but by 10 am I was always hungry again. Eventually I found oatmeal. Once I started eating that breakfast was easy, cheap, and kept me feeling fed until lunch. I started using it as a night time snack and I stopped waking up with a headache and desparately needing food.
At some point I bought a used copy of a cookbook, “The No Fad Good Food 5$ a Week Cookbook. For a 9 month school year I kept track . $3.27 a week for food. Using the cookbook’s guidance I met my adult daily requirements for everything according to the US government. I exceeded the minimum requirements for protein, and roughly got over 100grams per day. I was not thriving, but this was partly due to eating too much dairy and potatoes, things I am allergic to. The other part is that flour, whole wheat or not, has a pretty high glycemic index. The advice “whole grains” is too general, although invariably the whole grain is better than the related refined version. The other part is that I was using grain syrups on the bread, and eating a lot of bananas.
My father had started his anti-vegetarian schtick which was entirely unhelpful, ” you can’t survive as a vegetarian”. I was expected to accept this verbatim because after all, he had a degree in biology and was therefore a “Scientist”. Therefore, this harassment (3 or 4 times a year) had the tacit endorsement of my mother too. Since by this point I knew ten or twenty vegetarians that seemed to be surviving just fine, and I was not a vegetarian, by any stretch of the imagination, it was irritating. Vengeance did come. After his bypass and then valve replacement his cardiologist told him “it won’t likely lengthen your life, but will improve the quailty of it if you become a vegetarian”. He decided to give it a try. I started to introduce him, “This my father, he is a vegetarian”.
I was in rather desparate shape physically and monitarily and I was at a meat market for Art Professors, a conference “The College Art Association Conference” in NYC. I was asked by the interviewer, “What books have you read recently?”. 40 years ago now, I do not remember the name of the book, but when asked what I learned from it I said, “Prior to the great potato famine in Ireland, the average Irish male ate more than 7.5 pounds of potatoes a day. Interested in survival, I looked it up, 7.5 pounds of potatoes have almost enough protein from a small male to survive. It is not particularly balanced protein, so it is not a good sole source of protein. Beans and squash seeds are good sources of these amino acids.
When I was working teaching and I had both a morning and early afternoon class I had only 40 minutes for lunch. Sanwiches did not work well. They left me hungry after only a few hours. During these semesters I was very good about bringing in food. I made up packs that could be microwaved.
To make the packs I would cook al dente about a pound of noodles. I would take two cans of rinsed beans, one can of diced tomatoes and then mix them with about 10 pounds of frozen mixed vegetables. I would mix it up, but not homogeneous, I wanted variation. Then I would add to different sections of the mixed veges, some Thai curry paste in coconut milk, some chili powder with peanut sauce, and then a section of soy sauce, hot sauce, garlic and sesame oil and pack it into bags, one bag per day. In general I would end up with 30 bags. I would microwave them for lunch. These meals were very low in protein, but would last through an afternoon. It was an eye opener for me. I had thought it would just get me through class. I did not need protein as much as a lot of fiber, and only a small amount of carbohydrate. The food was good. I shared packs with hungry students.
There are a bunch of protein based glues. One is casein. It is the protein from milk. The easy way to make it is to rinse cottage cheese until the curds are left without gooey stuff. Then cover them just barely with hot water and add a tablespoon of borax per 10 ounce container. In a few days you will have a gooey gluey substance that can be used as a glue or as a paint pigment binder, a medium.
Fish Glue, Hide Glue, are collagen protein glues used in furniture, and still used in musical instrument making. They are nicely reversable and stick to themselves making them valuable in repair.
Egg tempera is a paint medium using egg yolks, but the whites are also used as a binder.