I saw the funniest damn thing the other day. There was an article by the chief resident scientist at some vegetarian organization in the EU, and his name was Pinto. His last name was Pinto, as in Pinto beans. He was totally ignoring and discounting the fact that Olympic athletes were asking for more meat in the Olympic cafeteria. Apparently, this guy Pinto, who, again, is named after a legume, decided that the decision to go "60% meatless" at the Olympics was a good move and that the athletes just needed to accept the "scientific consensus" that plant-based protein is just as effective and offers just as much performance benefit as animal protein.
This is another case of “don’t believe your lying eyes,” that the authorities who supposedly have our best interest in mind continually try to foist upon us.
Only this time it’s even worse because they are telling athletes with decades upon decades of the most intense training and recovery known to man that everything they believe about diet and especially animal protein in the diet was all wrong. Everything they’ve done to recover from their intense training has been mistaken. Everything they’ve done to get themselves to the upper echelon of their sport, as represented by their inclusion and appearance in the Olympics 2024, has been misguided. They didn’t need the eggs, steak, chicken, fish, or dairy to get them where they are today. They could’ve just had tofu and almond milk and oat milk. It is absolutely insane what they’re doing to these athletes.
But the best part of all this is that even though the Paris Olympics had pledged to be 60% meatless, claiming that the 2024 Olympics would be the most sustainable of all time and they would do this by enforcing compulsory vegetarianism on all the athletes at over half of the meals, they had to reverse course. The athletes complained so much about the lack of animal protein that the catering company in charge of the Olympics reversed course immediately and began ordering tons of steaks, eggs, and other sources of animal protein.
This whole episode fills me with confidence for the future. You can’t outsmart biology. Eventually, all your fanciful ideas about the way things should be will run up against cold, hard reality. And the biological reality is that athletes need animal protein and lots of it.
We are going to win. Real food, including real meat, will win, but it’s gonna take a lot of kicking and screaming. It may not be easy, but rest assured that you can’t circumvent biology.
