A Poverty of Flesh?

Chapter 4 turns to the development of sarcopenia as a category of disease that positions all humans as either currently or potentially deficient in protein, thus facilitating the mass production of whey and other powders for protein supplementation. Exploring the research literature on sarcopenia, this chapter asserts that sarcopenia became constituted as a disease of protein deficiency at a particular historical moment, one in which the constant yet shifting need to find homes for nutritional sources of protein, the defunding of healthcare for aging populations, the frontier-building demands of the neoliberal university, and the ascendance of protein’s status among nutricentric subjects coalesce. Through sarcopenia, protein deficiency is established as an inevitable reality of advancing years on earth, with consequences for how those years are experienced. But it also becomes a pliable, reversible phenomenon, something inexorable unless one undertakes certain practices of the body to mitigate it.