Last night was Xmas night, and I ended up getting the bestest gift of all : three hours plus of high quality intellectual conversation.

Every year, my roomate Joe’s family invites me over for Xmas dinner, and I could not be more grateful for that. Xmas can be hard on anyone who has no family nearby to celebrate with, but it is an especially troubling time for those of us with depession.

The suicide statistics for December attest to that.

So I got to eat a very good Xmas dinner, the highly of which for me is always their home-made cranberry sauce (I never liked cranberry stuff until I tried theirs) and afterward we sat around and chatted in the living room.

Or is it the family room? There’s no TV, so I am gonna say family room.

Anyhoo, during said conversation, I ended up bringing up an amazing article I once read about this woman who has started out as a highly skilled agronomist (aka farming science expert) who went all over the world teaching people better farming techniques so that they could get better yields from their fields.

And I have to love how down to earth and pragmatic that is. That will help people a hell of a lot more than a bag of flour or rice from the West.

But as she traveled around the world to places of extreme political instability, violence, poverty, and disease, a pattern began to emerge.

Everywhere she went, the local diet was far too low on protein. Even she could see that, and the only nutritional science she knew came through the filter of what an agronimist thinks about, like how to rate the nutritional content of a crop.

This seemed to her to be leading her to a conclusion she really didn’t like, so she quit her life of jet set philanthropy, went back to her home country, and dedicated herself to learning all there was to know about nutrition.

And everything she read lead her to the conclusion she did not like : that many of the third world places ripped apart by constant war and instability might well be like that, at least in part, because of their low protein diet.

Because here’s the thing : when a human being doesn’t get enough protein, their brain does not work right.

A lot of the higher brain functions shut down, and the person becomes short-tempered, emotional, agitated, and emotionally unstable.

Now imagine that effect multiplied by an entire culture, and you begin to see why this conclusion upset her so badly and why she really did not want to believe it.

If true, it meant that millions of people had died and millions more made into poverty stricken refugee status by a simple lack of protein.

What’s more, there was evidence that denying people sufficient protein was an excellent tool for keeping them from rebelling. That’s why various cult leaders in history have kept people just barely alive by giving them nothing but carbs and vegetables.

No protein, no ability to think rationally and clearly. People who can’t think clearly are much easier to manipulate with strongly emotional rhetoric and threats of violence or excommunication.

And that’s bad enough when it’s David Koresh or the Reverend Jim Jones, but when you are talking entire countries – hell, entire regions – then the human cost rises to apocalyptic levels.

Scientifically, then, the evidence is clear. Politically, though, whoa boy.

Try bringing up the idea that entire nations are stupid due to lack of protein and you will not get to finishes your sentence before people are calling you a eurocentric racists fascist eugenicist. It is simply not a concept we in the developed world can digest. It veers far too close to the third rail that is racial and cultural politics for our comfort.

The optics, in other words, are terrible. It’s not racist, but it sure SOUNDS racist, and that’s plenty bad enough.

So this is a problem that could not be confronted directly. You can’t stand in front of the UN and tell them you want a hundred million dollars in order to make poor brown people less stupid.

Even if that’s not what you say, that’s what people will hear.

So you would have to approach it obliquely. Talk entirely in abstract terms about increased nutrition in poverty stricken areas. That, by it self, sounds like a great idea. Say absolutely nothing about brain function, IQ, higher brain functions, or any of that.

Just make a dull yet appealing case for the program, get the funding, and get down to business.

Then you would face the problem of how to get people their protein. But luckily, the forces of capitalism have already solved that for us.

Protein powders are a billion dollar industry. Millions have already been spent on coming up with ways to deliver large quantities of protein in a shalf-stable and efficient form.

Some of them, I imagine, even taste good.

So all that would be necessary would be to survey the available products, choose the one that best suits the needs of the project, and adapt it into the product that could save the world.

Or at least feed its brain.

Then comes delivery, and that’s where things get tricky. The number one problem of global philathropy is actually getting to the people.

My plan is an elaborate one, but it’s the best I have come up with yet.

What you do is partner up with a popular sports drink company and market the stuff as a sports drink. Let’s call it Go Cola. Work hard to make it the number one sports drink around, if possible. The idea would be to build both cash and hype for the project so that people all around the world will want these product the same way they want Coca-cola, blue jeans, and other projects from the West that they see on Western TV.

Then you “invade” the regions that need the protein the most not with military or overt humanitarian aid but with marketing. Get local dictators and warlords on board by giving them a cut of the profits and pumping up their egos by emphasizing how great it will be to be the person who brought the excitement and pleasure of Go Cola to their country.

By the time they realize that Go Cola is directly responsible for the revolution currently coming for their head, it will be too late.

It could be the biggest thing for global intelligence and consciousness since they put the iodine in salt and took the lead out of the gas.

And all it takes is some goddamned protein.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.