Leaning Vegetarian

There’s a joke floating around on the internet that goes something like this:

How many vegetarians does it take to change a lightbulb?

Just one, but where do you get your protein?

Of course there are other things than meat that have protein. We eat them regularly, even when we are eating meat dishes too. Off the top of my head, some of these in the last few days have been

black beans
yogurt
brown rice
hash browns

The better question is how much do we need? I looked over at the USDA site at the Dietary Reference Intakes provided by the National Academy of Sciences .

If I scroll down to the Macronutrients page I see that for me, a 49-year-old female, I need about 46 grams of protein per day.

Cool. But what does that mean? Taking the list above for example, I’d have:

(These numbers are taken from the list from UC Davis and the USDA National Nutrient Database.)

So it’s not a particularly hard task to get enough protein – another 1-2 grams for some juice plus 6 for an egg at breakfast, some peaches and cottage cheese (up to 28g for a cup), and I’m good for the day.

What’s your favorite protein source?