Or, how the supplement industry took meat garbage and turned it into a 9-billion-dollar business.
So then, why, why, why is everyone so amped on collagen? Because it’s cheap. It’s literally akin to a waste product, the last thing left over after all the other value has been extracted from animals. It is, in effect, meat garbage. It’s like a wood shop selling the sawdust off of its floor. There is a lot of it, just as a fact of how the rest of the protein production machine goes. It’s so cheap to get and make that a lot of money can be spent dressing it up like a fancy self-care moment, a bone broth or an expensive-looking gel, and putting it in the hands of very famous celebrities, and the seller still comes out ahead. (It’s precisely the fact that it requires so much song and dance to sell that should tip us off to what garbage it is.) I'm guessing that it's the magic triangle of "collagen is present in bodies/we lose it as we grow older/we are desperate not to age" that keeps collagen, well, vibrant in the market. The global collagen market is 9.12 billion dollars, and by god, is it growing.
