Tho I must admit that I would never get that close to the surface with my bare hands while doing this.
Yes, you can. Lettuce has around 2 gramm per 100. Apples 0.3
As comparison beef has 26.
So while lettuce has much less, saying you can’t get proteins from it is just plain wrong.
There are different kinds of proteins build from different amino acids, 9 of 20 amino acids are essential, meaning our bodies can not produce them, so we need to eat them. Meat contains all the amino acids we need in our bodies in the amount we need in our bodies. For vegetables that’s not necessarily the case.
Because of that vegetable protein needs to be very varied and balanced to be a complete diet, and just lettuce and apples is not enough.
In a first world country we can get these vegetable proteins varied and year round with little to no problem, which makes vegan diet a sustainable and morally superior diet.
In the developing world people are generally happy about being able to have a complete diet, moral questions take a backseat to survival and health, so carnivorous or piscivorous diets are far more common.
Pretty sure everyone else understood the meaning behind the sentence ‘you can get protein from lettuce and apples’. You need a certain amount of daily protein intake for a healthy diet and the comment implied you can get those from lettuce and apples. It is technically kinda true if you take it literally, but eating 5kg of lettuce is not practical.
Both lettuce and apples are incomplete sources of protein and could not sustain a healthy diet.
Fish is a complete source of protein.
