All I can think of is tofu and protein powders. Everything else, you have to eat a ton of carbs or fat to get to enough protein.
Also, look into how much protein is actually recommended per day to be realistic about how much carbs and fat on top is fine to eat. It's not like people eat meat/dairy without a serving of fat and carbs next to it, so it should be fine to get some extra fat and carbs from protein sources then rebalance elsewhere on the plate.
My understanding is if you eat enough calories with an okay diet without thinking about protein, you'll hit the recommended (non-athlete) amounts without trouble and will easily exceed them if you throw in a couple of high protein sources.
> You'd pretty much have to eat some kind of fermented soy product every day to get enough protein through semi-normal meals, which is workable I guess though very boring.
Althetes eat pretty weird and repetitively anyway, lots of chicken and protein shakes. TVP, seitan, tofu and tempeh are versatile, and there's plant based protein shakes too.
For the average person that doesn't lift somewhat regularly, I think this means you're disagreeing with the health professionals from Canada, UK, US and more here.
What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?
The horror
> What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?
60g (12% of a 2000 cal diet) is the low end of the recommended 10 to 35% protein intake by these organizations anyway. Low end is getting to barely preventing muscle wastage territory. Plenty of upsides and no downsides to taking more protein while plenty of downsides to not taking enough protein. Do your own googling I guess, not particularly interested in convincing you.
If you're a professional athlete trying to be vegan, then sure, you'll end up with a weird diet to meet those absurd protein needs, but omnivorous professional athletes tend to have weird diets too for the same reason.
Professional athletes that are actually vegan are 4 sigma outliers. For most normal humans it's not possible to even be a more-that-casual athlete in any competitive sport eating plants. Animal meats contain more than just protein including things like iodine, creatine, vitamin D, etc. A quick google brings up numerous studies on the nutritional deficiencies of the typical vegan diet you would need to rely on external supplementation for. Keto diets and other fad diets are also not great for the competitive athlete.
If you're vegan because you don't want to eat animals there's nothing wrong with it. When the vegans start pointing to the outliers as evidence "it can be done" it's just a deep cope to make everyone as miserable as them.
People approach veganism as "take out the meat", which leads to nutritional deficiencies. You can't do that, you basically have to reboot the way you eat. I tracked all my food for months when switching to learn what mix of foods gave me the nutrition I needed. Now it is habit and pretty easy. The only new thing I supplement with is vitamin B12 and a protein shake after workouts. (I did the protein shake before being vegan so no change there)
It isn't miserable at all, we love how we eat.
Where I live, in Europe, tofu and protein extracts are many times more expensive than meat, e.g. 5 times more expensive than chicken breast per their protein content (chicken breast is only twice more expensive than lentils, both having the same protein content).
Therefore neither tofu nor protein extracts are a rational choice for a vegan diet.
I have made countless experiments in the attempt of composing a vegan diet that would not make me gain weight very rapidly and which would also be no more expensive than a meat-based diet.
At the prices from here, I have found only a single solution. I make at home a special kind of bread that is highly enriched in protein, with up to 50% protein. This is made by washing away most of the starch from the dough, enriching the dough in gluten. While it is possible to extract almost pure gluten from wheat flour, the so-called "seitan", this requires more time and more water than I am willing to spend every day. For the protein-enriched bread that I make, about 5 minutes of dough washing are enough.
Fungal ovalbumin would be a good alternative for this process, but I doubt that we would see it at a decent price any time soon.