Every summer a patch of the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey goes dead, the fish and shrimp leave or suffocate, and the thing that killed it is the fertiliser running off the corn and soy fields of the Midwest that grow the protein on the plant-based label. The Mississippi drains forty percent of the United States, and most of that is cropland: a hundred and eighty million acres of corn and soybeans, fed every spring with nitrogen and phosphorus from the bag because the soil under a monoculture has nothing of its own left to give. The rain takes it. It runs off the fields into the ditches, the ditches into the rivers, the rivers into the Gulf, and in the warm shallow water off Louisiana it does what fertiliser does: it grows a bloom of algae that dies, sinks and rots, and the rotting takes the oxygen out of the water from the bottom up. By July there is a layer along the seabed where nothing with gills can live. Six, seven, eight thousand square miles of it. The shrimp boats steam further out every year to find water that is breathing. It has been measured every summer since 1985 and has never been fixed, because fixing it means putting less on the fields, and the fields are the economy. The plant-based industry's inputs are grown in exactly that basin: the soy for the burger, the pea for the milk, the corn for the syrup and the oil. A cow on grass puts her fertiliser straight back on the field she took it from, in a form the soil holds, and the water off a pasture runs clear. The dead zone has never once been traced to a hill farm. The shrimp that were there are the animal protein nobody put on the ledger. The soybeans are what replaced them.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr's own campaign veterans say the administration he serves has broken more than 85% of its health promises, and the weedkiller tops their list. The scorecard came out on 8 October, drawn up by people from Kennedy's 2024 campaign, including the activist known as Glyphosate Girl. It charges the administration with breaking "more than 85% of the commitments" the movement made on food, farming and environmental health, from mercury emissions to the limits on forever chemicals in drinking water. Top of the charge sheet: new pesticide approvals, and a presidential executive order to boost the domestic supply of glyphosate, the weedkiller sprayed on wheat and oats before harvest to dry them out for the combine. The White House says the administration "has already secured extensive victories for the MAHA Agenda". A consumer campaigner at the Center for Science in the Public Interest put it more vividly: "What started out as a hairline crack in the coalition is now widened to be a gaping fissure." A week later the Health Secretary's cookery series, the Real Food Show, had Lou Ferrigno on as a guest, with recipes under $5 a serving where possible. The Incredible Hulk is helping America cook, and the oats are being sprayed either way. Monsanto has seen this film before. In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that put DDT and the spray-everything farm on trial. The New Yorker serialised it that summer, and CBS gave her an hour of television the following spring. Before it was out, Velsicol, the maker of chlordane, threatened to sue her publisher. The industry's spokesmen called her "a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature". Time called the book "hysterically overemphatic". And Monsanto printed "The Desolate Year" in its company magazine, a parody of her opening chapter in which America stops spraying and the insects take the country. The President's own science advisers backed her the following year. She died in 1964, of a heart attack, with the breast cancer she had fought all the way through the writing of the book. The EPA banned DDT in 1972. Monsanto launched glyphosate as Roundup two years later, and Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018. The script from 1962 still works on every politician who promises to cut the spraying: describe the world without it as a famine, and the promise turns into a concern for the harvest. The weedkiller now has a federal order to make more of it, and the Incredible Hulk is doing the cookery.

People ask me why I'm so obsessed with ruminants. I've given it some thought, and my conclusion is that I'm not obsessed enough. A cow walks onto a wet hillside that grows nothing a human can eat, puts her head down, and comes back with steak, butter, cream and a pair of boots. She does it with a 150 litre fermentation tank she carries inside her, stocked with more bacteria than there have ever been people, which she feeds, waters and keeps at blood heat herself. Grass goes in. The bacteria take apart the one thing no animal can digest, and she lives on what they make. Then she digests the bacteria as well. Nothing is wasted. Even the fat comes out the far side rebuilt into something stable enough to fry in. Fuel: rain and sunlight. Emissions: next year's grass. She repairs herself, builds her own replacement every spring, and improves the ground she is standing on while she works. The finest engineers alive have spent billions trying to copy one chamber of her stomach in a steel shed, and so far they have made a paste. We have leaned on that machine for everything. The word capital comes from cattle, because a herd was the first bank. Domesday Book is written on sheep, and so was every deed in England for 500 years. Ruminants clothed our armies, lit our houses and carried our laws. Civilisation is a thing that happened to people who kept them. And they are such good company about it. A sheep remembers fifty faces for two years, which is forty-six more than I manage. A cow has a best friend, and her heart rate drops when that friend is beside her. A goat that cannot solve a problem will turn and look to you for help, as a dog does, and then ignore your advice. Let a herd out onto spring grass after a winter indoors and half a tonne of animal will skip. They ask for grass, rain, and to be left to get on with it. After ten thousand years of feeding, dressing and housing us, they will still walk over to the gate to see who you are. So no, I will not be calming down.