Meat

Constipation on carnivore means you've gone lean, and the cure is the thing the diet was supposed to be built on in the first place. Meat is almost entirely absorbed. There's very little left over to pass, so a carnivore going once a day or once every two days, comfortably, isn't constipated. That's what happens when food stops being mostly packaging. The bran that used to bulk everything out was never doing you a favour; it was a cargo you paid to carry through. The actual complaint, hard, dry, an effort, is a different thing, and it has one cause. Fat. Fat is what moves the gut. A fatty meal tells the gallbladder to empty, bile goes in, and bile is the body's own laxative, which is why a pound of lean steak sits like a brick and the same steak with the cap on and a knob of butter melting over it goes through like it was expected. Lean mince, chicken breast, egg whites and a tin of tuna is a plate with the plumbing turned off, and the person eating it blames the meat. So the fix is never fibre and never a sachet. It's the butter you were told to leave off, the 20% instead of the 5%, cream in the coffee, the fat cap eaten first. Within a day or two the problem has gone, and it stays gone as long as the plate shines. Which is the point. A diet of meat only works when the fat is on it. Take the fat off and you have a bodybuilder's cut with worse manners, and the gut is the first thing to file a complaint. Carnivore is high fat by definition. The bathroom is where people find that out.

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.