Conde Crápula

Eat a mouthful of grass and you get nothing. It goes in green and comes out green, with a slightly sore jaw for your trouble. Eat straw and you get nothing. Your gut cannot touch cellulose, and it will tell you so for two days. Eat acorns and you get tannins, a bitter mouth and a very long afternoon. Eat bracken and you get a carcinogen with a view. Eat nettles, thistles, gorse, rushes and heather and you get a mouth full of blood and not one calorie. Eat the beet pulp, the oat husks and the spent brewer's grain and you get the sweepings the factory could not sell to a human at any price. Now put the whole hillside in front of a cow. She turns every one of them into steak, butter, cream, milk and a leather coat, on ground that will never grow a lettuce, using four stomachs and a fermentation vat you were not issued. The grass she eats grew on rain and sunlight, for free, on a slope nobody can plough, and she walks up it herself. She is the only creature on earth that can take a field of inedible fibre and hand you back the most nutrient-dense food there is, and she does it while being told she is the problem. She is eating the 90% of the planet's plants that you cannot. Nobody at the table was going to touch them. Best plant-based diet ever invented. It just has a cow in the middle doing the chewing.