Liz Wriston

An egg is the best thing a chicken will ever do, and it still inherits the chicken's problem. A hen has one stomach and no filter, so whatever is in the feed is in the yolk. Feed her corn and soya in a shed and a large egg carries about a gram of linoleic acid. Let her scratch for grass and insects and it carries about half that. A tablespoon of sunflower oil carries nine. A portion of chips fried in it carries as much as ten eggs. So three eggs a day is not where your omega-6 is coming from, unless you fry them in the bottle. The pan was always a bigger problem than the hen. The yolk is the prize: choline, vitamins A, D and K2, DHA, and the cholesterol your body makes its hormones from. The white is the security system, built to stop bacteria reaching the yolk, and it is armed. It carries a protein that locks up biotin, another that blocks your digestive enzymes, and the second most common food allergen in children. Gym culture spent thirty years binning the prize and drinking the security system. Plenty of people who feel off on a meat diet, and blame the meat, turn out to be reacting to the egg white. So buy the pastured ones if it is easy, cook them in butter, and favour the yolk. And never let an egg sit in a steak's seat. It is the best thing in the bird aisle. The bird aisle is still the second division.

Humans are the only animal that drinks another animal's milk, says the person holding an oat flat white. Humans are the only animal that drinks another animal's milk. Ants have been milking aphids for millions of years, and gulls steal it straight off elephant seals. Humans are the only animal that soaks an oat, strains it, adds rapeseed oil and calls the result milk. Humans are the only animal that washes a seed in solvent to get the oil out. Humans are the only animal that chooses a diet it needs a vitamin tablet to survive. Humans are the only animal that ships an avocado 6,000 miles for breakfast. Humans are the only animal that reads the ingredients. Humans are the only animal that eats food with a mascot. Humans are the only animal that campaigns against its own food supply. Almost nothing people do with dinner is done by any other creature. Of everything on that list, milking a cow is the oldest by about eight thousand years, and the only one a calf would recognise. Natural is a strange hill to die on in a jacket made of oil.

Walk into hospital with coeliac disease and they take the bread away. Walk in with a peanut allergy and they take the peanuts away. Walk in with a liver damaged by alcohol and they take the alcohol away. Walk in with lungs damaged by cigarettes and they take the cigarettes away. Walk in with type 2 diabetes, a body that can no longer cope with sugar, and they bring you breakfast: cornflakes, orange juice, white toast and a little pot of jam. Then the insulin trolley, to push down the sugar the breakfast put up. Then a carton of juice by the bed, in case the insulin pushes it too far. Then a line in your notes: poorly controlled. This is the disease they diagnose by making you drink 75 grams of glucose and watching your body fail to clear it. Every other patient on the ward is kept away from the thing that's hurting them. The diabetic gets it on a tray, three times a day, with a drug to clean up after it.

A lamb with a gut full of worms will walk past the good grass to eat a bitter plant that kills them, and the only place it ever learned which plant was at its mother's side. Researchers at Utah State University spent years watching this, because nobody believed it. They took lambs carrying a heavy load of stomach worms and offered them two feeds. Plain alfalfa, which a lamb loves. And alfalfa laced with tannins, the bitter, mouth-drying compound that makes stewed tea undrinkable and that happens to be hard on gut parasites. Healthy lambs barely touched the bitter one. Why would they. The wormy lambs started eating it. Then preferring it. They ate more of the medicine the sicker they were, and their worm counts fell. Then the researchers dosed them with a proper wormer, the parasites went, and the lambs went straight back to the plain feed. They took the medicine while they were ill and stopped when they were cured, which is more than can be said for most of the people in a pharmacy queue. The second part is the one that should keep a dietitian up at night. They put lambs on a heavy, bitter diet and offered them a compound that neutralises the bitterness. Lambs that fed alongside their mothers learned to take it. Lambs taken away from their mothers never touched it. Not once. The knowledge of what to eat when something is wrong was being handed down at the trough, ewe to lamb, by example, and a lamb without its mother simply never got the lesson. Shepherds have known a version of this for as long as there have been shepherds. The sick ewe that goes off on her own to the hedge bottom and eats something she ignores the rest of the year. The flock that heads for the rough corner of the field in a wet spring. Nobody wrote it down because it was obvious. In 1928 a doctor in Chicago let babies choose their own food from a tray, and the one with rickets drank cod liver oil until his bones healed and then stopped. It is the same experiment, with wool on. Meanwhile the human version of the lamb is handed a plate diagram, a list of recommended portions and a leaflet on overriding cravings, and told the instinct is the thing that needs managing. The lamb was never given a diagram. It had its mother, a hedge, and enough sense to stop taking the tablets when it was better.

The fruit in your bowl is a sugar bomb, bred to be eaten raw by the handful. For most of English history the fruit on the tree was hard, sour or bitter, and it needed a fire and a sugar loaf before anyone would call it food. The finest pear in medieval England, the warden, never softened. It went into wine or into saffron pies. The quince was a gritty, mouth-puckering lump until it had been boiled for hours with honey, and that paste was the first marmalade: the box of marmalade sent to Henry VIII in 1524 was almost certainly quince. The oranges Europe knew were bitter, squeezed over meat and fish like vinegar, and the sweet orange only arrived in the late 1400s. Much of the English apple crop went into the cider press or the pie. Rhubarb was a root you bought from the apothecary to purge your bowels, priced above opium, and nobody ate the stalks until sugar got cheap in the 1800s. So fruit was a raw material, and it was worked. Cooked, spiced, sweetened with honey or sugar that cost a fortune, fermented into drink, or boiled into a sharp sauce for the meat. The doctors, following Galen, warned against eating it raw at all. The French still call the gooseberry the mackerel berry, because its job was sauce for a fish. Then came the breeders. Belgium's melting butter pears in the 1700s. Cox's Orange Pippin around 1830. Navel oranges, seedless grapes, and apples engineered for crunch and sugar and sold under patent. In 1916 an advertising agency told Americans to drink an orange, and a glut of fruit became a daily glass of sugar. The sweetness medieval cooks paid a fortune to add had been bred into the fruit itself. Five centuries ago fruit came by the spoonful beside the joint. Now it comes by the bowl, and the joint is the thing we are told to ration.