Joe Bob

The ruminant family, and the one job each of them does that nothing else on earth can. The cow turns a wet hillside into beef and milk, and leaves the soil better than she found it. The sheep grows a fireproof, waterproof, compostable coat every year, out of grass and rain, and then gives it away for the price of a haircut. The goat eats the bramble, the scrub and the invasive weed that strangles everything else, and asks only for a weak point in the fence. The water buffalo makes the milk that becomes real mozzarella, standing in marsh a cow would sink in. The yak gives milk at an altitude that would kill a lowland animal in a week, and carries your bags up there as well. The reindeer feeds and clothes entire peoples above the Arctic Circle, on lichen and moss, in the dark, for months. The bison built the deepest soil on the planet by walking across it and eating. Seven animals, one gift each, and not one of them can be replaced by a crop, a machine or a sachet. Every one of them is classed, this decade, as a liability on a spreadsheet by somebody who has never been cold.

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.