Customer: "No veal, thanks. I know what happens to the calves." Butcher: "So do I. Which bit do you know?" Customer: "Crates. Taken off the mother, kept in the dark, can't turn round." Butcher: "Banned here in 1990. This one had straw, a shed, and other calves to annoy for eight months. Rose veal, we call it. Pink, not white." Customer: "It's still a baby cow." Butcher: "It's a dairy bull calf. Where do you think they went before people bought veal?" Customer: "Reared for beef?" Butcher: "A Holstein bull doesn't make beef worth the feed. For years the answer was a bolt in the head at a day old. Tens of thousands a year, in this country, shot in the pen because nobody would eat them. The industry only promised to stop that a couple of years ago." Customer: "That's horrific." Butcher: "That's the price of a latte. Every pint of milk needs a cow in calf every year, and half the calves are boys." Customer: "So eating the veal..." Butcher: "Gives him eight months in a shed instead of eight minutes. The customer who won't touch veal and buys a flat white has made a choice. She just didn't get told what it was." Customer: "I'll take a kilo." Butcher: "Good. And the next person who tells you veal is cruel, ask them what they take in their coffee."

What the label on a wool jumper would say if labels told the truth: - Grown on a hill nothing else can use. - Raw material: grass and rain. - Factory: a sheep. - Energy source: sunlight, via the grass. - Carbon: pulled from the air the summer it was grown. - Harvest: a haircut the animal needs anyway. - Warm wet, warm dry, warm in wind. - Will not sustain a flame in the air you breathe. - Takes a third of its weight in water and feels dry. - Worn for four days without smelling, because bacteria cannot get a grip on it. - Wears for thirty years, darns, passes down. - End of life: rots back into the soil within months, and the worms eat it. What the label on a fleece jacket would say: - Grown in a refinery. - Raw material: crude oil. - Factory: a factory. - Energy source: more crude oil. - Carbon: pulled from under the ground, where it had been for 300 million years. - Melts at 250 degrees and sticks to skin. - Smells after one wear and is washed after every wear. - Sheds 700,000 plastic fibres per wash into the sea. - Found in human blood, lungs, placenta and brain. - End of life: a hole in Chile, for the next thousand years. One of these two is in the sustainability section. It is the one with the oil in it, and the sheep is still being blamed.

You have a gallbladder because your ancestors ate fat, and the advice on the ward after they remove it is to eat less of it. A horse has no gallbladder. It grazes all day and never meets a fat meal. A rat has no gallbladder. A deer has no gallbladder. A pigeon has no gallbladder. A dog has one. A cat has one. A wolf has one. A human has one. A gallbladder is a storage tank for bile, concentrated up to ten times, held ready for a meal big enough in fat to need it all at once. Eat fat and the gallbladder squeezes, the bile floods the gut, and the fat and its vitamins get through. Eat no fat and the gallbladder sits full and never empties. Bile that sits goes still, and bile that goes still sets into stones. A low-fat diet is the standard advice for gallstones, and a low-fat diet is on the list of things that cause them. The NHS removes around 70,000 gallbladders a year, the commonest planned operation it does, and sends the patient home with a diet sheet that says avoid fat. The organ was built for the fat. It stopped working when the fat stopped coming. A horse does not need one. You were not built like a horse, whatever the plate says.

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.

This week a council approved a solar farm on two hundred and thirty-five acres of grazing, and the family who had run cattle on it for generations said it would probably finish them. The panels will be there for forty years. The cattle were there for four hundred. The land is not the developer's. It belongs to an estate or a pension fund, and the developer offers a rent per acre no cow has ever earned. The farmer gets a letter. The council, told to triple solar by a minister who has never kept a beast, finds that the loss of a herd is not a planning consideration. So the field goes under glass. In Britain a solar array produces for about one hour in nine. It makes most in June at noon, when the country needs it least, and nothing on a January evening, when it needs it most, so a gas station is kept idling behind every one. The panels are made in China from polysilicon out of a province the government will not name. They lose output every year they stand there, and at the end there is no plan and no bond for taking them away. A quarter of a million square metres of glass, aluminium and copper cable, in a field, with a thirty-year lease and a company that will not exist when it ends. Under the panels the grass dies for want of light, the soil compacts under the plant, and the hedges go because the fence has to be electric and the fence has to be straight. The sheep in the brochure are for the photograph. The cattle were a solar panel already. Grass takes the light, the cow converts it, and the output is beef, every day of the year, on no cable, no subsidy and no inverter, for as long as there is rain. They have replaced a power station that makes dinner with one that works on a sunny afternoon and sits dead the rest of the time, and the family who ran the first one are being evicted to make room for the second.

For 60 years the blue tits of Britain broke into the milk on your doorstep, and all they ever took was the cream. It was first seen in Swaythling, near Southampton, in 1921. A blue tit landed on a bottle, pecked through the cap and drank. By the 1950s every tit in the country seemed to know the trick. Housewives put out saucers, stones and upturned cups. The birds learned to follow the milk float down the street and be waiting at the next step. You will remember the bottle. Silver foil on top, and beneath it 2 inches of thick yellow cream that had risen overnight, with the white milk underneath. The first one down in the morning got it on the porridge. That cream was the whole point of the burglary. A bird cannot digest milk. It has no means of handling the sugar in it. Cream is nearly all fat, with very little sugar, so the tits drank down to the line and stopped. A wild animal weighing 11 grams, with every bird table and berry bush in the street to choose from, worked out how to open a sealed container to get at butterfat. Then the habit died, in about 10 years. Nobody trapped them or changed the caps. The milk changed. It was homogenised so the cream no longer rose, then skimmed so it was hardly there, then moved to a plastic jug in a supermarket. The blue tits inspected the red top, found nothing in it worth stealing, and went back to the hedge. They were the last creatures in Britain to judge a pint of milk on what was actually in it.

Here is what the animals in the meat aisle actually ate. The chicken: soy, corn, wheat and a vegetable oil pellet, every day of its 42 days, in a shed. Its fat is over 20% seed oil. It is sold with the word healthy. The pig: soy, barley and wheat, from weaning, in a shed. Its fat is 15 to 20% seed oil. Sold as the other white meat. The salmon: a pellet of wheat, soy and rapeseed oil, in a cage. Its omega-3 is half what it was in 1990. The British cow: grass, from birth, outdoors, for 18 to 20 months. Silage, which is grass, for the winter. Barley for the last 90 days to finish. Her fat is 3 to 4% seed oil, because the rumen refuses the rest. The sheep: grass, heather and whatever the hill gives, from birth to the lorry, and often not a grain in its life. Only two animals on that list spent their lives eating what their bodies were built for, and only two have a stomach that turns whatever they ate into clean fat. They are the two with the warning. Red meat. Limit to 70 grams. For your heart. The three that ate the seed oil, in a shed, are the three with the heart logo. Every farmer in Britain could have told the committee that. The committee has never met one.

You cannot govern a man with a herd. A herd walks. It cannot be fenced, counted, tithed or taxed, and the man behind it eats every day without asking anyone's permission. A field stays where it is, and so does the man in it. Every empire worked that out, and every empire did the same thing first. The Normans took the deer and the boar off the Saxon, made touching one a hanging matter, and left him pottage. The English took the cattle off the Irish, outlawed the herdsmen who drove them, and left them a root from the Andes. When the root failed, the cattle were still sailing out of Cork. The English took the cattle off the Highlander, put sheep on the glen, and left him oats, a potato and a passage to Nova Scotia. The Americans shot the bison from the trains, on purpose, because a colonel had said that every buffalo dead was an Indian gone, and left the Plains flour, sugar and lard by the sack. The Americans burned the Navajo's sheep and peach orchards in 1864, marched the people 300 miles, and fed them white flour and bacon fat. Frybread was invented out of that ration. The Soviets took the herds off the Kazakhs in 1930. A million and a half died inside three years, a third of the nation, and the survivors were handed a grain quota. The Soviets took the herds off the Mongols, the greatest horsemen who ever lived, and handed them a loaf and a collective. The Canadians shot the Inuit's sled dogs through the 1950s and 1960s, by the thousand, and the hunters who could no longer reach the seal moved into the settlement and ate from the store. The British took the range off the Maasai by treaty, cut the cattle count, and left maize meal. Every time, the animal first. Every time, the sack after. Every time, a people that had been tall, fed and impossible to govern became short, sick and on a register. Now it is the climate. Trees on the Welsh hill. A buyout for the Dutch dairy farmer. A tenth of the Irish dairy herd gone. Fourteen grams of red meat a day, says a committee, for the planet. The herd goes first. The sack comes after. In ten thousand years it has never once gone in the other order. The only new part is that this time you are being asked to hand the cow over yourself, and to feel good about it.