Sama Hoole

What the coach says will happen if you train without breakfast: - You'll be weak - You'll feel faint on the first set - Your body will eat your muscle - Your metabolism will slow down - Your blood sugar will crash - Your lifts will go backwards - You'll binge later What actually happens: - Yesterday's dinner is still sitting in your muscles as glycogen - Your liver tops up your blood sugar without being asked - Your body burns more fat for fuel - Growth hormone climbs while you haven't eaten - Your muscle stays exactly where it was overnight - The bar weighs what it always weighed - No mid-morning slump, because there was no cereal to slump from - You eat afterwards, properly hungry, and the steak tastes better than it has any right to Generations of farm workers did the milking, mucked out and walked the stock before they sat down to eat, and nobody called it a protocol. The only thing that crashes when you skip breakfast is the cereal aisle.

Children with type 1 diabetes are taught to eat carbohydrate and cover it with insulin, and the families who quietly stopped feeding them carbohydrate got blood sugar their own doctors called almost too good to be true. In type 1 the pancreas stops making insulin, usually in childhood, and never starts again. The standard advice is to eat normally, count the carbohydrate, and inject insulin to match. Only about one child in five hits the blood sugar target meant to protect them from blindness, kidney failure and amputation. In 2018 Harvard researchers surveyed 316 people who had done something else. Children and adults with type 1, eating about 36 grams of carbohydrate a day, and meat, eggs, fish, fat and green vegetables for the rest. 131 of them were parents answering for their children. Their average HbA1c was 5.67%, the range of someone without diabetes at all. Almost all of them hit their target. They needed far less insulin. Diabetes hospital admissions in the past year: 2%. The lead author said their control seemed almost too good to be true, and nothing she usually saw in a type 1 clinic. Before insulin existed, children with type 1 were kept alive for years on severe carbohydrate restriction. Many children's diabetes clinics still warn families off it. The parents found it in a Facebook group, because the clinic was still handing out the carbohydrate chart.

Waving a flag at British culture is not the same as having any, so here is what the flag is supposed to be standing in front of. It is five in the morning on a fell above Buttermere, sleet going sideways, and a Herdwick standing in it looking mildly inconvenienced. Her breed has been on that hill since the Norse landed. The weather has never once won. It is a shepherd behind her with a crook and a collie, counting yan, tan, tethera in a language the Romans heard, and not stopping to explain it to you. It is a drove road through the Welsh borders, worn a foot below the fields on either side by four hundred years of cattle walking to London, and mud in October that still has an opinion about your boots. It is a dry stone wall with nothing holding it up but a dead man's judgement, keeping sheep in on a slope you would struggle to stand on. It is a hedge laid by hand, a hay meadow cut late for the flowers, and a village with a livestock mart in the middle and a pub called the Shoulder of Mutton beside it. It is leaning on a gate waving at a field of Herefords who do not wave back, and the silence afterwards, which is the real national anthem. It is a farmer who answers "how are you" with "not bad", a vet who has been up since three and will not mention it, and a woman doing the books, the calving and the WI cake in the same afternoon. It is complaining about the weather while standing in it on purpose. It is a Cornish pasty out of the paper on a harbour wall, pastry thick enough for a miner's hands, gravy down your wrist, a herring gull watching with intent. The crust was for throwing away. The gull knows that too. It is a Yorkshire pudding that rose because the dripping was spitting when the batter hit it, and the Sunday beef behind it with a crust of fat, the potatoes roasted in what fell off. It is mutton, slow, dark and tasting of heather, the meat that fed this island for five hundred years, and a butcher who has to go out the back to find you some. It is a pork pie eaten cold on a train with a flask of tea, and the man opposite pretending not to be jealous. It is a pint of full-fat milk on a doorstep before six, cream in the neck, and a blue tit who got there first. It is a wool church in a Suffolk village of ninety people, big enough to seat a thousand, because the fleeces paid for it. Every bit of it was made by a farmer and an animal, outdoors, in the rain, slowly, over a thousand years. And every bit of it is being taxed, rewilded, rebranded and Deliveroo'd into a museum while the flag goes up another lamppost. You cannot wave a culture. You eat it, wear it, walk it, and keep the people who make it on the land. The rest is bunting. Buy the mutton. Then wave whatever you like.

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring with breast cancer eating through her, hid it from everyone but her closest friends so the chemical industry could not use it against the book, and testified to the Senate in a wig because the radiation had taken her hair. She was a government biologist who wrote pamphlets about fish for the Fish and Wildlife Service and sat up at night writing about the sea. Her first book came out a few weeks before Pearl Harbor and sold almost nothing. Her second, in 1951, sat on the bestseller list for 86 weeks and bought her out of the civil service. She never married. She buried her father, her sister and then her mother, and at 50 she adopted her orphaned great-nephew, Roger, aged five, and raised him alone. In 1958 a friend wrote to her about the birds dropping dead in her garden after the mosquito spraying. Carson had been collecting the evidence on DDT since 1945, when the magazines turned her down. She started the book that winter. In the spring of 1960, with the manuscript half written, the surgeon took her left breast off and told her it was benign. It was not. The tumour had spread, and she found out months later, from another doctor, that the first one had decided not to tell her. She wrote the rest of Silent Spring between radiation sessions, through nausea and a crumbling spine, with her hair falling out and an arthritic grip on the pen, and she told almost nobody. If the industry learned the author had cancer, the book would be read as a dying woman's grievance rather than a case. The book came out in September 1962. The industry spent an estimated quarter of a million dollars answering it. Velsicol, which made two of the pesticides she named, wrote to her publisher threatening to sue and suggesting sinister influences wanted American farming reduced to Soviet levels. Monsanto printed a parody called The Desolate Year, in which the insects inherit the earth, and sent out 5,000 copies. A former Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, was reported to have asked why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics, and to have concluded she was probably a communist. In April 1963 she went on CBS to face the industry's man, Robert White-Stevens of American Cyanamid, who told 10 million viewers that if mankind followed Miss Carson it would return to the Dark Ages. Two of the programme's sponsors had pulled out. Carson, upright in a wig, quietly took him apart. A month later President Kennedy's own science advisers reported that she had been right. In June she sat before a Senate committee, barely able to walk to the chair, and the chairman greeted her with the line Lincoln is supposed to have given Harriet Beecher Stowe. "Miss Carson, you are the lady who started all this." She died on 14 April 1964, aged 56, of the cancer she had hidden for four years so that it could not be used to discredit her work. America banned DDT in 1972. In 2015 the daughters of the women sprayed in her lifetime turned out to carry 3.7 times the breast cancer risk when their mothers had carried the most DDT. Rachel Carson spent her last four years proving the chemical killed birds, and died of the disease it would later be found to have passed down through the daughters of the women who stood in the fog. The industry called her hysterical. She never once mentioned her own body in the argument. She did not need to.

The year is 1746. You live in the Highlands, weeks after Culloden. The redcoats burn your house and drive the cattle of the glen down to Fort Augustus, 2,000 at a time, where dealers up from Yorkshire buy them by the lump. You walk to the camp to beg for one cow back for the children and are turned away at the gate. The old die of hunger on the bare hillside while the Duke of Cumberland holds horse races on the flat ground below. The year is 1847. You live in Ireland, a country that lived off its cattle until conquest handed the herds to the landlords and left you an acre of potatoes. The potatoes have rotted black in the ground. The ships leaving for England are loaded to the rails with cattle, pigs and butter, and your neighbours are found dead in the ditches with their mouths stained green from eating grass. A million die. The man running relief from the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, writes that the famine will bring about a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation. He is knighted for his work. The year is 1905. You are Herero, in what is now Namibia, a people whose whole life is cattle. The German general has ordered every Herero shot, with or without cattle, and the rest driven into the desert to die of thirst. In the camp at Swakopmund the women are made to boil the heads of the dead and scrape them clean with shards of glass, for shipping to universities in Germany. Four Herero in five die. The survivors are forbidden by law to own a cow. The year is 1932. You are Kazakh. The Party has taken your herds and sent them to feed Moscow and Leningrad, and the bodies along the roads are stacked like firewood. You pull a sled across the steppe with your dead child on it, and if you run for China the border guards shoot you. Four Kazakhs in ten die, and the ones left become a minority in their own country. The year is 2026. You milk cows in County Cork, where the cattle sailed for England while your great-great-grandparents chewed grass in the ditch, and your own government has modelled culling nearly 200,000 dairy cows to meet a climate target. Take a people's animals and hunger does the rest. The redcoats knew it. The Treasury knew it. The general and the Party knew it. Ireland learned it in a ditch with grass in its mouth, and is now drawing up the list itself.

Doctor: "Your HbA1c is still climbing on the metformin and the gliclazide. It's time to start insulin." Patient: "What's actually wrong with me?" Doctor: "Type 2 diabetes. Your cells don't respond to insulin properly, so the sugar stays in the blood." Patient: "They don't respond to insulin." Doctor: "Correct." Patient: "And you're giving me insulin." Doctor: "More of it, to push past the resistance." Patient: "If my key stops turning in the lock, do you cut me a bigger key?" Doctor: "The analogy isn't perfect. Insulin still moves glucose out of the blood." Patient: "Into where?" Doctor: "Muscle, liver. And fat tissue." Patient: "So it makes me fatter." Doctor: "Weight gain is a common side effect, yes." Patient: "Does fat make the resistance better or worse?" Doctor: "Worse." Patient: "So next year?" Doctor: "We'd adjust the dose." Patient: "Up." Doctor: "Typically." Patient: "My brother-in-law started on twenty units. He's on ninety and he's four stone heavier." Doctor: "It's a progressive condition." Patient: "It's progressive because the treatment feeds it. What makes the blood sugar in the first place?" Doctor: "What you eat. Carbohydrate, mainly." Patient: "Then I'll stop putting it in rather than paying a man to shove it into my belly. Keep the pen. Write 'declined, cut the bread' and underline it."

Winston Churchill took time out in July 1940, with German invasion barges gathering across the Channel, to tell his own Ministry of Food that a vegetable diet would lose the war. On 14 July, three weeks after France fell, the Prime Minister wrote to Lord Woolton, the department store boss he had kept on as Minister of Food, about what the British were going to eat. He started on the meat ration. Then he turned to the experts. Almost every food faddist he had ever known, he wrote, the nut-eaters and their kind, had died young after a long period of senile decay. The British soldier was far more likely to be right than the scientists. "All he cares about is beef." Then the line that should be framed in every food ministry in the world. The surest way to lose the war, he told Woolton, was to push the British public onto a diet of milk, oatmeal and potatoes, washed down on special occasions with a little lime juice. He was writing to a ministry that was about to discover the cartoon vegetable. Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot would soon be selling roots to children from the hoardings, Dig for Victory was turning lawns and parks into allotments, and meat was rationed by price, so the less you could afford the less you got. The planners wanted bread and potatoes to carry the nation. Churchill wanted the nation to have its beef. He fought the small battles too. In 1941 the ministry proposed calling its new state canteens Communal Feeding Centres. He wrote back that it was an odious expression, suggestive of communism and the workhouse, and renamed them British Restaurants, because everybody associates the word restaurant with a good meal. A man who would stop in the middle of a world war to rescue the word restaurant had his priorities in exactly the right order. The ministry got its vegetable dinner in the end. That same year the kitchen of the Savoy produced the dish that carried the minister's name: a pastry lid over potatoes, cauliflower, swede and carrots, thickened with oatmeal. Woolton pie was pressed on the country as proof that a family could manage perfectly well without meat. It contained two of the three foods the Prime Minister had named as the way to lose the war, which suggests nobody at the ministry read his memo past the word beef. The pie is remembered most fondly by people who never had to eat it. Eighty-one years after that memo the vegetable plate came back, without a war to excuse it. In 2021 Henry Dimbleby, the restaurateur appointed to write Britain's National Food Strategy, asked the country to cut its meat consumption by 30% within ten years. Woolton pie recipes now circulate as the sustainable option, the meatless plate has become the policy, and it is the beef that has to justify itself. The man who actually had to win the war, with the U-boats sinking the convoys and the Luftwaffe over the Channel, looked at the evidence and concluded that a nation fed on oats and potatoes would lose its nerve before it lost a battle. With the invasion barges in sight, the Prime Minister put in writing that oatmeal and potatoes were the surest way to lose a war. They are now sold as the surest way to save the planet.

Meat and animal fat stand accused of killing some of the most famous people of the last few centuries, and every one of them was up to something far more dangerous at the time. Henry VIII was killed by roast meat, according to every television historian. He also had a jousting wound that festered for a decade, a court that ate sugar moulded into castles, and legs that could no longer carry him. Dead at 55. The verdict went to the venison. Eisenhower was killed by saturated fat, according to his own cardiologist, who briefed the nation on cholesterol after the President's heart attack in 1955. Ike had smoked four packs a day for decades and run a world war. He went home to melba toast and margarine, and had several more heart attacks on it. Mama Cass was killed by a ham sandwich, according to the papers in 1974. She had been crash dieting for years. The pathologist found heart failure and no food in her windpipe at all. The sandwich kept the headline. Elvis was killed by fried peanut butter and bacon, according to every documentary since. His doctor had prescribed him more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics in the last eight months of his life. Must have been the bacon. Dr Atkins was killed by his own diet, according to the medical records a vegan doctors' lobby slipped to the Wall Street Journal. He had slipped on ice, cracked his head, and spent nine days in a coma swelling with fluid. The heart condition, his doctors said, came from a virus. Five deaths, five meat verdicts, and in every file a real cause the headline had no use for. The evening news Eisenhower watched in 1955 was called the Camel News Caravan. The cow was never in a position to sponsor anything.

You were born at the top of the food chain, and you have climbed down two floors to graze with the sheep. At the bottom, the grass, turning sunlight into cellulose that only a microbe can open. Above it, the grazers. Cows, sheep, goats and deer, with the stomachs and the bacteria to turn that grass into flesh and fat. Above them, the animals that eat the grazers. Wolves, lions, eagles, and for two million years, you. The grazer is the middleman, and the best one nature ever built. It takes a field you cannot digest, puts two years of work into it, and hands you the B12, the haem iron, the complete protein and the fat, finished and ready to absorb. That was your cut. Then somebody told you it was more virtuous to sack the middleman and eat the raw materials yourself. So now you are in the field beside the sheep, with none of her equipment, chewing a leaf and hungry again by eleven. The sheep is embarrassed for you. She has four stomachs and she still finds this hard. Not one apex predator on earth lives on grass. Except one, and it buys a bag of spinach and a tub of iron tablets in the same shop. Climb back up. Take your seat. Eat the thing that ate the grass.

A diet that stopped children's seizures was found at the Mayo Clinic in 1921, and it took the director of Airplane! to drag it back out of the textbook seventy years later. Doctors had noticed for centuries that fasting quietened epilepsy. Russell Wilder at the Mayo Clinic worked out why. A body without food runs on ketones, made from fat. So he built a diet that kept the body there while still feeding it. Mostly fat, some protein, almost no carbohydrate. He called it the ketogenic diet, and for years it was a standard treatment for children with epilepsy. Then the anti-seizure drugs arrived, and the diet was quietly dropped. It took work to run and nobody sold it. 1993. Jim Abrahams, who made Airplane!, has a baby son called Charlie having seizures every day. The drugs fail one after another. Abrahams finds the diet in a library book and gets Charlie to Johns Hopkins, one of the few hospitals still using it. Within days the seizures stop. Abrahams set up a foundation, made a film about it starring Meryl Streep, and spent the rest of his life asking why nobody had told him. In 2008 a trial in London finally tested it on children whose epilepsy no drug could control. Four in ten on the diet had their seizures cut by more than half. On usual care, six in a hundred. A plate of fat beat the pharmacy on the hardest cases in children's medicine. It is still offered only after at least two drugs have failed.

For a thousand years Inuit children were raised on everything the guidelines tell parents to limit, and tooth decay was almost unknown among them until 1950. Nothing grows on the sea ice. There were no greens to finish and nobody to bribe. When the fish came in, the heads and tails went to the children. At a seal kill they crowded in for the liver, eaten raw and still warm. They chewed frozen fish shaved thin, chewed muktuk with the blubber still on, and cracked caribou bones for the marrow. After a good hunt the whole camp ate until it could not move, children included. Explorers watched them gnaw a whole fish the way an American eats corn on the cob. No fruit. No grains. No juice. And no scurvy, because the vitamin C was in the raw liver. Stefansson lived among them for years and reported that their teeth were perfect wherever they had not learned to eat like white men. Then the store arrived and the plate began to look like the guidelines. Bread, crackers, cereal and juice, with sugar and seed oil riding along. 85% of Inuit children in Nunavut aged three to five now have tooth decay. They go under general anaesthetic for it at nearly twelve times the rate of children in Ontario. The territory's only hospital gives a quarter of its operating theatre time to dental surgery, most of it on children. Some of the children still eat the old way, and in 2007 researchers measured what it does for them. Most of the 388 preschoolers surveyed met their needs for many nutrients without eating the servings in Canada's food guide. The more seal, caribou and fish a child ate, the more iron, zinc, vitamin A and vitamin D they got. Four in five of the biggest country food eaters met their vitamin D needs, against two in five of the children eating none. The best fed children in the Arctic were the ones eating furthest from the guide. The researchers' advice included more fruit and vegetables. Flown in by plane, at Arctic prices, to improve on the seal.

Every compound sold to you as the health benefit of a plant is a weapon the plant built to make an animal stop eating it. Broccoli keeps two chemicals in separate compartments and mixes them only when a leaf is bitten, releasing a mustard oil to drive the caterpillar off. It is sold as sulforaphane. The chilli makes capsaicin so a mammal's mouth burns and it leaves the fruit for the birds, who cannot feel it. It is sold as a metabolism booster. The coffee bush makes caffeine to paralyse the insects chewing its leaves. It is sold as an antioxidant. The grapevine makes resveratrol to fight off fungus. It was sold as the French secret and an anti-ageing pill, and the trials came back flat. The red kidney bean makes a lectin so potent that four or five raw beans will empty you from both ends. It is sold as fibre and protein. The potato makes solanine to poison whatever digs it up. In 1979 it made 78 schoolboys in south London ill. The clover makes oestrogen-like compounds, and in the 1940s grazing on it left whole flocks of Western Australian ewes unable to lamb. The same family of compounds is in your soya. The cassava root makes cyanide, and where it is eaten badly prepared, children are paralysed by a disease called konzo. It is sold as gluten-free flour. Every one of those plants is trying to get you to leave, and the health shop has bottled the eviction notice.

Mutton is the best red meat in Britain and it costs less than the lamb it raised. - Five years on a Welsh hill, not five months at a teat. - Grass, heather and rain. Never grain, never a shed. - The most saturated fat in the shop. Deep yellow, mostly stearic. - More iron, B12, zinc and creatine than the lamb she reared. - Omega-3 to omega-6 near one to one. Chicken sits at one to twenty. - The one meat that improves with age. The French pay extra for it. - Tastes of the mountain. Lamb tastes of the milk. - Fed Britain for five centuries. Dropped when nylon killed the wool cheque. Oldest animal in the shop, best life, most fat, most nutrition, best flavour, and nobody is bidding against you. Buy the ewe.

In 1928 a Chicago paediatrician let babies choose their own dinner from 34 foods, and for six years not one of them chose the way the pamphlet says. Clara Davis took fifteen infants just weaned, and put a tray in front of them at every meal. Beef, lamb, chicken, liver, kidney, brains, bone marrow, fish, eggs, milk, bananas, oats, carrots, peas, cabbage, salt. Nothing processed. No sugar. Nobody steered. The nurse held the spoon, the baby pointed. One boy ate seven eggs a day for a stretch. Another lived on bananas for a fortnight and then would not look at one. They chewed bone marrow. They drank the beef juice. They pushed the greens round the tray. One baby arrived with rickets. She put cod liver oil on the tray and left it there. He drank it, unprompted, until the rickets healed, and then never touched it again. Six years. Not one case of stomach trouble. Not one deficiency. Visitors said they had never seen healthier children. The doctors who examined them wrote it up as the wisdom of the body. Nobody had taught these children that the yolk was bad or the marrow was rich or the cabbage was the healthy part. Left alone with the food, a one-year-old built itself a diet heavy in the animal and ate the plants as a side when the mood took it. The experiment is almost a century old. The pamphlet is still telling his mother to start with the carrot.

Doctor: "Reflux. I'll put you on omeprazole and we'll review in a year." Patient: "What's the problem, too much acid?" Doctor: "Acid where it shouldn't be. The tablet switches most of it off." Patient: "Does stomach acid go up or down with age?" Doctor: "Down." Patient: "And reflux?" Doctor: "Up." Patient: "So the people with the least acid get the most reflux, and the cure is less acid." Doctor: "What's left still burns when it comes up." Patient: "What pushes it up?" Doctor: "Pressure. The valve gives way." Patient: "And what makes pressure in a stomach with no acid?" Doctor: "Food sitting." Patient: "Fermenting. Like a bin in August. You've switched off the thing that would've cleared it." Doctor: "It's well tolerated." Patient: "Long term?" Doctor: "Low B12, low magnesium, some fracture risk." Patient: "And when I stop after the year?" Doctor: "The acid can rebound. Most people restart." Patient: "So the tablet makes you need the tablet." Doctor: "It can be hard to come off." Patient: "This started when I went on the porridge and the brown bread. Does your plan take the bread out?" Doctor: "We don't advise removing food groups." Patient: "You've just removed an organ. Keep the pen. I'll bin the loaf."

Women have been handed the plant version of every nutrient for fifty years and then told the tiredness is just being a woman. Told to eat spinach for iron. Spinach iron absorbs at about 2%. The iron in a steak absorbs at up to 35%. Told to take flax for the omega-3. The body turns a few percent of it into the fat the brain actually uses. A mackerel arrives with it done. Told to swap the milk for oat. The milk was where the iodine was, and the thyroid runs on iodine. Told to get B12 from nutritional yeast. Yeast has none until a factory sprays it on. Told to get protein from tofu, which has half what a lamb chop carries and none of the fat to use it. Told to cut the yolk for the cholesterol. The yolk was the choline, and the choline was the baby's brain. Told to go low fat in 1985 and to count calories in 1995, and the hunger that followed got a diagnosis of its own. Three women in ten on earth are anaemic. The advice for all three has been a leaf. Every substitution on that list took the animal off her plate and handed her the deficiency, and then handed her a label for the deficiency. Hashimoto's. Fibromyalgia. Chronic fatigue. Low mood. Perimenopause, arriving at thirty-eight. She was never short of a plant. She was short of a cow. Fifty years of being told to eat like a rabbit, and the fatigue filed under hormones.

The pumpkins went out on the doorsteps along the lane on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning every one of them had been hollowed out from the back, and the candles had been left exactly where they were. Nobody saw it done. The Reverend's was first, by the evidence, because the Reverend's is nearest the churchyard and the churchyard gate is left open for him now. Then the two cottages. Then the shop, which had put four out, in a row, in descending order of size, and had them back in descending order of size with the faces still on and nothing whatsoever behind the faces. A pumpkin is a goat's idea of a reasonable Wednesday. It is a vegetable the size of a head with a hole already cut in it, and an Anglo-Nubian has a tongue and a neck and a complete lack of respect for the concept of a doorstep. He puts his face in through the cut side and takes the lot. What is left is the front. The lane, on Thursday morning, was a row of faces with nothing in them, like a parish council. Steve's had a lid. Steve's had been carved by Steve, with a template, over a Sunday, and sat on the step with a tea light in it and a lid on top, and Steve came down at seven to find the lid on the path, the candle standing on the step, upright, unlit, and the pumpkin gone to the rind. Steve has written. Steve's position is that the candle was moved, which it was, and that this constitutes entering the property, which, he concedes, it does not, because the step is the property's edge and the goat had plainly thought about that. Dave came round. Dave stood on the path and looked at the candle and said that at least he had not knocked it over. The children have been told it was foxes. The children have not believed this, because the children have met Keith, and one of them has said, at school, with total confidence, that the goat did the pumpkins and left the candles so nobody would get burnt, and that is now the version the village has agreed on, and the Reverend has repeated it from the pulpit. Keith is on the barn roof. There is a certain amount of orange on his beard, and he has eaten nothing since Thursday morning, on the grounds, Dave assumes, that he does not need to.

Pemmican was the first energy bar ever made, and nothing on the petrol station counter has come close to it since. What went into pemmican: - Dried meat, pounded to powder - Rendered fat, poured in hot - Held together by the fat, nothing else - About 3,000 calories a pound - Keeps for years without a fridge - Wrapped in the animal's own hide What goes into the one by the till: - Oats, puffed rice, soy protein isolate - Sunflower or rapeseed oil - Glued together with syrup, under 3 different names - About 1,800 calories a pound - Best before next spring - Wrapped in plastic that will outlive you It took 5 pounds of fresh meat to make 1 pound of the dried, and a whole bison to fill one bag. The drying took out the water, which is most of what an animal weighs, and the fat put back the part that does the work. In the Boer War the British Army issued it as the iron ration: 4 ounces of pemmican and 4 of chocolate in a tin, and a soldier could march for 36 hours on it before he started to drop. Peary took 30,000 pounds of it to the Pole and called it the most concentrated and satisfying of all meat foods. The word is Cree. Pimîhkân, from pimî, which means fat. The people who invented the energy bar named it after the energy.

In 1959 a study in California started freezing the blood of 20,000 pregnant women, and half a century later that freezer answered the question everyone is still arguing about: what DDT did to people. DDT was never hidden from you. It was the opposite. In June 1947 Pennsalt ran a full-page advert in Time with a chorus line of a housewife, an apple, a cow, a potato and a dog all singing DDT is good for me-e-e. You could buy it as wallpaper for the nursery, ready pasted, just dip in water and hang. You could buy a lampshade soaked in it, so the heat of the bulb spread it invisibly round the room. The adverts said to comb it through a child's hair for lice. The trucks fogged the streets and the children ran in the cloud. The man who found what it did to insects got a Nobel Prize in 1948. The line was that it was harmless to warm-blooded animals, and it was repeated with total confidence for 25 years. Plenty of people are still repeating it. In Oakland, from 1959 to 1967, the Child Health and Development Studies enrolled about 20,000 pregnant women, drew their blood, and put it in a freezer. Then it waited. It followed the babies, who grew up in the peak years of American DDT use, and it followed their babies. In 2015 the daughters were in their fifties, and 118 of them had breast cancer. The researchers went back to the freezer and measured the DDT in their mothers' blood from the week they were born. The daughters whose mothers carried the most were 3.7 times more likely to have the disease than those whose mothers carried the least. The thing was in them before they drew breath. In 2021 they went down another generation. 365 granddaughters, born long after the ban. The ones whose grandmothers carried the most DDT in pregnancy were fatter and had started their periods younger, both of which raise the risk of the cancer their mothers got. Half of the eggs that became those granddaughters were already inside the grandmother when the fog came down the street. A pregnant woman is three generations at once. Her, the baby, and the eggs in the baby. The spray truck got all three in one pass. Harmless to warm-blooded animals. The warm-blooded animals took 54 years to answer, and the answer is in a freezer in California with a name on every tube.

Henry Ford called the cow the crudest machine in the world, and when he built his own model town in the Amazon he fed the workers brown rice and oatmeal until they rioted and threw his managers out. In 1921 he told the papers his laboratories would take the cereals a cow eats and make a milk infinitely superior to the dirty product of those discredited animals. He meant it. He spent years on the soybean. Soy milk, soy plastics, a car with soybean panels, a suit woven partly from soy fibre. In 1928 he took a concession of about 10,000 square kilometres of the Brazilian Amazon to grow rubber for his tyres, and built a town from nothing. American bungalows, a hospital, a golf course, sprinklers on the lawns. He called it Fordlândia and ran it on his own ideas about how a man should live. No drink, no tobacco, managers inspecting the houses. And in the canteen, his food. Brown rice, wholewheat bread, oatmeal and tinned peaches, for men raised on river fish and manioc. In December 1930 the canteen changed the way it served the stuff, and the workers had had enough. They smashed the place, cut the telegraph wires and drove the American managers out, and the Brazilian army had to come and end it. The locals called it the Quebra-Panelas, the breaking of the pans. The rubber did no better. Ford's men planted the trees close together in rows, the way you plant a field, in a jungle where wild rubber trees grow far apart for good reason. Blight and insects ran down the rows and took the lot. Ford never once visited. In 1945 his grandson handed the land back to Brazil at a loss of over $20 million, and not one drop of latex from Fordlândia ever went into a Ford car. The man who called the cow the crudest machine in the world built a town on his own menu in the most fertile place on earth, and the first thing it produced was a riot.