Cecile - Metabolic Multiplier

People ask me why I'm so passionate about cattle, and I walk away every time thinking I let her down. Take the trick nobody else on this planet can do. A cow walks onto a hillside that will never grow a crop, a slope too steep, too wet, too thin, too rocky, the sort of ground that breaks a plough and bankrupts anybody who tries it, and she eats the only thing living up there. Grass. A substance from which no human being has ever extracted a single calorie. Then she stands out in the rain and turns it into steak. She is doing the impossible half of agriculture, on land nobody else wants, in weather nobody else will work in, for nothing. The machinery is properly deranged. Four chambers, the first a fermentation vat holding tens of gallons at a steady temperature, running a microbial population she farms inside her own body and feeds by hand. She sends the food back up and chews it again for eight hours a day, producing well over a hundred litres of saliva in the process, which is more fluid than most people drink in three months, entirely to keep the bugs comfortable. She is a brewery with legs, and she is also the brewer. Those bugs make B12 out of cobalt and grass. She grows her own vitamins in her own stomach. No plant makes it, no human can make it, and every vegan alive is buying in a tablet what she produces for free, standing up, in a wet field, while thinking about nothing. Then she gives the lot away. Milk, a complete food that arrives warm. Butter and cheese, which is milk built to survive a winter. Beef, carrying the heme iron and the zinc and the retinol and the creatine in exactly the proportions you need, because the assembly was done by an animal built along the same lines as you. Tallow for the pan. Leather for your boots. And dung, which grows next year's grass, so the fertiliser plant sits on the same site as the meat operation and nobody drives anything anywhere. Sunlight and rain in one end. The finest food available to a human being out of the other. On ground that grows nothing else. Using an engine that laboratories have spent a fortune failing to copy, in a warehouse, on a grant, with a press release. For this she has been declared an environmental problem by people who have eaten her their entire lives and could not tell you what a rumen is. I have never met a cow that was underperforming. I have met a great many committees. Get her on your plate and be grateful.