Tom Scott

Vegans: "Oat milk is better for you and better for the planet." Great point. So instead of a cow turning grass into milk in a field down the road, we've developed a twelve-step industrial alternative. Step one: plough a field. Pasture is never ploughed; an oat field is turned over, sprayed and emptied of everything living in it every single year. Step two: spray the standing crop with glyphosate a fortnight before harvest so it dries on schedule. Step three: ship the oats from wherever the contract was cheapest this year, Scandinavia, Canada, the Baltic, to a factory that is almost never in the country drinking the result. Step four: mill the oats, stir them into water, and add enzymes to pre-digest the starch into sugar, which is why it tastes sweet and why a glass carries about 7g of carbohydrate and 1g of protein. Milk is the other way round. Step five: spin out the bran and fibre, which is most of the oat, and sell it as pig feed. Step six: look at what's left. 10% oat, 90% water, tastes of nothing. Step seven: pour in rapeseed oil, from a crushing plant, because the oat has no fat and the coffee needs something to foam. Step eight: add dipotassium phosphate so it doesn't curdle the moment it meets a hot drink. Step nine: add calcium carbonate from a quarry, potassium iodide from a mine, vitamin D2 grown on irradiated fungus, and B12 brewed in a bacterial vat, most likely in China. Four continents, to put back what the cow put in for free. Step ten: heat it to 140 degrees, homogenise it, and seal it in a six-layer carton of card, plastic and aluminium. Step eleven: load the cartons onto lorries and drive 90% water up and down the motorway network. Step twelve: print a picture of a field on the carton. Not the ploughed one. The cow: stands in a field that has never seen a plough, eats grass no human can digest, and makes milk that already contains the fat, the protein, the calcium, the iodine and the B12 in the proportions a mammal is built for. The herd is inside 30 miles of your fridge. The bottle came in a van. Better for the planet, though. Says so on the carton. Next to the field.

Four in ten of the salmon put into Scotland's sea cages in 2022 died before anyone could eat them, and the inspectors made two unannounced visits in three years. Scottish farmed salmon is sold as the clean, cold-water, omega-3 food of the north, the fish the health pages tell you to eat twice a week. The industry's own production survey, published last autumn, put the losses on the 2022 intake at about 40%, the worst since records began in 1989. At some sites it was worse: the Bay of Holland cages lost four fish in ten in a single month at the start of 2025. In one November, string jellyfish drifted through two sites and killed 194,000 fish. Across 2023, 2024 and 2025 the farms reported nearly 36 million dead salmon. The Fish Health Inspectorate, the body meant to police it, made two unannounced inspections in 2024 and none at all in 2023 or in the first nine months of 2025. It recorded 55 legal breaches in 2024, most of them for record-keeping, and has not issued a financial penalty since 2021. Mowi's site at Inchmore lost 3 million fish in three years and was never inspected. A hatchery that had taken up to £5 million of public money reported more than 9 million dead. The minister responsible, Mairi Gougeon, told parliament Scotland has "a really robust regulatory regime". A cattle farmer who lost four animals in ten before slaughter would have the ministry at the gate inside a week, and quite rightly. The salmon dies by the million in a net off a sea loch, and the fillet goes out under a saltire.