🇿🇦 Donn Edwards

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.

The year is 1956. Your mother is expecting you, and her doctor smokes through the appointment. More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand, the adverts say, and he tells her a few a day will settle her nerves and keep the baby small for an easy birth. The year is 1960. Your first proper shoes come from a shop with an X-ray machine in the corner. You slide your feet into the slot and watch your own toe bones wriggle, green and glowing, while the assistant checks the fit. You go back every time your feet grow. The year is 1961. Your mother is expecting your sister and the sickness is bad. The chemist has a new tablet, advertised as completely safe in pregnancy. Your sister arrives the next year alongside 10,000 other babies whose mothers took it, and some of them arrive without arms. The year is 1964. Three sore throats, so the tonsils come out, as they do for over a million children a year on both sides of the Atlantic. Twenty beds, and the promise of ice cream. Nobody asks what the tonsils were for. They were the immune system, and the operation never did much for the throats. The year is 1972. You are sixteen and every car on earth runs on leaded petrol. The lead comes out of the exhaust and settles on the playground, the vegetable patch and the blood of every child walking to school. The men who put it in the petrol knew what it did to a brain in the 1920s. The ban arrives in your forties. The year is 1981. Your mother's hands have gone stiff. The doctor has a new arthritis tablet with the biggest launch the drug industry has ever mounted. Two years later it is pulled on both sides of the Atlantic, with dozens of pensioners dead whose kidneys could not clear it. She gets off lightly: the sun burns her on it, and she spends a summer behind the curtains. The year is 1991. Your father is diabetic, and the dietitian hands him a sheet. More than half his calories are to come from carbohydrate: bread, potatoes, pasta, cereal. His sugar goes up on it, so his insulin goes up with it, and his waist follows. He does as he is told for twenty years. The year is 1998. Your back has gone. The doctor has a new opioid, and the rep carries a letter from a medical journal saying addiction on it is under 1%. The letter is five sentences long. The company pleads guilty twice, and by the second time more than half a million Americans are dead. The year is 2002. Your knees hurt, and the doctor has a new pill that is kinder on the stomach. You take it for two years, the same two years the maker is sitting on its own heart data. It is withdrawn with as many as 140,000 heart attacks laid at its door. Your heart was fine. The man next door's was not. The year is 2008. Your wife has a prolapse after three children, and the surgeon fits a strip of plastic mesh. Once the tissue grows through it, it cannot come out. Australia apologises to its women in 2018, America bans it in 2019, Britain apologises in 2020. Your wife gets hers by press release. The year is 2026. You are seventy, and the new doctor has a screen and a number for everything. The meat on your plate is a hazard. The oil in the bottle is good for your heart. The injection is for life. He is the age the first doctor was when he lit a Camel in front of your mother, and every bit as sure. Not one of them was a rogue. Every one was the standard of care, taught to the next doctor, printed on the leaflet, and handed to a family with no way to check it. You have spent seventy years as the experiment. The results come out after you are gone, under somebody else's name, and the chair you are sitting in is where they recruit for the next one.

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.

Take away one macronutrient at a time and watch what your body does. Only one of the three turns out to be optional. Go without protein. - Your body eats its own muscle for amino acids. - Then your organs, your heart included. - Your hair thins and your wounds stay open. - Your immune system stalls. - Children swell with fluid. Doctors call it kwashiorkor. The body breaks down. Go without fat. - Your skin turns dry and scaly. - Vitamins A, D, E and K go unabsorbed. - Your night vision fades and your bones soften. - Your blood stops clotting properly. - Explorers living on lean rabbit sickened within a week. The body breaks down. Go without carbohydrate. - Your liver makes all the glucose you need. - Insulin falls and your fat stores open up. - Your brain runs much of its fuel on ketones. - Your blood sugar stops lurching up and down. - The hunger that nagged every three hours goes quiet. The body adapts. Even the US Institute of Medicine admits it in writing: the lowest carbohydrate intake compatible with life is apparently zero. The first fortnight feels flat while your body retools from sugar to fat. Push through, and within a few weeks the machinery is built. Protein and fat, you cannot live without. Carbohydrate, you can, and a great many people live better for it. Give it three months. Beef, lamb, eggs, butter, cheese. No sugar, no bread, no seed oil. Then decide whether you ever needed the third one at all.