Sama Hoole

Audrey Hepburn's famous slenderness, copied by the fashion world for seventy years, was what was left of a girl who had lived through a winter on tulip bulbs. In the autumn of 1944 she was fifteen, living with her mother in Arnhem and then at her grandfather's house in Velp, while the battle for the Rhine bridges was fought around them. She had been dancing in blacked-out houses to raise money for the Dutch resistance. That winter the German authorities cut off food to the occupied west of the Netherlands, the canals froze, and the cities fell to a few hundred calories a day. The Dutch call it the Hunger Winter. People ate whatever they could find. Endive, when there was any. Nettles. Bread made from peas. And tulip bulbs, dug up and peeled, the bitter core cut out, ground into a grey flour that one survivor said tasted of sawdust. The government printed recipes for them. Her son wrote later that she would spend whole days in bed with a book, trying to stop thinking about food. When liberation came in May 1945 she had just turned sixteen. She was nearly five foot six and weighed 88 pounds, with jaundice, oedema and anaemia, and close to death. A Dutch soldier gave her seven chocolate bars and she ate the lot, with condensed milk from the relief trucks, and was violently sick, because her stomach had been empty too long. The relief organisation was UNRRA, which became UNICEF. She spent the last years of her life working for it. Her family believes the famine left her body unable to put weight on for good. The world saw the waist and the collarbones and built a standard of elegance on them. The Dutch bulb growers later named a white tulip after her.

University debate: "Carnivore is just the latest fad diet." Dietitian: "A fad has three marks. It appears from nowhere, it's sold by influencers, and it has no track record in a real population. Carnivore ticks all three. It was invented on the internet about eight years ago." Anthropologist: "What was the year?" Dietitian: "2018, give or take." Anthropologist: "1928. A hospital ward in New York. An Arctic explorer and a colleague ate nothing but meat for a year under medical observation because the doctors were certain it would kill them. It didn't. They published the results and the doctors moved on to something else." Dietitian: "Two men. That's an anecdote." Anthropologist: "The explorer had learned it from the Inuit, who'd been doing it for a thousand years." Dietitian: "The Inuit had no choice. You can't grow kale on ice." Anthropologist: "The Maasai had a choice. They live in some of the best farmland in Africa, surrounded by people growing maize, and they chose milk, meat and blood for centuries and looked down on the farmers for digging." Dietitian: "A small tribe. Genetically adapted." Anthropologist: "The Mongols were not a small tribe. Meat and mare's milk, no bread, and they ran the largest land empire there has ever been. The people they conquered ate grain and were, on average, shorter than their horses' ears." Dietitian: "That's warfare, not health. They died young." Anthropologist: "Genghis went at about sixty-five, in the saddle, with his teeth. The gauchos of the pampas lived on beef and nothing else for two hundred years, and when a young English naturalist rode with them in 1833 he wrote that he'd gone weeks on meat alone and didn't dislike it at all. His name was Darwin. He turned out to know a bit about what humans are adapted to." Dietitian: "A travel diary." Anthropologist: "Every one of these is a travel diary to you. The Plains tribes on bison, the Sami on reindeer, the Scottish Highlander on his cow, the Irish on milk and beef before the potato was imposed on them. Each one you call an exception, and I've named six continents." Dietitian: "They all got sick eventually." Anthropologist: "They all got sick on the same day. The day the flour, the sugar and the seed oil arrived in the trading post. Not one of them got sick on the meat. Which brings me to your third mark. No track record in a real population." Dietitian: "The modern version has none." Anthropologist: "What's the track record of yours?" Dietitian: "Mine?" Anthropologist: "Low fat, six to eleven servings of grain, seed oil for the heart. First published 1977. No population on earth had ever eaten it before. Pushed by a committee, sold on television, and inside forty years the people who followed it were the fattest and sickest humans ever recorded." Dietitian: "That's an oversimplification." Anthropologist: "Appeared from nowhere, sold by the famous, no track record. Your definition, your three marks. One of us is defending the fad diet here, and hers is only forty-nine years old." Moderator: "Closing." Dietitian: "A diet of only meat has never been tested properly." Anthropologist: "It was tested on every people who ever had a herd. Yours was tested on you. How's it going?"

In March 1855 the most famous chef in London walked into the army hospital kitchens at Scutari and found the orderlies pouring the best part of the soldiers' dinner away. Alexis Soyer ran the kitchens of the Reform Club, wrote bestselling cookbooks, wore his cap at a rakish angle and could never resist a newspaper. When the dispatches from the Crimea reached The Times, with sick and wounded men dying in their thousands, more of them from disease and bad food than from the Russians, he wrote to the paper offering to go out at his own expense and sort out the cooking. The government could not believe its luck and sent him. At Scutari, across the water from Constantinople, he found Florence Nightingale's hospital fed by orderlies with no training at all. Joints of meat tied to sticks and dropped into coppers of boiling water. A soldier's ration was a pound of meat and a pound of bread, and between the coppers and the orderlies, most of what was good in it was going missing. When the dinners had been served he noticed a big copper still half full of rich broth, with about three inches of fat floating on top, and asked what became of it. Throw it away, sir, they told him. Soyer stopped them. The broth went into soup. The fat was skimmed off and used in place of butter. He rewrote the hospital diets, had the coppers retinned, trained cooks, and invented a field stove, an iron drum with the fire in the bottom, that cooked for a company on a fraction of the fuel. Nightingale, who did not hand out praise, called his death three years later a disaster for the army. The British Army used his stove, modified over the years, for well over a century. The last big consignment went to the bottom of the South Atlantic in 1982 aboard the Atlantic Conveyor, hit by an Exocet off the Falklands. A century after Scutari the same instruction came back as public health advice, with a chart attached, and it said exactly what the orderly said. Throw it away, sir.

In 1797, a British Army surgeon called John Rollo had a diabetic officer passing sugar in his urine. He put him on meat and fat. The sugar vanished. The officer recovered. Rollo wrote it up. For the next hundred years, low-carbohydrate eating was the standard treatment for diabetes. In the textbooks, on the wards, in what doctors actually did. In 1915, Frederick Allen opened a diabetes clinic at the Rockefeller Institute. There was no insulin. He kept patients alive on almost no carbohydrate at all, and some lived long enough to receive the first insulin in 1922. The diet bought them years they had no other way of getting. Then insulin arrived, and the diet became an inconvenience. If a needle could handle the blood sugar, nobody needed to restrict the bread. The drug had a manufacturer. The diet had nobody. In the 1950s, Elliott Joslin, the most influential diabetes doctor in America, began quietly loosening the carbohydrate limits that had defined his own field for 150 years. In 1977, the McGovern guidelines told the entire American public to cut fat and eat more carbohydrate. Diabetics were not excused. By the 1980s, the American Diabetes Association was recommending that 50 to 60% of a diabetic's calories come from carbohydrate. Half of every meal from the one thing the disease is defined by being unable to handle. The prescriptions went up. The insulin doses went up. The amputations went up. The pharmaceutical companies posted earnings that would embarrass a small country. In 2008, the ADA conceded that low-carbohydrate diets could be appropriate. As an option. In a footnote. After thirty years of recommending the reverse. In 2019, a two-year trial put type 2 diabetics on a low-carbohydrate diet, and more than half came off their medication with normal blood sugar. The same result Rollo wrote up in 1797. In 2021, Diabetes UK quietly published guidance accepting low-carbohydrate eating as a valid option. 224 years after the case report. Remarkable pace.

Most classic dishes are an animal food carrying a plant that was only there for the look of it, and the fix is to put the plant down. Creamed spinach. Have the cream. Cauliflower cheese. Have the cheese. Buttered peas. Have the butter. Steak and chips. Have the steak, and fry the fat that would have gone on the chips. Bacon sandwich. Have the bacon, and dip it in the egg. Cheese on toast. Have the cheese, grilled, on itself. Beef stew with dumplings. Have the beef, and drink the gravy out of the mug. Roast lamb with mint sauce. Have the lamb, and stop apologising for it with vinegar. Chicken salad. Have the egg instead, and skip the chicken as well. Full English. Have the sausage, the bacon, the eggs and the black pudding, and leave the beans in the tin where the sugar is. Fish and chips. Have the fish, in dripping, with the skin on. Cream tea. Have the clotted cream, and the scone can carry it to your mouth or your spoon can. Every one of these meals was built around the animal and padded out with the cheapest thing in the kitchen, so the padding is the only part you're giving up. Nobody has ever stared at an empty plate and missed the spinach.

In the 1920s Britain's Medical Research Council ran a feeding trial on boys at a Barnardo's home, and margarine lost to butter in a straight fight. The home at Woodford in Essex was a village of its own. Boys lived in separate houses, ate from the same kitchen, and went to the same school. So each house was given a different extra every day, on top of the same basic diet. A pint of milk. Three ounces of sugar. An ounce and three quarters of butter. An ounce and three quarters of margarine. Milk protein powder. Watercress. The milk, butter, sugar and margarine extras carried almost the same calories. So whatever happened would not be down to extra energy. The boys were weighed and measured, year after year. The milk boys grew taller and heavier than the rest. The butter boys were next. Sugar did little. The protein powder did little. Margarine did little. The watercress boys put on a bit of weight and grew no taller than the boys getting nothing extra. The researcher noted, with some satisfaction, that the margarine contained no vitamin A and no butterfat at all. The report came out in 1926. Milk went into British schools on the strength of it, and stayed there for decades. Today the official advice for those children's grandchildren is to swap butter for spreads made from seed oils, and the free milk has long since been taken away from everyone over 7. Britain ran the experiment, read the result, and served the margarine anyway.

The year is 180. You are a gladiator in Ephesus, and the films will give you a body like a bronze statue. You are fed barley porridge and beans, and the crowd calls you a barley man to your face. The porridge puts a layer of fat over your muscle so the cuts bleed instead of killing, which is good for the show. The man who owns you dines on dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed. When your bones are dug up eighteen centuries later they are full of barley and almost nothing else, and a man at a university will call your diet plant-forward. The year is 1300. You are a villein on a Hampshire manor, living, as the brochure will one day put it, in harmony with the land. The land gives you pottage: peas, beans and oats in the one pot, every day, until you die of it at forty. The hall above you smells of venison from the lord's own park, roast pork, eel, swan, butter from cows you milked before dawn. Take one deer from his wood and you lose a hand. The court that decides it sits in his hall, after dinner. The year is 1755. You are a Highland tenant eating oatmeal three times a day, and in London Dr Johnson has just printed his dictionary. Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. The laird at the head of your glen finds this very funny over his beef. The beef was driven to market past your door. The year is 1795. You are a Berkshire farm labourer and a clergyman is at your table with a notebook, writing down what your children eat. Bread. Tea. A little cheese. Bacon on Sunday if the pig did well. He prints it as a national disgrace. The squire you work for has a joint every day of the year and is told from the pulpit that your trouble is thrift. The year is 1847. You are in County Clare and the potatoes have gone black in the ground for the second year running. Your family lived on them, ten pounds a day for a working man, and you are sitting in a cabin with nothing. At the harbour the ships are loading cattle, pigs, butter and bacon for England, under armed guard. The agent on the quay looks well. So does the bullock walking up the gangplank past the people who raised it. The year is 1933. You are in a village outside Kharkiv. The grain quota has been collected, then collected again, then the brigades have come with iron rods to probe the floors for anything buried. Your children are eating boiled bark, and the dog next door has stopped barking. In the district town there is a shop for Party members with a curtain over the window. Behind the curtain there is sausage. The year is 1997. You are in North Pyongan and the rations stopped months ago. You are stripping the inner bark from pines and boiling grass, and the famine will take hundreds of thousands before it ends. The Dear Leader's personal chef is flying to Japan for tuna, to Denmark for pork and to Iran for caviar, and will write a book about it. The year is 2026. You are in a supermarket in England. The posters say eat less meat for the planet. The spread is plant-based, the cereal has a heart on the box, and the beef carries a warning about its footprint. You take the lentils, because you are a responsible person, and you pay more for them than the villein's pottage ever cost anyone. The people who put the posters up flew to the climate conference, and the menu had beef on it. They eat what the lord ate, what the laird ate, what the agent on the quay ate, what the man behind the curtain ate. Two thousand years, and the diet of grain and beans was always what the powerful handed down to the people beneath them. Everyone at both ends of the table knew what it meant. Now it has a name, a logo and a moral, and for the first time in history the peasant is paying extra for it.

Doctor: Your bone scan's come back. Osteoporosis in the hip. I'll start you on alendronate, calcium and vitamin D, and I'd be careful with anything heavy. Patient: What makes bone grow? Doctor: Calcium, mainly. Patient: My daughter's cat gets calcium. Why hasn't it got my skeleton? Doctor: Bone responds to load as well. Weight through it. Patient: Load. Doctor: Within reason. Patient: So the one thing that tells bone to get thicker is the thing you've just told me to be careful with. Doctor: We don't want a fracture. Patient: What did I do for the last twenty years? Doctor: Walked, I expect. Patient: Walked, swam, did the aerobics class, and ate low fat because my husband's cholesterol was up. Skimmed milk since 1998. Margarine. The lot. Doctor: Those are sensible choices. Patient: They've got me a hip like a wafer. What does the tablet do? Doctor: It slows the cells that break down old bone. Patient: So the old bone stays. Doctor: It preserves density. Patient: It preserves old bone. Does old bone that can't be cleared out get stronger or just older? Doctor: There's a small risk of unusual fractures with long use, which is why we review at five years. Patient: So the tablet that stops me breaking a bone can break a bone. Doctor: Rarely. Patient: My mother carried coal up two flights of stairs until she was eighty and drank the top of the milk. Nobody scanned her. Nobody needed to. Doctor: Different generation. Patient: Same hips. She loaded hers. You've told me to rest mine, and given me a tablet to keep the old bits in. I'll take the calcium. In cheese. And I'm going to the gym on Thursday to pick something up. Doctor: Start light. Patient: Light is what got me here.

In 1950, the British state paid a farmer to grow food, and the food went to Britain. In 1960, the British state paid a farmer to grow food. In 1970, the British state paid a farmer to grow food. In 1985, the British state paid a farmer to grow food, and the country fed itself almost to the pint. In 2026, the British state pays the same farm to plant a hedge, leave a margin, dig a pond, count a beetle, sow a strip of flowers he will never harvest, and submit the application by a deadline that falls in the middle of harvest. There is no box on the form for how much food you grew. There is a box for the beetle. Self-sufficiency in the 1980s: nearly 80%. Self-sufficiency now: about 60%, and falling. The hedges are lovely. The pond is full. The hill that used to send lamb to the butcher sends a photograph to a scheme inspector. The form is doing exactly what it was written to do, and the people who wrote it have a word for a country that imports two fifths of its dinner. They call it a transition.

Most people who tell me carnivore didn't work for them learned it from the first wave of meatfluencers, and that first wave couldn't have told you where the fat was on a cow. They were busy with the organs. Nose to tail or you weren't serious. Raw liver eaten to camera like a dare. Heart, kidney, spleen, a bull's testicle for the thumbnail. And at the end of every sermon, the freeze-dried organ capsules, discount code in the description. Strange how the gospel always finished at a checkout. Fat got a line, if it got anything. That's the diet upside down. Take away the carbohydrate and fat is the fuel, the only fuel left. Protein builds you; it was never meant to run you. The trappers of the north had a name for living on lean meat alone: rabbit starvation. Pounds of it a day, and they wasted away with full stomachs. So the beginners did exactly as they were shown. Sirloin with the white trimmed off. Chicken breast. A palmful of capsules and a glass of water. By week three they were exhausted, blocked up, ravenous and dreaming about toast. Back to the bread they went, telling everyone carnivore had nearly killed them. They never tried carnivore. They tried lean protein and pills, then blamed the cow. That's the mess I spend most of my week cleaning up. - Buy the cut with the most white on it. - Treat butter as a food, not a garnish. - Pour the fat from the pan back over the meat. - Tip what's left in the pan into a mug and drink it. Nobody in six years has ever quit carnivore because there was too much butter on the plate. They quit because there wasn't enough.

Everyone assumes we're smarter than our Ice Age ancestors, and the biggest human brains ever measured belong to them, not us. For two million years the human brain grew. Then, around 20,000 years ago, it went into reverse. The Homo sapiens with the largest brains lived 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, from Europe down to South Africa. Barrel chests, heavy jaws, enormous teeth, and bones thicker than anything walking around today. Since then the average male brain has lost around 150 cubic centimetres, from about 1,500 to about 1,350. Roughly 10%. A tennis ball's worth. Women's brains have shrunk by the same proportion. We comfort ourselves that we must be cleverer anyway. We have smartphones, satellites and supermarkets. Not one of us invented them, and not one of us could build one. The Ice Age hunter made everything he owned. He knapped razor-edged blades from flint. He sewed fitted clothing with needles carved from bone. He read tracks, wind and season, and followed reindeer, horse, bison and mammoth across hundreds of miles without a map. Then he crawled into a cave and painted them from memory, by the light of a lamp burning animal fat, so well that 17,000 years later we queue to see the replicas. Our knowledge lives in a phone. His lived behind his eyes. The explanations for the shrinking run from smaller bodies to self-domestication to life in crowds. Nobody disputes the timing. It tracks the end of the great hunts, the spread of farming, and the packing of people into villages and towns. Every domesticated animal ends up with a smaller brain than its wild ancestor. The wolf's is bigger than the dog's. The dog isn't dimmer by nature. It has just never had to find its own dinner. The biggest brains in human history were fed by hunters who followed the herds across the tundra. Ours were raised on toast, and we're the ones calling them cavemen.

Everything alive on this planet turns towards the sun. Flowers swing to face it through the day. Trees grow crooked to reach it. Lizards lie flat on the rock to soak it in. Cattle leave the shed to graze in it. Dogs find the one warm patch on the carpet and sleep in it. Babies turn their faces to the window. Our skin makes a hormone from it that no food can fully replace. Our blood pressure drops the moment it touches us. Our body clock runs on it, and sleep falls apart without it. Two million years of humans worked, hunted and rested by it. Then one species, on the advice of a leaflet, started slathering chemicals on its skin to keep it out. The flowers never got the memo. Neither did your bones.

On 25 May 1982 an Exocet sank the ship carrying Britain's heavy-lift helicopters, so the Royal Marines and the Paras carried the war across the Falklands on their backs. The Atlantic Conveyor went down with three of the four big Chinooks, six Wessex and a Lynx. Twelve men died with her. The plan to fly the troops forward sank with them. From the beachhead at San Carlos to Stanley was around 56 miles. Nothing on the Falklands runs in a straight line. Peat bog that swallowed a boot to the shin. Tussock grass in knee-high clumps. Rivers of loose rock. Rain two days in three, sleet, and a wind straight off the Southern Ocean. 45 Commando went first. Twelve miles to New House, eight more to Douglas, then on to Teal Inlet. 3 Para marched for 24 hours in two columns. The Marines called it yomping. The Paras called it tabbing. Each man carried 80 pounds and often far more. Rifle, ammunition, mortar rounds, radio batteries, sleeping bag, rations, a shovel. About the weight of a grown Labrador, carried for days, then dug in under at night. At the end of it there was no rest. They went up Two Sisters, Mount Longdon and Mount Harriet, and fought at night, up rock, some of it with bayonets. The photograph of the yomp, a Marine with a Union flag tied to his radio aerial, became the picture of the whole war. Those men are in their sixties and seventies now. Around 2020 the fitness industry discovered walking about with a heavy pack and called it rucking. The Marines called it getting to the fight.

Customer: "That rib's a funny colour. Darker than the rest." Butcher: "That's off a cow. A dairy cow, eight years old." Customer: "I thought beef had to be young." Butcher: "It had to be under thirty months in this country for the best part of ten years. Mad cow rules. The whole trade got used to killing them as teenagers and never went back." Customer: "So eight is ancient." Butcher: "Eight is middle-aged, and she's spent it eating grass and raising calves. Every year's gone into that fat. The yellow you're looking at is eight summers." Customer: "Who buys it?" Butcher: "The Spanish. The Basques pay more for a steak off a twelve-year-old cow than you've paid for anything in here. There's restaurants in London charging a hundred and twenty quid for a chop off a Galician cow older than their waiters." Customer: "For an old cow?" Butcher: "For a cow that's lived. The young stuff tastes of the shed it was finished in. This tastes of the field." Customer: "What would you have done with her before the Spanish wanted her?" Butcher: "Mince for the burger vans. Or the dog. Eight years of the best eating in Britain, sold at the price of scrap because a leaflet in 1996 decided beef stops at thirty months." Customer: "Go on, a rib off her." Butcher: "Rest it longer than you'd think. She's earned it."

Humans carry the stomach acid of a vulture, and the scientists who measured it had filed us as omnivores. In 2015 a team from North Carolina State gathered every reliable measurement of stomach acidity they could find, across 68 species of birds and mammals, and lined each one up against what the animal eats. The pattern was clean. Herbivores had the weakest acid. The most specialised plant-eaters went further and grew a separate fermenting chamber, kept alkaline so the microbes breaking down leaves could live in it. Among primates, only one family of leaf-eating monkeys ever built one. Carnivores had stronger acid. Scavengers, the animals eating meat already crawling with bacteria, had the strongest of all. The white-backed vulture sits around pH 1.2. Then humans. Around pH 1.5. Down with the carrion eaters. Other primates sit at 3 or above. Because the scale is logarithmic, that makes the human stomach roughly thirty times more acidic than an ape's. Acid that strong is expensive. The body burns energy making it and burns more protecting its own lining from it. Evolution does not keep paying a bill like that for nothing. The study's verdict was that stomach acid is not there to digest food. It is a filter, a sterilising bath for whatever is coming down. And the strongest filter goes to the animals whose food is most closely related to themselves, because a mammal's bacteria can infect another mammal far more easily than a plant's can. Our acid was built for eating animals, the kind that had been dead a while. Your stomach is set up for a carcass, and the breakfast advice is still porridge.

In 1987 doctors at a New York hospital worked out why seven babies from careful, loving homes had stopped growing, and the answer was the heart-healthy diet. The children were between 7 and 22 months old. They were falling off the charts for weight, and then for height. They were not ill. They were not neglected. Their parents were attentive and devoted. One little girl of 21 months had not gained weight in nearly six months. When the paediatricians went through the food diaries, every child was getting between 60% and 94% of the calories a baby that age needs. The parents had been restricting them on purpose. They were frightened their babies would grow up fat, get clogged arteries or get hooked on junk food. So they fed them the way doctors were telling at-risk adults to eat. Low fat. Low cholesterol. The doctors wrote that these were diets in line with health beliefs in vogue, and recommended by the medical community for adults at risk of heart disease. The babies' bodies treated it as a famine. When the restrictions were lifted, the babies ate far more and started growing again. Two years later the same team reported on 40 children whose parents had put them on low-fat, low-cholesterol diets for high cholesterol. Eight had stopped growing properly. Three were so badly affected the doctors called it nutritional dwarfing. The advice had been written for middle-aged men with bad hearts. It was their children who stopped growing.

In the 1930s an American dentist sailed to the Outer Hebrides to find out why the island children had near-perfect teeth, and the answer turned out to be a cod's head stuffed with liver. Weston Price had spent his career in Cleveland filling children's teeth, and he was tired of it. So he went looking for children who did not need him. He found them on the Isle of Lewis. Crofters and fisherfolk in stone black houses, peat smoke curling through the thatch, almost no trees, and the Atlantic on every side. Their children lived on oatcakes, porridge and the sea. Fish, shellfish, fish roe, and the liver of the cod. The dish the islanders thought most important for a growing child was ceann cropaig, a cod's head baked whole, stuffed with chopped cod's liver and oatmeal. On one outlying island Price met a young woman of about twenty who had never seen milk in anything bigger than drops. There were no dairy animals at all. In the interior of Lewis, Price examined the children's mouths. 1.3 teeth in every hundred had ever been touched by decay. Ten miles away sat Tarbert, the port where the Harris Tweed went out and the white flour, jam, sweetened tea and tinned food came in. There, 32.4 teeth in every hundred were decayed. On the islands he found two brothers eating at the same table. The older one still ate the oatcakes and the fish, and had excellent teeth and a broad face. The younger one insisted on white bread, jam, sweet coffee and chocolate. His teeth were rotting, and his face and jaw were narrower. Price photographed all of it and published it in 1939. He was convinced the protection came from the fat-soluble vitamins in the animal foods, the cod liver, the roe and the fat of the fish. Dentistry decided the answer was a toothbrush. Ninety years on, a Scottish parent is told to build the children's plate on wholegrains, fruit and low-fat yoghurt, and almost nobody on the mainland has heard of a stuffed cod's head. The island children grew their teeth on the bit of the fish we now throw away.

University debate: "Eating meat is a learned habit, not human nature." Vegan: Nobody is born wanting a steak. We're taught it. Culture does the rest. Anthropologist: Name a culture that taught the opposite. Vegan: Plenty. India. Anthropologist: The one that ranks its vegetarians by caste and whose word for a feast involves a goat. Try again. Vegan: The Jains. Anthropologist: A religious order, a few million people, and they had to write rules to make it stick. Nature doesn't need a rulebook. Vegan: So what's natural about it? Anthropologist: There's a word for it. Meat hunger. The Hadza have one. Tribes in the Amazon have one. You can be full of yams and still have it, and every language that lives near the land invented a word for the feeling. Nobody has a word for lentil hunger. Vegan: That's language, not biology. Anthropologist: What does every culture on earth give up for a fast? Vegan: ... Anthropologist: Meat. Lent, Ramadan's daytime, the Buddhist retreat, the Hindu holy day. The sacrifice is always the animal, because a sacrifice has to cost something. No religion has ever asked its followers to give up cabbage. Vegan: That proves it's a luxury. Anthropologist: It proves it's the thing wanted. What does a chimpanzee do when one of them catches a monkey? Vegan: Shares it? Anthropologist: The whole troop gathers and begs. Chimps don't beg for figs. The want is older than us. Vegan: Children don't want meat. Anthropologist: Children don't want greens. Watch what gets bribed onto the plate and what gets taken off it. Moderator: Thirty seconds. Vegan: I was raised without it and I've never missed it. Anthropologist: You've got a word for how you feel about it, though. Everyone does.

Modern medicine will test a healthy person until it finds something it can treat for life. If your blood pressure is normal, they lower the line until it isn't. If your cholesterol is normal, they run your age through a calculator and prescribe anyway. If your sugar is normal, they lower that line too, and now you are prediabetic. If your bones are normal for your age, they measure them against a thirty-year-old's. If your kidneys are normal for your age, they call it chronic kidney disease. If your weight is normal, they redraw the chart and you wake up overweight. If your neck is normal, they scan it and find a nodule. If your vitamin D is normal, they raise the bar until most of the country is short. If your grief is normal, they give it two weeks and diagnose depression. If your child is normal but the youngest in the class, they diagnose the birthday as ADHD. If every test is normal, they sell you a scan of your whole body. If the scan is normal, they call it a baseline and book you in for next year. Each time the definition widened, somebody was already standing by with the treatment. When the cholesterol line came down, eight of the nine experts who moved it had been paid by statin makers. When osteopenia arrived, the company selling the bone drug helped get the scanners into doctors' surgeries. Nobody ever made a penny sending a healthy person home.

The idea that eating cholesterol clogs your arteries was born in 1913, in a laboratory full of rabbits fed egg yolk dissolved in sunflower oil. Nikolai Anitschkow, a young pathologist in St Petersburg, extracted cholesterol from egg yolks, dissolved it in sunflower oil, and fed it to rabbits. Their arteries filled with fatty streaks and plaques. The diet-heart idea had its founding experiment. Rabbits eat grass. A wild rabbit never swallows a milligram of cholesterol in its life, and its body was never built to deal with a dose of it. When researchers tried the same feeding on dogs, the dogs cleared it. Their arteries stayed clean until scientists suppressed their thyroids with drugs to force the result. The meat eater shrugged the cholesterol off. The grass eater choked on it. Almost nobody stopped to ask which of the two a human being resembles. A century on, the cholesterol-fed rabbit is still a standard model in heart research, and the guidelines are still written as if you were one.