traymca 💙

In the 2025 drought the government asked people to delete their old emails to save water, and that one piece of advice tells you most of what you need to know about the beef water myth. The reason it gave was data centres. They cool themselves with water, and a big one can get through 1.5 million litres a day, the supply of a small town. That is real water. Pumped, piped, evaporated, gone. Now take the number you've been hit with for years: a kilo of beef needs 15,000 litres of water. British researchers ran the sum for English beef and got even more, 17,700 litres. Then they said what it was: - English beef: 84% rain - English lamb: 97% rain That is rain falling on a field, drawn up through the grass and breathed back out of the leaf. It happens with a cow on the field or without one. An empty field does not save a drop. Take the rain out and the beef figure shrinks to a sixth. The lamb figure shrinks to a thirtieth, because a hill sheep drinks from the sky and eats what the sky grew. Even the cow's own drinking water comes back. A milking cow drinks up to 155 litres on a hot day, turns some of it into milk, and returns most of the rest to the field. - 1 data centre: 1,500,000 litres a day, into the air - 1 milking cow: 155 litres a day, back onto the grass The beef water figure counts the weather. The data centre figure counts the tap. When the taps actually ran low, nobody in government asked you to give up beef. They asked you to delete your photos.

Shein adds about 4,700 new styles to its site every day, and the end of the line for clothes like that is a beach in Ghana where the sand has grown tentacles. 82% of what Shein makes starts life as fossil fuel. Last November Greenpeace sent 56 Shein garments and shoes to a lab. Of those, 18 broke EU chemical limits, three of them children's clothes, and the waterproof jackets carried PFAS at up to 3,300 times the limit. A dress like that gets worn twice and goes in a charity bag. What the charity can't sell is pressed into bales, and a great many go to Kantamanto in Accra, the biggest second-hand clothes market in the world. About 15 million used garments land in Ghana every week. Traders buy the bales blind, cut the string, and something like 40% is rubbish before it's touched a hanger. Around 100 tonnes a day leaves the market as waste. When Greenpeace tested the clothes on Accra's dumps, 89% had plastic in them. Some goes on the tip, where old clothes have built up into cliffs with layers like rock. Some goes into Korle Lagoon, and the rains flush the lagoon out to sea. The sea brings it back. On Jamestown beach the tide buries it in the sand and twists it into ropes, tentacles of cloth that start on the beach and carry on under the waves. Last year reporters found M&S, Primark, H&M, Zara and Next clothing dumped in the Densu Delta, where endangered leatherback turtles nest. And some of it gets burned. In Old Fadama the public washhouses heat their water over fires of old clothes, and the air inside carried benzene at almost 200 times Germany's indoor guideline. People wash in water boiled over somebody else's wardrobe. Chile has its own version. What won't sell from the free port at Iquique gets dumped in the Atacama, and the pile can be photographed from space. There are Christmas jumpers in it. Shein knows where all this goes. In 2022 Xu Yangtian's company pledged $50 million over five years to a fund for Kantamanto's waste workers. On the first of September it floated in Hong Kong and raised about $1.7 billion, enough to pay that pledge for 170 years. Meanwhile a ewe in Powys grows one coat a year. Scientists left wool and polyester in seawater for 90 days, and the sea got stuck into the wool and barely touched the polyester. Jamestown beach is what the sea does with the stuff it won't eat.

Clotted cream is the richest dairy product in the British kitchen, nearly two thirds fat, and it was invented as a way of keeping milk in a county with no ice. The method is older than anyone can trace. Fresh milk from the morning is left in a wide pan until the cream rises, then the whole pan is set over a very low fire or in a cooling bread oven for hours, never boiling, until a thick crust forms on top the colour of old gold. It cools overnight and the crust is lifted off with a skimmer. That crust is the cream, and the scalding is what kept it. Heated that way it lasted for days when fresh cream would have turned by teatime. Devon and Cornwall argued over it for centuries and still do. The Cornish got the legal protection in 1998, on condition that the milk is Cornish and the fat is at least fifty-five per cent, though the good stuff runs higher. The argument about whether the cream or the jam goes on the scone first has split the two counties for as long as there have been scones, and it is the only question in British food that people will genuinely fight over. If you grew up in the West Country it came in a cardboard tub with a crust you broke through with a knife, and it went on everything: the scone, the apple pie, the porridge, a spoon of it straight off the blade when nobody was looking. A pot sent by post to a relative in London was the standard Christmas present from Cornwall for a hundred years. It is milk with the water taken out and the fat left in, and it was the ordinary household food of the two poorest counties in England. The cream tea is now a treat you drive to and photograph. In 1930 it was what a dairy farmer's wife did with Tuesday's milk, and the fat was the whole point of doing it.

Walker: "I nearly bought a wool jumper in town. £140. Nice work if you can get it." Farmer: "I got about £2 for the fleece." Walker: "£2?" Farmer: "Per sheep, per year. Clipped it off her in two minutes, rolled it, bagged it, drove it to the depot. The cheque for the whole flock didn't cover the diesel." Walker: "Then who's getting the £140?" Farmer: "Not me, not the shearer. He costs me more per sheep than the wool fetches. I pay to have it taken off." Walker: "So you lose money shearing." Farmer: "Every year. And I can't not shear, or she cooks in July and the flies eat her alive. The wool's a welfare job that used to be an income." Walker: "Sell it yourself, then. Cut out the middleman." Farmer: "Not allowed. By law it goes through the board. Has done since 1950. I can keep a fleece for the wife to knit with, and that's about the extent of my freedom." Walker: "So where does it go?" Farmer: "Washed in Bradford, if we're lucky. Shipped to China, spun, knitted, shipped back, and sold to you with a label about heritage. By the time it's in the window there are eleven people between us and I'm the only one who met the sheep." Walker: "That's mad." Farmer: "My grandfather paid the rent on the wool cheque. I pay a man to take it away. Same sheep, same hill, same jumper in the window. Only the price of the farmer went down." Walker: "What would fix it?" Farmer: "You buying the jumper. And asking them where the other £138 went."