"We'd start you on the weekly weight-loss injection. Around 15% off in the first year." And when I stop? "We don't think of it as something you stop." Humour me. "In the trial, people put two thirds of it back inside a year." So it rents me a break from the hunger. "It manages a chronic condition." What comes off, exactly? "Weight." What kind? "...Mostly fat." And the rest? "In the trial, about four kilos in every ten were lean tissue." So I pay monthly to get smaller and weaker, and the month I stop I get bigger. "That's one way to put it." How do you put it? "Lifelong therapy."

Cottonseed oil spent its first half century in the American kitchen travelling under other people's names. In the 1870s the cotton gins of the South had a problem the size of a mountain, and it was the seed. Millions of tons a year, far more than any farm could plough back in, with an oil inside it that nobody would knowingly buy. So nobody was told. In 1881 a Georgia farm paper reported, almost cheerfully, that refined cottonseed oil was being shipped in quantity to Italy and Spain, cut two parts to one with olive oil, and sold to the world as pure olive oil. In Maine, the same paper said, herring were being tinned in straight cottonseed oil and labelled in French as sardines in the best olive oil. Then it went into the lard. By 1884 the crushers had pooled their mills into the American Cotton Oil Trust, modelled on Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and a trust that size needed a bigger customer than the sardine. In March 1888 a House agriculture committee in Washington took evidence on what the meat packers were selling as lard. Two former workers from a Boston pork packer testified that the firm made two grades, one pure and one a compound. Affidavits were read out stating that petroleum tanks had been cleaned before being used to carry the cottonseed oil. Cleaned, they wanted it on the record. The trade's answer to the scandal was a new name for the product: compound lard. In 1895 California's olive growers were still complaining in print that American cottonseed oil was crossing to Europe, being blended into olive oil, and coming home labelled pure olive oil, undercutting their own pure oil at half the price or less. The government got round to prosecuting eventually. In 1914 a New York importer pleaded guilty over a shipment labelled Lucca Oliv Oil that was largely cottonseed, with the word cottonseed printed in smaller type. His fine was $25. By then the oil had found a better disguise. In 1911 Procter and Gamble hydrogenated it into a white paste, called it Crisco, and sold it to housewives as the modern, scientific replacement for the lard it had spent the last thirty years counterfeiting. After that it went into the margarine. Then the salad oil. Then the labels stopped naming it at all and called it vegetable oil, as if a cotton gin were an allotment. French sardine oil, Italian olive oil, compound lard, Crisco, vegetable oil. It has had more names than a conman, and the one it never seems to use is its own.

India, the most vegetarian nation on earth, now has a Prime Minister going on national radio to beg it to use less cooking oil. In February 2025 Narendra Modi used his monthly broadcast to ask every family to cut its edible oil by 10%, and to pass the challenge on to ten others. By August he was repeating it in his Independence Day speech. The national school board told schools to put up oil boards, and the health ministry wanted signs in offices showing how much oil is in a samosa. He had reason. In 2022, 212 million Indians had diabetes, more than a quarter of every diabetic on the planet, and 133 million of them weren't being treated. He warned the country it could have 440 million obese people by 2050. It starts before birth. Doctors in Pune found Indian newborns were the best part of a kilo lighter than British ones, and had lost far less of their fat than of everything else. They named it the thin-fat baby. This is the nation that eats around 8kg of meat a head a year, a fraction of the world average. The plate is rice, roti, dal and vegetables, as approved by every plant-based book in print. And the fat it is cooked in stopped being ghee a long time ago. India is the biggest importer of edible oil on earth, and the tins on the kitchen shelf hold soybean, sunflower and palm. A country that eats a fraction of the world's meat and swapped its ghee for the imported tins has ended up with a quarter of the world's diabetes. It is still cited as proof that the plants work. The ghee was never the problem, India. Put it back in the pan.

Vegan leather is sold as the upgrade, so somebody had better stand up for the real thing. Leather is skin that's decided to outlive you. In 2008 archaeologists digging in a cave in Armenia found a shoe. One piece of cowhide, laced up the front and back, stuffed with grass, made about 5,500 years ago. It's older than Stonehenge. It's older than the pyramids. Somebody walked about in it before anyone had built anything you'd recognise, and it still looks like a shoe. Ötzi, the man they found in the ice in the Alps, was dressed and kitted out in five different animals, with a bearskin hat on his head. He'd been up there 5,300 years and the leather was still recognisably a coat. Your grandad's belt. Your dad's wallet. The satchel that went to school with four children in a row and came home every time. The saddle that's been on three horses. The cricket ball hit by men who are now dead. A good leather boot gets resoled, and resoled, and goes to the charity shop in better nick than the man who wore it. It moulds to your foot. It breathes. It ages, and it ages well, which is more than can be said for most of my family. Then you put your hand on the vegan pair. Polyurethane, on a fabric back. Shiny. Smells like a new car that's been in an accident. Give it two winters and it starts peeling at the crease like a sunburnt tourist, and no cobbler on earth can do a thing about it. Buy the leather. Feed it once a year. Leave it to somebody in your will.

Leaving a sheep alone is the cruellest thing you can do to it, and there's a fleece in a museum in Canberra to prove it. On 13 September PETA protesters crashed the COS show at New York Fashion Week with placards against wool, and Steven Kolb, who runs American fashion's trade body, ended up wrestling them beside the catwalk while the models kept walking. The demand was simple: stop taking wool from sheep. One merino has already had that granted in full. In 2015 a personal trainer, Sue Dowling, was out with a client on the edge of Canberra when she noticed him standing in a paddock, not moving. He'd been living wild for about five years with nobody for company but the kangaroos. Nobody had sheared him. Nobody had done anything to him at all. She named him Chris, after the unhappy sheep in Father Ted, which was the right call. He could barely walk. His legs had started to bow under the weight of his own coat. The RSPCA put out an urgent appeal for a shearer, and within hours a four-time Australian champion, Ian Elkins, had put his hand up. They sedated Chris first, for fear of shock, and the job took about 45 minutes. The fleece weighed 41.1 kilos, a world record and enough for about 30 jumpers. Underneath it his skin was infected from years of urine and muck trapped in the wool. With it on, he'd been reckoned to have weeks left. That's what a merino does without a shearer. He doesn't shed. Thousands of years of breeding saw to that. The coat just keeps coming until it buries him. Chris took the record from Big Ben, shorn of 28.9 kilos in New Zealand in 2014, who'd taken it from Shrek, 27 kilos, in 2004. Every one of them a sheep that went years without a haircut, and every one saved by somebody with clippers. Several farmers came forward to claim Chris. None of their markings matched, so he went to a sanctuary instead and lived another four years. The RSPCA turned him into a children's book about animal welfare, and the welfare in question was a haircut. His fleece went to the National Museum of Australia, where it's the second most sought-after thing in the building, after the heart of the racehorse Phar Lap. Leave a merino alone for five years and what you get is Chris.

There are fewer grazing animals on earth's grasslands today than there were in 1800, and the planet has warmed anyway. Somebody should check the sums. In 1800 North America carried 30 to 60 million bison, with elk, deer and pronghorn beside them in numbers nobody counted. The plains belched methane all day, every day, for 10,000 years, and the climate stayed put. By 1890 the bison were gone. The cattle that replaced them never matched the number. American cattle peaked in 1975 at 132 million. Today there are about 87 million. A third fewer cows. Britain had 15 million cattle in 1974. Today about 9.5 million. Europe's herd has been shrinking for 40 years. Across that same half century the planet warmed by about a degree and the methane in the air kept climbing. The cows were disappearing while the thing they are blamed for got worse. What grew in those decades was oil, gas, coal, aviation, concrete and the fracking fields, which leak methane straight from the ground with no grass involved. The ruminant was here through every stable century of the Holocene. The warming arrived with the one thing a ruminant cannot do, which is dig. Blaming the cow for the climate is blaming the bison for the railway that shot it.

Put a cow beside you, part by part, and every one of your parts belongs to the animal that eats her. Her eyes sit on the sides of her head and cover almost 330°, so nothing can creep up on her. Yours point forward, at whatever you're creeping up on. She has no top front teeth, just a hard pad of gum to tear grass against. You have a full top row, canines included. Her jaw grinds side to side. Yours mostly opens and shuts. She grazes for about eight hours a day and chews the cud for eight more. You get through your eating in under 5% of your waking day. She brings her lunch back up to chew it again. You do that once and get referred. Her first stomach would fill a bath, kept near neutral for the bacteria living in it. Yours holds about a litre and runs at pH 1.5, which is scavenger territory. She makes over 100 litres of saliva a day to stop that bath going sour. You make about a litre, and it copes with a steak. She grows her own B12 in the same bath. You get yours from her. She outweighs you eight to one and carries a third of your brain. She spends her whole life turning grass into something you can eat. You were built to eat her, and the poster on the surgery wall tells you to graze.

In June 1965 a 27-year-old Scot weighing 456lb stopped eating, didn't start again for 382 days, and the fat he was carrying kept him alive for every one of them. Angus Barbieri worked in his father's fish and chip shop in Tayport, across the Tay from Dundee. He had eaten his way past 32 stone. He checked himself into Maryfield Hospital for what his doctors intended as a short fast. It went well. He felt fine. He asked to carry on. The doctors agreed, warily, and let him go home, provided he came back in regularly for blood and urine tests. He lived on tea, coffee, sparkling water and vitamins. No food. A week became a month. A month became a season. The weight came off at about three-quarters of a pound a day. Day 100 came and went, then 200, then 300, with the hospital checking his blood every step and waiting for something to break. Nothing did. For long stretches his blood sugar sat at around 30mg per 100ml, about a third of normal, the kind of reading that has junior doctors reaching for a drip. He went about his days perfectly lucid. On 11 July 1966 he sat down to his first meal in over a year: a boiled egg and a slice of bread with butter. He weighed 180lb, under 13 stone. He had lost 276lb, very nearly 20 stone, and it went into the Guinness Book of Records as the longest fast in history. Five years on he was still around 14 stone, and he lived until 1990. His doctors wrote him up in 1973 under the driest title in medicine: Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration. His brain kept working the whole year, which is the part the textbooks of the day had no answer for. In 1967, in Boston, George Cahill's team supplied one. They ran fine tubes into the blood vessels draining the brains of three obese patients five weeks into a fast and measured what the brain was burning. It had switched to ketones, made in the liver from body fat, as its main fuel. The organ every textbook said ran only on glucose was running on fat, and running happily. So every thought Barbieri had that year was powered by the fat around his middle. A human body carries months of fuel and a brain built to use it. It was shaped by two million years of hunts that came good one week and failed the next, and it treats an empty plate as an ordinary Tuesday. Angus Barbieri had 382 of them.

Customer: What's this fleece made of? Assistant: Recycled plastic bottles. It's our most sustainable range. Customer: And when I wash it? Assistant: It sheds a few fibres. Customer: Where do they go? Assistant: Down the drain. Some of them end up in the rivers. Customer: So the bottles get to the river anyway. Assistant: Smaller, though. Customer: What's the wool one made of? Assistant: Wool. Customer: Where's that from? Assistant: A sheep. She grows a new one every year. Customer: And when it's worn out? Assistant: It rots. You could put it on the compost. Customer: And this one, when it's worn out? Assistant: ... Customer: Which one did you say was the sustainable range?

A New York physician who had spent twenty years failing to make fat people thin by starving them walked into the American Museum of Natural History, asked the curators what prehistoric man had eaten, and spent the next forty years prescribing fat meat and water to seventeen thousand patients. Blake Donaldson had done what every doctor did. He had put his heavy patients on low-calorie diets and watched them cheat, give up, or lose weight and put it back. So he went to look at the skulls. The teeth of our ancestors, the museum told him, were the teeth of meat-eaters, and the great weakness of the modern mouth was a sign that the diet had changed faster than the animal. Then an Arctic explorer, fresh from a year on meat in a New York hospital, told him that the Inuit lived well on fat and starved on lean. Donaldson built his prescription from that. Three meals a day of half a pound of fat meat each, three parts fat to one part lean by the calorie, salted, with water and black coffee, and a half-hour walk before breakfast. No flour, no sugar, no milk. His patients lost two to three pounds a week without hunger and kept it off. His allergy patients, he said, lost their allergies. He published it all in 1962 under the title Strong Medicine, with a line that is still quoted: there are probably only two perfect foods, fresh fat meat and clean water. The president of the American Medical Association's journal called the book unscientific. A Harvard nutritionist put it on a list of quackery that should be on nobody's shelves. That nutritionist was being funded by the sugar industry at the time, which emerged fifty years later. Donaldson died in 1966 having spent his whole career doing the one thing the establishment never managed: making his patients thin and keeping them that way. The establishment has spent the years since explaining why he should not have.

In 1969 a trial swapped the butter for vegetable oil to save men's hearts, and the men on the oil died of cancer instead. The Los Angeles Veterans trial. 846 men, eight years, half of them moved from animal fat onto corn, soybean, safflower and cottonseed oil. Heart deaths went down a little. Cancer deaths went up. 31 in the oil group against 17 on the butter. The authors noted it, said it was probably chance, and the oil went into every American kitchen anyway. It was not chance. Rats fed corn oil grow more tumours than rats fed beef fat, and laboratories had known since the 1970s. Linoleic acid, the main fat in seed oil, is what a growing tumour wants. In 2025 a team at Weill Cornell found exactly why, in human breast cancer. Linoleic acid switches on the growth pathway that drives the most aggressive form of the disease. Saturated fat does not. The skin cancer story runs the same way. A Sydney doctor found in the 1980s that melanoma patients had more polyunsaturated fat in their skin, and that the fat goes rancid under sunlight, inside you. The fat in your cells is the fat you ate. Your membranes are built out of the bottle on the counter. A membrane built from seed oil oxidises. Oxidised fat damages DNA. Damaged DNA is what a tumour is. Your great-grandfather's cells were built out of dripping, which does not oxidise, because it has nothing for the oxygen to attack. The guideline took the one fat that behaves itself out of the kitchen and put the one that catches fire in your cells in its place. Then it called cancer bad luck.

An American doctor flew to Kenya in the early 1960s to prove that a people living on milk, meat and blood would have the worst hearts on earth, and found 400 men without a sign of heart disease between them. George Mann was a Vanderbilt professor who had helped set up the Framingham study, and he was not a crank. The theory of the day said that saturated fat raised cholesterol and cholesterol furred the arteries, and the Masai of the Rift Valley were the perfect test, because they ate almost nothing else. A warrior lived on milk, several litres of it a day, fresh or soured. He ate meat at feasts and on raids. When a bullock was needed and not to be killed, he opened a vein in its neck, drew off a gourd of blood, and drank that mixed with the milk. Vegetables were for women and the sick. By the arithmetic of the American Heart Association, the Masai should have been dropping on the plain. Mann put them through the machines. He took blood from hundreds and ran electrocardiograms on 400 young and middle-aged men, and in all of them found no evidence whatsoever of heart disease. Their cholesterol came back at about half the figure of an American of the same age. He put them on a step test and a treadmill and recorded a fitness he could only describe as Olympic standard: men who walked 20 miles a day behind cattle and would run alongside a vehicle for the fun of it. He went back and did the hard part. In 1972 he published autopsies on 50 Masai, and here is where the honest reader has to sit still, because it is the detail that makes the story. Their aortas showed atherosclerosis, plenty of it, lipid and fibrous change the whole length. And their coronary arteries were wide, far wider than an American's, and in none of the hearts was there a trace of a blockage, a scar or an infarct. They had the plaque and not the disease. The pipe had grown with the load. Whatever killed a Masai, and plenty did, it was not his milk. Mann came home a heretic and spent the rest of his career saying so in the journals, loudly, and the journals stopped printing him. The belief he had gone out to confirm is the belief still printed on the tub: that the fat of the animal is what stops a human heart. He took the best instruments of his age to the people who ate more of it than anyone alive, and the instruments said no, and the people were the fittest he had ever measured. The response of his profession was to find other populations. Four hundred men, half a doctor's expected cholesterol, zero disease, and a blood-and-milk breakfast. The science has had 60 years to answer that and has preferred to change the subject.

A cow cannot add a single atom of carbon to the sky, and the people who say she can have never followed one atom round. Grass is made out of air. The plant pulls carbon dioxide down and builds a leaf from it. The cow eats the leaf. The carbon is now in the cow. Some of it comes back out of her as methane. One carbon atom, four hydrogens, belched. Methane lasts about 12 years up there. Then it breaks back down into carbon dioxide. The grass pulls it down again. The cow eats the grass again. The same atom, round the same loop, since the first grazing animal walked onto the first grassland 50 million years ago. Nothing is added. The cow is a carbon atom's way of getting from one blade of grass to the next. A car works differently. The petrol was carbon that spent 300 million years locked under rock. Burn it and that carbon is in the sky, new, for a thousand years, and no cow on earth can bring it back down. A herd that stays the same size adds no warming at all. The methane going up equals the methane breaking down. Her grandmother's belch is already in this year's hay. The whole case against the cow rests on counting a loop as a leak. It is an error you can only make with the answer already decided.

University debate: "Chronic disease is the price of living long enough to get it." Doctor: "In 1900 the average Briton was dead at 47. Nobody lived long enough to get heart disease. We cured the infections and inherited the rest." Anthropologist: "Who was dying at 47?" Doctor: "It's an average." Anthropologist: "Of what?" Doctor: "...Babies, mostly. One in seven died in the first year." Anthropologist: "So a dead baby and a man of 90 average out at 45. Neither of them died at 45. The babies died and everyone else got old." Doctor: "Fewer got old." Anthropologist: "A 65-year-old in 1900 had about eleven years left. Now it's about nineteen. Eight years. That's the whole of your argument, and you've stretched it over a century of epidemics like a small tablecloth." Doctor: "Eight years at exactly the ages the diseases strike." Anthropologist: "Bowel cancer in the under-50s. Up 3.6% a year in England, falling in the over-65s. Which of those patients lived too long?" Doctor: "That's a separate trend." Anthropologist: "Type 2 diabetes in children. Nearly doubled in five years. Did not exist in a British child in 1990. Did the twelve-year-old live too long?" Doctor: "That's obesity." Anthropologist: "Obesity used to be a disease of age as well, if you want another one for the shelf." Doctor: "The rates still rise with an older population." Anthropologist: "Every rate you've quoted tonight is age-adjusted. A statistician took your excuse out of the numbers before they were printed. They went up anyway." Doctor: "Heart attacks have always been a disease of age." Anthropologist: "The first one was described in 1912. Boston was full of 70-year-olds in 1911. Not one of them had a heart attack, because nobody had invented it yet." Doctor: "You're saying old people didn't get ill." Anthropologist: "They wore out. They didn't catch a disease at 12 that their great-grandfather never caught at 80. You said people weren't living long enough. The children are living long enough. That's rather the problem." Moderator: "Time." Doctor: "Living longer remains the biggest risk factor there is." Anthropologist: "For dying. You've got the wrong disease."

A Melton Mowbray pork pie is pork, wrapped in pork fat, sealed with pork jelly. It was built to survive a day in the coat pocket of a man on a galloping horse. The pastry is like no other. You boil water with a block of lard until it melts, pour it hot into the flour, and work it while it is still warm. The result can be raised by hand into a tall case that will stand up on its own. It bakes as hard as a tin. The filling is fresh pork, chopped with a knife, with nothing added but salt and pepper. It cooks grey, the colour of a roast, and a real one is never pink. Then comes the clever part. As the meat cooks it shrinks away from the crust and leaves a gap. So when the pie comes out of the oven, hot stock made from boiled trotters is poured in through a hole in the lid. It sets into a jelly that fills every space and shuts out the air. That is what makes the pie keep. It was the food of the hunting field. The grooms and riders of Leicestershire needed something that would not fall apart at a fence, and from the 1830s Melton was sending them to London by stagecoach. And the pork was there for a reason. The same countryside makes Stilton. Cheesemaking leaves gallons of whey, and whey fattens pigs. The cheese fed the pig, and the pig became the pie. The recipe has been protected by law since 2009. Every part of it breaks a modern rule. It is also a complete meal you can eat with one hand, that needs no fridge and no packaging, and they solved it 200 years ago with a pig.

The lamb got its head through the stock fence on Sunday night and could not get it back, and Eduardo stood over it in the rain from dusk until the farmer found them at six. It happens. A sheep sees grass on the far side of square mesh and puts her head through, and the head goes through fine, and then she lifts it, and the ears catch, and she is held. She cannot reason backwards. She pulls, and pulls harder, and the more she pulls the more she is held, and a sheep caught in a fence overnight on a Welsh hill is a sheep the fox finds. Every farmer has found one in the morning. Not all of them were alive. The lamb is six months old, it thinks it is an alpaca, and it had gone to the fence at the top of the field at dusk and done the one thing an alpaca never would. The farmer did not see. The ewes do not care. The lamb pulled, and bleated, and pulled, and the rain came on at eight. Eduardo came up the field. He is a Huacaya alpaca whose whole living is to stand at the centre of a flock and do arithmetic on the edges of it, and the centre of the flock is where he was built to be, and he left it. He walked to the top fence and found the lamb hanging in the wire by its neck in the dark, and he stood next to it, and he did not leave. The farmer's daughter's sound box was on the post twenty yards along. She has the night. The lamb bleats, and the alpaca hums, and the lamb bleats, and the alpaca hums, every few minutes, for ten hours, in the rain, and twice in the recording there is a sound she had not heard him make before, a hard high alarm, and the second time it is followed by something going away fast through the hedge. The lamb stopped bleating at about three. The hum did not stop. The farmer found them at six. An alpaca standing square over a lamb that was lying flat with its head still in the wire, soaked through, cold, with its eyes open, and a cream animal above it with the rain running off him who had not eaten or sat or moved since the light went. He cut the wire. The lamb came out and lay there, and then got up, and shook, and went to stand under the alpaca's chin, and Eduardo put his nose down into the wet wool on the top of its head and hummed, once, low, the one from the glossary that the farmer has always said means all present and correct, and the farmer, who is not a man given to any of this, had to go and look at the hedge for a minute. He has told his wife the alpaca is not for sale. His wife said nobody had suggested it. He said he knew. He said he was just saying.

In Scotland it has been illegal to sell a glass of raw milk since 1983. The farmer may drink it. His children may drink it. The man at the gate may not buy it, and the dairy farmer who sells it to him has committed a crime. England kept a loophole: the farmer may sell it at the farm, and nowhere else. Not in a shop. Not to a café. It must carry a warning, and the inspector comes twice a year. In most of the United States it is a felony to carry it over a state line, and armed federal agents have raided Amish farms in Pennsylvania to seize it. This is milk as it comes from the cow. The food every mammal on earth starts life on, which fed this island for six thousand years before anybody boiled it. Pasteurisation was invented for the swill dairies of the Victorian cities, where cows stood in their own filth under distilleries and the milk killed children, and it was the right answer to that. The clean farm was never the problem. The clean farm got the same law. What raw milk carries that the heated kind does not is the point of it: the enzymes that digest it, the living cultures, the proteins that fold properly only until the temperature goes past them. The people who drink it will tell you that children who could not stomach the carton can drink the churn. The authorities will tell you that is anecdote and that the risk is unacceptable, and then license the sale of raw oysters, raw beef, raw fish and raw eggs without a word. A thousand farms in England sell it legally and their waiting lists are long. North of the border a woman can drive to a farm, look at the cow, and be refused a pint of what it made that morning. Nobody banned milk. They banned the kind with anything left in it.

High reps are more fatiguing than heavy weights. A set of 20 at a light weight costs you more than a set of 5 at a heavy one, and the mechanism is time. A heavy set of 5 takes about 15 seconds. A light set of 20 to failure takes a minute. Every kind of fatigue a muscle produces is built by time spent contracting: - Hydrogen ions and phosphate pile up inside the fibre with every second of work - Those metabolites block the calcium the fibre needs to produce force - Nerve endings in the muscle read the build-up and turn down the signal from the brain - Calcium leaks for longer, so more fibres end up damaged The 5 reps that build muscle are the last 5 before failure in both sets. Their cost is everything else. The heavy set buys them for 15 seconds of chemistry. The light set buys the same 5 reps for a minute of it, then spends three days recovering from the minute. Load was never the fatigue. Time was.

Activist: "Your beef isn't even organic." Farmer: "What is it, then?" Activist: "Conventional. Sprayed, fertilised, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics." Farmer: "Hormones have been illegal in British beef since the eighties. For all of us. Organic or not." Activist: "Antibiotics, then." Farmer: "She gets them when she's ill. Same as your kids. The organic rulebook allows that too, with a catch." Activist: "What catch?" Farmer: "Ill three times in a year and she loses her badge. So an organic cow had best not get ill. The rulebook also says herbal and homeopathic remedies are to be tried first, in preference to actual medicine. It's in the regulation. I'm not making it up." Activist: "Homeopathy." Farmer: "A sugar pill for a cow with pneumonia, in preference. Provided it works." Activist: "At least organic cattle eat grass." Farmer: "An organic animal only has to be 60% forage. The rest of its dinner can be grain out of a trough, so long as the grain's got the badge as well. Mine has never seen a trough. There's nothing on this hill but grass and weather." Activist: "And pesticides. You spray." Farmer: "Spray what? Find me the sprayer. Nothing has gone on this hill in my lifetime that didn't come out of a cow. The organic lot are allowed to put copper on their veg, mind. Look it up." Activist: "So what's the difference?" Farmer: "About a thousand pounds a year to an inspector, and a word on the packet. The organic farmer pays to be told he's doing what my grandad did. I just do it." Activist: "The label still means something." Farmer: "It means the paperwork was organic. Nobody has ever certified the rain. She's drinking it now, uncertified, and getting on fine."

What a farmer feeds a pig when he wants it fat: Barley. Wheat. Maize. Soya meal. Skimmed milk. Whey. Stale bread from the bakery. Potato waste. Apples, in autumn. Water, lots, so it keeps eating. What a dietician feeds you when she wants you thin: Porridge. Wholemeal bread. Brown rice. Pasta. Skimmed milk. Low-fat yoghurt. Potatoes, jacket. Five pieces of fruit. Two litres of water. Same list. The pig at least knows what it is for.