Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

University debate: "The most vegan meal on earth is a grass-fed steak."

Vegan: "I'm sorry, I've read the motion three times. Is it a misprint?"

Anthropologist: "No."

Vegan: "You're going to stand in front of four hundred people and tell them a steak is vegan."

Anthropologist: "The most vegan. I'd like credit for the full claim."

Vegan: "It's a dead cow."

Anthropologist: "One. What did you have for lunch?"

Vegan: "A lentil and rice bowl. Nothing died for it."

Anthropologist: "It came off a ploughed field. Mice, voles, ground nests, every insect in it, cleared out several times a year by a machine the width of this stage. One bullock feeds a person for twelve months. I'm on one death. You lost count at the starter."

Vegan: "Those are accidents."

Anthropologist: "I'll let the voles know it wasn't personal."

Vegan: "Fine. The planet. Cattle take up enormous amounts of land."

Anthropologist: "Hill, rain and grass. Land no plough can touch. He eats what grew there by itself and nobody has to clear a thing. Your lentils needed the field emptied first."

Vegan: "We could rewild it."

Anthropologist: "With what?"

Vegan: "...Grazing animals."

Anthropologist: "I've brought some."

Vegan: "This is absurd. Humans can get everything they need from plants."

Anthropologist: "There's a lawn outside. Help yourself."

Vegan: "We can't digest grass."

Anthropologist: "He can. Four stomachs and a vat of bacteria. He's the only system on earth that gets everything out of a plant, and he hands it over as protein, iron and the B12 you're taking as a tablet."

Vegan: "So your argument is that the cow is vegan."

Anthropologist: "Strictly. Never touched meat in his life. I'm simply eating a plant-based diet that's been finished properly."

Vegan: "You cannot call that vegan."

Anthropologist: "Fewest deaths, no plough, no supplements. If you've a better word for what you were after, I'll use it."

Moderator: "Time."

Vegan: "I'd like the motion read out again."

Moderator: "It's still not a misprint."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1998 the most trusted cook in Britain went on television to show the nation how to boil an egg, and sold 54 million extra eggs.

Delia Smith had left school at 16 without a qualification. She had been a hairdresser and a washer-up. By the 1990s she had sold more cookery books than anyone in British history, and when she recommended a thing, the shops ran out of it.

That autumn she began a new series called How to Cook. The first programme started at the very beginning. How to tell if an egg is fresh. How to boil one. How to fry one, in a little fat, basting the top. How to make an omelette, in butter, in a proper pan.

The chefs were scornful. A grown woman, on the BBC, in prime time, explaining a boiled egg. One of them called it insulting.

The public's verdict came through the tills. Egg sales across the country rose by 10%. A small firm in Lancashire that made a plain aluminium omelette pan had been selling 200 a year. Delia called it a little gem, and they sold 90,000 in 4 months.

Now do the dates. Cookery had been taken off the school timetable in 1990. Eggs had been under suspicion since the cholesterol scare of the 1970s, and a government minister had frightened the country off them altogether in 1988.

So by 1998 there was a generation that had never been taught to cook, and had been warned off the cheapest and most complete food in the kitchen. Millions of them were sitting at home, not knowing how long to boil it, and too embarrassed to ask.

Delia never made a speech about any of that. She put the pan on and showed them.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

"I've got raw milk in the cooler. Can I drive it across the state line?"

"No. Federal offence since 1987."

"Raw oysters?"

"Fine."

"Steak tartare."

"Fine."

"Sushi."

"Fine."

"Cigarettes."

"Fine."

"Bourbon."

"Fine."

"So what's different about the milk?"

"It hasn't been pasteurized."

"Neither have the oysters."

"The oysters aren't milk."

"Is there any legal way to take it with me?"

"Label it pet food."

"And then?"

"What a man does with his cat's milk is his own business."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

For fifty years Britain treated a poorly child with Lucozade, a bottle of glucose handed over at the exact moment the child's white blood cells needed to be at their quickest.

If you were ill in the 1960s or 70s you remember it. The heavy glass, the crackle of the yellow cellophane, the fizz going flat on the bedside table by teatime. It came from the chemist, which made it medicine, and "Lucozade aids recovery" stayed on the label until 1983. Visitors carried it onto hospital wards the way they now carry grapes.

It held so much sugar that NHS clinics poured it as the dose for the diabetes test, right up until 2017, when the recipe was halved to dodge the sugar tax.

Give a healthy adult 100g of sugar and the white cells that swallow bacteria slow down, and five hours later they are still slow. It happens with glucose. It happens with honey. It happens with orange juice.

Lucozade, honey and lemon, a glass of orange for the cold. The whole British sickbed is on that list.

The World Health Organization now tells surgeons to keep the sugar down in the blood of every adult on the operating table, diabetic or not, because a high reading lets infection into the wound.

Milk was built for the opposite job.

A calf is born with almost no antibodies of its own. Every one it fights its first weeks with arrives in its mother's milk, and raw milk goes on carrying the kit:

- Antibodies, aimed at whatever is going round the farm
- Lactoferrin, which locks away the iron bacteria feed on
- Lysozyme, which splits their walls open
- White blood cells, still alive

When about a thousand babies were followed through their first year across five European countries, the ones given raw farm milk had fewer colds, fewer ear infections and fewer fevers than the ones given long-life milk from the shop. Heating the farm milk at home took much of that away.

Britain fought a child's infection with a bottle that slows the white blood cells down, and pasteurised the drink that comes with its own.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Diner: "I have to say something. I don't even like vegetables, and I've eaten every one on this plate."

Waiter: "Thank you, madam."

Diner: "The carrots. They're almost sweet. Glossy."

Waiter: "Butter. They're cooked in it until there's nothing left in the pan but the shine."

Diner: "The spinach, then. I've never had spinach like it."

Waiter: "Cream. A kilo of spinach cooks down to about a handful. What you had was mostly the cream."

Diner: "The leeks?"

Waiter: "Butter, then cream."

Diner: "The potato thing. With the layers."

Waiter: "The dauphinoise. Cream, with potato in it to stop it running off the plate."

Diner: "The green beans were just green beans, surely."

Waiter: "Tossed in butter at the pass. Chef won't let them leave without it."

Diner: "So when I said I loved the vegetables..."

Waiter: "You loved the butter, madam. The vegetables were how we got it to the table."

Diner: "I steam mine at home. For my health."

Waiter: "And do you eat every one on the plate?"

Diner: "...I bin about half."

Waiter: "We steamed the carrots here once. In 2009. Chef still doesn't talk about it."

Diner: "I thought I was finally turning into a vegetable person."

Waiter: "Nobody is, madam. There are people with butter and people without."

Diner: "Could I see the dessert menu?"

Waiter: "It's the same two ingredients. We just stop pretending."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Japan is the plant-based poster child of every longevity book ever written, and nobody has told the Japanese.

What the books say Japan lives on:

- Rice
- Tofu
- Seaweed
- Green tea
- Sweet potato
- A sliver of fish, on special occasions

What Japan lives on:

- Protein from animals: more than half of it
- Protein from tofu and all other soy: under a tenth
- Meat per head: up more than tenfold since 1950
- Fat in the diet: tripled since 1950
- Eggs: about 330 each a year, near the top of the world table
- Milk: in every school lunch since 1954
- Rice: less than half what it was in 1962

In 1950 the Japanese did eat like the books say. They were 10cm shorter, stroke was the leading cause of death, and life expectancy was around 60.

Then the animal food went up every decade. Stroke deaths fell by more than 80%, and Japan went to the top of the world table at 84.

When researchers studied Japan's centenarians, they found the 100 year olds were eating more animal protein than the national average.

Okinawa, the island the books love most, is the pork capital of the country. The saying there is that you eat every part of the pig but the squeal.

Its famous sweet potato diet was recorded in 1949, on an island that had just been flattened. It was what was left.

The books describe a Japan the Japanese left as fast as they could afford to.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Activist: "A vegan world wouldn't need your animals at all. Just crops."

Farmer: "What feeds the crop?"

Activist: "The soil."

Farmer: "And what feeds the soil? Take wheat off a field every year and something has to go back on."

Activist: "Compost."

Farmer: "Made of what? You've sent the plants to the shops."

Activist: "Organic fertiliser, then."

Farmer: "Read the sack. Manure. Chicken litter. Blood, fish and bone."

Activist: "The ordinary kind."

Farmer: "That's natural gas. They burn it to pull nitrogen out of the air. About half the people alive are fed on it, and the price of bread moves whenever a pipeline does."

Activist: "There must be a third thing."

Farmer: "Clover will fix you some nitrogen. Then you want something to eat the clover."

Activist: "..."

Farmer: "Every carrot you've ever had has been through an animal or a gasworks. I can show you the animal. She's the one stood behind you, fertilising."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

MCT oil is sold to the keto crowd as rocket fuel for the brain, and the three fats it's famous for are named after the goat.

Caproic, caprylic and capric acid. All three come from capra, Latin for goat, because they smell like one and goat's milk is full of them. They make up about 15% of the fat in goat's milk. Cow's milk carries about a third of that.

Medium-chain fats are the fast lane. They skip most of the digestive queue, go more or less straight to the liver and get turned into ketones, which is the entire sales pitch printed on the bottle.

The bottle gets them out of coconut or palm kernel oil in a factory, strips out the smell, and charges you by the 500ml for the privilege.

The goat makes them for her kid, for nothing, in a white milk you can drink by the litre. White because a goat converts the carotene in what she eats into vitamin A before it reaches the milk, so there's no yellow left to show. Her butter comes out the colour of chalk for the same reason, and it spreads straight from the fridge like it's showing off.

I drink a litre of raw goat milk most days. It tastes faintly of goat, which is how you know the expensive part is still in it.

The tang people wrinkle their noses at in goat's cheese is the exact molecule they're buying at the gym in a bottle with a lightning bolt on it.



Mike

 

[Medusa]

In 1992 ontdekte een chirurg in Caïro een mannelijk voorbehoedsmiddel dat werkte bij elke man die het droeg, en het was een stukje polyester.

Ahmed Shafik leidde de afdeling chirurgie aan de Universiteit van Caïro. Hij nam 14 gezonde mannen en voorzag elk van hen van een polyester sling om de testikels te ondersteunen, die dag en nacht een jaar lang werd gedragen en alleen werd vervangen als het gewassen moest worden.

Tussen vier en vijf maanden later hadden alle 14 helemaal geen sperma meer. Nul. Ze bleven op nul voor de rest van het jaar.

Hij nam de slings af en wachtte. De tellingen kwamen terug, gemiddeld zo’n vijf maanden later. Een biopsie na zes maanden had aangetoond dat de buisjes die sperma aanmaken aan het degenereren waren, en de schade was nog steeds zichtbaar een half jaar nadat het polyester was verwijderd.

Hij had het al eerder op ratten geprobeerd. In 1993 kleedde hij 75 van hen in piepkleine broekjes van katoen, wol, polyester of een polyestermengsel en liet hij ze die tot wel een jaar dragen. De ratten in polyester paarden merkbaar minder vaak. De ratten in wol gingen door zoals ratten dat doen.

Daarna probeerde hij het op honden. Een dozijn in polyester broekjes, een dozijn in katoen, gedurende twee jaar. De katoenhonden waren onveranderd. De tellingen van de polyesterhonden daalden, hun abnormale sperma nam toe, en twee van hen hadden een jaar later nog steeds niet hersteld.

Hij mat de statische lading die de stof opzette door wrijving tegen de huid, en gaf dat de schuld. Katoen bouwde geen statische lading op.

Hij publiceerde alles, noemde de sling een veilig en omkeerbaar voorbehoedsmiddel, en in 2016 kreeg hij een Ig Nobelprijs, de prijs voor onderzoek dat mensen eerst aan het lachen maakt en daarna aan het denken zet.

Tussen 1973 en 2018 daalden de sperm tellingen wereldwijd met meer dan de helft. In dezelfde jaren ging polyester van een noviteit naar de meest gedragen vezel op aarde, 59% van alles wat in 2024 werd gesponnen, en nu standaard in sportondergoed, gyms shorts, beddengoed en schooluniformen.

Een chirurg stopte veertien mannen erin en zette hun vruchtbaarheid uit als een kraan.

De rest van ons draagt de proef nog steeds.

 

[fatsnotbad]

Mother: "Is raw milk really all right for children? My health visitor went white when I asked."

Farmer: "What did you feed them first?"

Mother: "Breast milk."

Farmer: "Did you heat it?"

Mother: "No."

Farmer: "That was raw milk. Full of antibodies and live proteins that teach a baby's immune system what to ignore. Cow's milk carries the same sort of thing, until it's heated."

Mother: "And heating does what?"

Farmer: "The legal test for pasteurised milk is that one of its enzymes is dead. That's how they know it's done."

Mother: "But does any of it matter?"

Farmer: "Germany, Austria and Switzerland wanted to know why farm children get so little asthma and hay fever. They followed over 8,000 of them."

Mother: "I'd have guessed the fresh air."

Farmer: "So did they. It was the milk. Children on raw farm milk had about 40% less asthma, whether they lived on a farm or not."

Mother: "Could be it's just fresher."

Farmer: "They checked. Boil the same milk and the benefit goes. It tracked with the whey proteins the heat destroys."

Mother: "Mine have had a cold since September."

Farmer: "They followed babies as well. A third fewer colds and ear infections in the ones on raw milk."

Mother: "So I'm not being reckless."

Farmer: "You're asking for what every child got until about 80 years ago. From a herd that's tested every quarter and inspected twice a year."

Mother: "Why did nobody tell me any of this?"

Farmer: "There's no rep for it. I've a cow and an honesty box."

Mother: "Four litres."

Farmer: "There's two children. I'd make it six."



Mike

 

[Medusa]

Eet een pond rundvlees per dag, elke dag gedurende een jaar, en één dier sterft. Eén stierkalf, twee jaar op gras, een schot in het voorhoofd en weg voordat het geluid hem bereikt.

Eet een pond varkensvlees per dag gedurende een jaar en 3 varkens sterven. De meeste gaan met een lift omlaag in een kuil met koolstofdioxide. Het brandt in de neus en keel, ze vechten om eruit te klimmen, en het duurt het grootste deel van een minuut om ze onder zeil te krijgen.

Eet een pond lamsvlees per dag gedurende een jaar en 8 lammeren sterven. Verdoofd, doorgesneden, gedaan in een seconde.

Eet een pond zalm per dag gedurende een jaar en 55 vissen sterven, plus de sardientjes waarmee ze gevoed werden. De gelukkigen worden doodgeslagen. De rest krijgt de kieuwen doorgesneden terwijl ze wakker zijn, of ze worden vergast, en ze vechten ertegen tot wel negen minuten.

Eet een pond kip per dag gedurende een jaar en 75 vogels sterven. Op z’n kop aan de poten opgehangen aan een lopende band, kop eerst door een geëlektrificeerd bad gesleept, en dan het mes. Sommigen buigen hun nek, missen het water, en ontmoeten het mes terwijl ze wakker zijn.

Eet een pond garnalen per dag gedurende een jaar en 15.000 sterven. In de sleepnet worden ze verpletterd en achtergelaten om te stikken op het dek. Op de boerderij wordt het oogstengel van hun moeder afgesneden om haar te laten leggen.

Eet een pond brood per dag gedurende een jaar en niemand kan je een getal geven. Veldmuizen, woelmuizen en nestelende vogels gaan in juli door de maaidorser. In Duitsland alleen al snijden de maaiers rond de 90.000 reeënkalveren in mei doormidden. Rond de graanschuur nemen de ratten het gif en bloeden ze een week lang vanbinnen dood.

Eet een pond rijst per dag gedurende een jaar en het rijstveld wordt onder water gezet, leeggepompt en gespoten, en alles in het water gaat eraan. Kikkers, vissen, slangen, alles. Dan wordt het stoppelveld verbrand.

De stier had een nummer op een oormerk en een man die elke ochtend naar hem keek.

De veldmuis had een maaidorser.

Het enige dier op de lijst dat in de ogen werd gekeken voordat het stierf, is degene van wie je geleerd hebt gekregen dat je je schuldig moet voelen.

 

[fatsnotbad]

I've been unfair to vegetables. Six years into carnivore, I can admit they are extremely good for you. The trouble is that almost nobody prepares them properly.

Steaming doesn't do it. Roasting doesn't do it. A smoothie is just an assault. A plant is a locked box, built by something that did not want to be eaten, and a kitchen cannot open it.

The correct method:

- Take 25 tonnes of mixed greens, raw
- Chew each mouthful forty times, then bring it back up and do it again
- Ferment at 39 degrees, sealed, for two days
- Strain off the oxalates, the lectins and the roughage
- Reduce slowly over two years
- Rest, then sear in butter

Makes about 250 kilos.

It is a lot of work, so I have somebody in. He does it standing in a field.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The part of France that eats the most duck fat has the fewest heart attacks in the country. When the world found out in 1991, it gave the credit to the wine.

The place is Gascony, in the south west. Its great dish is confit. You take the legs of a fattened duck or goose, salt them overnight, and cook them for hours, very slowly, submerged in their own melted fat. Then you pack them into a stone crock, pour the fat over the top until they are sealed, and put them in the cellar. They will keep all winter.

Everything else is cooked in what is left. Potatoes are fried in duck fat. Beans are stewed with it. A Gascon housewife traditionally kept no cooking oil and little butter, because the bird supplied all she needed. The same region produces most of the world's foie gras, and eats a great deal of it.

In 1991 a French researcher gave the figures to an American television programme. Among middle-aged men, deaths from heart attack ran at about 315 per 100,000 in the United States. For France as a whole it was 145. In Gascony it was 80.

The programme called it the French paradox and suggested the answer might be red wine. Sales of red wine in America jumped by nearly half within weeks.

Nobody rushed out to buy a crock of goose fat.

It was only a paradox if you began by assuming the fat was the danger. The Gascons never assumed that. They had been preserving meat under it since before France existed.

The healthiest hearts in the country belonged to people who kept a duck in a jar of its own dripping.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Customer: "Do you do anything plant-based?"

Butcher: "All of it."

Customer: "Sorry?"

Butcher: "The lamb's plant-based. Grass, mostly."

Customer: "I meant made from plants."

Butcher: "So did I. He ate nothing else."

Customer: "I mean without the animal."

Butcher: "Then who's going to eat the grass?"

Customer: "The burgers in the supermarket manage it."

Butcher: "They've got twenty ingredients and a factory. Mine's got one and a hill."

Customer: "It's not the same thing."

Butcher: "No. Theirs is plants pretending to be meat. Mine's plants that got there."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Lancashire hotpot is a dish of fatty mutton that cooks itself for eight hours. It was invented for women who worked.

In the cotton towns of the 19th century, wives and mothers went out to the mill. Lancashire had more married women in paid work than anywhere else in Britain. They left the house before six and were not back until evening, and there was a family to feed at the end of it.

So the dinner was built in the morning. Chops from the neck of a sheep, the cheapest and fattiest cut, went into the bottom of a tall brown pot. On top went sliced onion, a few kidneys, and in those days a handful of oysters, which were poor people's food. Then a thick lid of sliced potato, overlapping like roof tiles, brushed with dripping.

The pot went into the oven beside the fire as it burned low, or was carried down the street to the baker's, who let it sit in his cooling bread oven for a penny. Nobody touched it all day.

By evening the mutton had fallen off the bone. Its fat had risen through the pot, soaked up into the potatoes and crisped the top to a deep brown crust.

It had to be mutton. The meat of a grown sheep has the flavour and the fat to stand a whole day's cooking. Lamb turns to string.

That was a hot dinner of meat and animal fat, on the table of a working family, six nights a week, with no adult at home.

The modern recipe calls for lean diced lamb, a splash of oil and two hours. It is neither as good nor as clever, and the women who invented it would have noticed straight away.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Britain has already run the experiment of putting a whole nation on a plant-based diet, with the full backing of the state. The official dish was called Woolton pie, and nobody has cooked one since.

It was 1941. Meat was rationed to a few ounces a week, and the Ministry of Food needed people to fill up on what could be grown at home. So it commissioned a recipe from the head chef of the Savoy Hotel. Potatoes, swede, carrots and cauliflower, boiled, thickened with oatmeal, and baked under a crust of potato or wholemeal pastry. It was named after the Minister, Lord Woolton, and the recipe was printed in The Times.

Everything was done to make the country love it. Posters. Radio talks. Cartoon characters called Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot.

The public ate it because there was nothing else, and described it accurately. Steak and kidney pie, they said, without the steak or the kidney.

Look at the other recipes the Ministry gave out and you can see what people were really thinking about. Mock goose, made of lentils. Mock duck. Mock crab. Mock cream. Every one of them was named after the animal food it was pretending to be.

Meat came off the ration on 4 July 1954. Housewives held a ceremony in Trafalgar Square, and Smithfield market opened at midnight to cope.

Woolton pie vanished overnight. It is not in the cookery books of the 1950s. Nobody's grandmother kept making it out of fondness.

48 million people gave the vegetable diet a fair trial for 14 years, under the best propaganda machine the country ever built. On the first day they were free to choose, they went to the butcher.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The gym has been eating chicken for forty years and calling it discipline. Except it's not discipline. It is beef with the nutrition removed.

Beef is red because it is full of iron. Chicken is white because the iron never turned up.

Beef carries six times the zinc, the mineral that testosterone runs on. Chicken carries enough to keep a sparrow going.

Beef carries eight times the B12. Chicken carries a rounding error.

Beef carries twenty times the carnitine, the molecule that gets fat into the furnace, which is the thing he bought the fat burner for.

Beef comes with its own fat, saturated and stable, the fat a cell wall is built from. Chicken breast comes with a teaspoon, and the fat on the thigh and skin is a fifth polyunsaturated, because the bird was raised on soy.

Beef comes off an animal that spent two years on a hill eating grass. Chicken comes off an animal that spent six weeks in a shed and was dead before it could crow.

Beef built the Zulu, the Comanche, the Maasai and every strongman photographed before 1960. Chicken built a generation of men who are tired at 3pm.

The golden era ate steak and eggs and looked like it. The chicken and rice era arrived at the same time as the supplement aisle, and the supplement aisle sells exactly the things the chicken left out.

An iron tablet, a zinc tablet, a B12 spray and a fish oil capsule, lined up next to a dry breast on a plastic plate, add up to roughly one steak.

He could have had the steak. The steak came assembled.



Mike