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[fatsnotbad]

The official state dish of Texas is a stew of beef cooked in beef fat. By the rules of the people who invented it, adding beans is an offence.

Chili began on the cattle trails and in the plazas of San Antonio. From the 1860s women known as the chili queens set up tables in the square at dusk and sold it by the bowl to soldiers, cowhands and anyone passing. It was the first street food in America to become famous.

Their recipe had three things in it. Beef, cut small with a knife. Dried red chillies. And suet, the hard fat from round the kidneys, rendered down in the pot before anything else went in. The meat was fried in it and then simmered for hours until the fat rose in a red layer on top. That layer was the mark of a good one.

On the trail, cooks pounded dried beef, suet and chillies together into bricks that would keep for months and only needed boiling water. One Texas historian called it the pemmican of the Southwest.

There were no beans. There were no tomatoes. Texans have a saying about anyone who puts beans in, and it questions whether he knows anything at all.

In 1977 the Texas legislature made it the official state dish.

The best known recipe in the country belonged to President Lyndon Johnson. After his heart attack, his doctors had him take out the suet.

So the dish has gone the way of everything else. The tin on the shelf today is mostly beans and tomato, thickened with starch, with the fat skimmed off.

The cowboys who drove ten million cattle north would not have fed it to the dog.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Customer: "Why's beef so dear? The chicken's a third of the price for the same weight."

Butcher: "How old's the chicken?"

Customer: "No idea."

Butcher: "About six weeks. Hatched, fed, gone. Never saw a season."

Customer: "And the bullock?"

Butcher: "That one was two summers out on the hill before he came to me. Thirty months, give or take."

Customer: "So I'm paying for..."

Butcher: "Time. Two years of grass, rain, a farmer getting up in the dark and a field doing what fields do. The chicken's six weeks in a shed on a bag of soya."

Customer: "Put like that, the chicken's the expensive one."

Butcher: "Per week of life, it's the dearest thing in the shop. You're just not paying for its life. You're paying for the shed."

Customer: "The beef still costs more at the till."

Butcher: "Everything that takes two years costs more than everything that takes six weeks. Whisky. Cheese. Oak. Nobody stands in a distillery asking why the vodka's cheaper."

Customer: "I'll have the beef."

Butcher: "He'd have wanted that. He put the work in."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

People ask me why I'm so obsessed with ruminants. I've given it some thought, and my conclusion is that I'm not obsessed enough.

A cow walks onto a wet hillside that grows nothing a human can eat, puts her head down, and comes back with steak, butter, cream and a pair of boots.

She does it with a 150 litre fermentation tank she carries inside her, stocked with more bacteria than there have ever been people, which she feeds, waters and keeps at blood heat herself. Grass goes in. The bacteria take apart the one thing no animal can digest, and she lives on what they make. Then she digests the bacteria as well. Nothing is wasted. Even the fat comes out the far side rebuilt into something stable enough to fry in.

Fuel: rain and sunlight. Emissions: next year's grass. She repairs herself, builds her own replacement every spring, and improves the ground she is standing on while she works. The finest engineers alive have spent billions trying to copy one chamber of her stomach in a steel shed, and so far they have made a paste.

We have leaned on that machine for everything. The word capital comes from cattle, because a herd was the first bank. Domesday Book is written on sheep, and so was every deed in England for 500 years. Ruminants clothed our armies, lit our houses and carried our laws. Civilisation is a thing that happened to people who kept them.

And they are such good company about it.

A sheep remembers fifty faces for two years, which is forty-six more than I manage. A cow has a best friend, and her heart rate drops when that friend is beside her. A goat that cannot solve a problem will turn and look to you for help, as a dog does, and then ignore your advice. Let a herd out onto spring grass after a winter indoors and half a tonne of animal will skip.

They ask for grass, rain, and to be left to get on with it.

After ten thousand years of feeding, dressing and housing us, they will still walk over to the gate to see who you are.

So no, I will not be calming down.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

University debate: "The Blue Zones prove a plant-based diet is the key to longevity."

Vegan: "Five places on earth where people routinely reach 100. Okinawa, Sardinia, Ikaria, Nicoya, Loma Linda. The common thread is beans, greens, wholegrains and barely any meat. It's the strongest longevity evidence we have."

Anthropologist: "What else do the five have in common?"

Vegan: "Community. Purpose. Walking."

Anthropologist: "Terrible paperwork. Four of the five are remote islands or hill districts with poor birth records, and the fifth is a church. When a researcher went through the data, the places with the most centenarians were the places with the worst record-keeping and the most pension fraud."

Vegan: "That's a slur on old people."

Anthropologist: "In 2010 Japan went looking for its registered centenarians and couldn't find 230,000 of them. Some had been dead for decades with the family collecting the pension. Greece found about 9,000 pensioners over 100 who turned out to be in the cemetery. Okinawa's records were destroyed in the war and rewritten from memory."

Vegan: "Even so, the diet in those places..."

Anthropologist: "Say what it was."

Vegan: "Sweet potato, in Okinawa."

Anthropologist: "And pork. Every part of the pig, cooked in lard, the highest pork intake in Japan. The Okinawan word for a feast means 'pig'. Sardinia?"

Vegan: "Beans and bread."

Anthropologist: "Sheep. The Sardinian shepherds you're quoting live on pecorino, lamb and a glass of red. Ikaria is goat and goat's milk. Nicoya eats more eggs and pork than the rest of Costa Rica. Loma Linda is the one true vegetarian zone, and they also don't smoke, drink or divorce. Take the meat out of the other four and the sum doesn't move."

Vegan: "The man who wrote the book spent years there."

Anthropologist: "He sells the book. The researcher who checked the records got an Ig Nobel prize for it, which is what science gives you for pointing out the emperor's birth certificate is missing."

Vegan: "So you're saying nobody there is old."

Anthropologist: "I'm saying the oldest-looking data on earth tends to be in the places where nobody can check it, and when you do check, the diet turns out to be pig."

Vegan: "Then what's the real Blue Zone?"

Anthropologist: "Hong Kong. Longest life expectancy on the planet, immaculate records, and the highest meat consumption in Asia. It's not in the book because you can't sell beans with it."

Moderator: "Time."

Vegan: "I've been to Okinawa."

Anthropologist: "What did they serve you?"

Vegan: "..."

Anthropologist: "It's all right. Everyone says pork eventually."



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

For most of human history, when a mother could not feed her baby, the baby went to a goat. Then a factory offered to do the goat's job, and you can guess which one is now sold as the scientific choice.

Goat milk is milk. Formula is skimmed milk powder with the fat removed and replaced by palm, rapeseed, coconut and sunflower oil.

Goat milk fat comes in globules smaller than a cow's, with more of the short and medium chain fats a baby burns easily. Formula fat comes out of a refinery.

Goat milk carries cholesterol, because an infant brain is built out of it. Formula carries next to none.

Goat milk carries oligosaccharides, the sugars that feed a baby's gut bacteria, and its profile sits closer to human milk than any other animal's. Formula manufacturers now synthesise a couple of them and print it on the tin as an innovation.

Goat milk is served warm, raw and alive, straight from the animal. Formula is spray dried, sealed, and brought back to life with the kitchen tap.

In 1816 a German physician published a book calling the goat the best wet nurse available. French foundling hospitals kept herds for the purpose and the infants suckled directly from the animal.

In 1816 nobody had a formula industry. Today it turns over about £40 billion a year, and the European Union only re-admitted goat milk as a base for infant formula in 2014, which means it had been banned.

Two centuries of goats and a two hundred million year track record on one side. Fifty years and a seed oil blend on the other.

The one with the seed oils is the one with the word science on the tin.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The heart attack was first described in a medical journal in 1912, and the man who described it had trouble finding a second case.

Doctors had been opening chests for 300 years. They had dissected kings, paupers, drunks and the obese, and the blocked coronary artery was a rarity you wrote up.

A young Boston cardiologist started practising in 1911. He later said he did not see his first heart attack patient until 1921, and then they came in a flood.

By 1950 it was the biggest killer in the United States. By 1960, in Britain.

Victorian England ate butter, dripping, suet, bacon and cream, and smoked like a chimney, and the coronary ward did not exist.

The Masai lived on milk, meat and blood, and the doctors who went looking in the 1960s could not find heart disease among them.

So what arrived between the dissecting rooms of 1900 and the coronary care units of 1960?

Crisco launched in 1911. Cottonseed oil hardened into a block that looked like lard.

Margarine followed it into every kitchen.

By 1960 a quarter of American fat came out of a seed press that had not existed in 1900.

The seed oil goes into your blood on the LDL particle. It is the part of the particle that oxidises. The oxidised particle is what the artery wall takes in.

The cholesterol was in the butter for a thousand years and the artery stayed open.

Then the fat changed, and a disease nobody had heard of became the way most people die.

The guideline blames the butter. The butter has an alibi going back to the Bronze Age.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The man Robinson Crusoe was based on spent four years alone on an island in the Pacific, lived almost entirely on goat, and ran so fast by the end that the crew who rescued him could not keep up with him across the hills.

Alexander Selkirk was a shoemaker's son from Fife with a temper, sailing with privateers off Chile in 1704 when he decided the ship was rotten and demanded to be put ashore. The captain obliged. The ship sank a few weeks later. Selkirk was twenty-eight, on an island four hundred miles from land, with a musket, a knife, a pound of powder and a Bible.

The island had goats, left by Spanish sailors a century before. When the powder ran out he learned to run them down barefoot on the mountainsides, catching them by the horns and killing them with the knife. He counted five hundred. He ate their meat, drank their milk, made his clothes from their skins, and when he was lame he had already crippled a few kids so he would always have one he could catch.

When Captain Woodes Rogers found him in February 1709 the castaway was dressed in goatskin and had half forgotten English. Rogers wrote that he was in rude health, and watched him go up the slopes after goats faster than the ship's dog. Rogers' crew were rotten with scurvy after months at sea on salt beef and biscuit. Selkirk brought them two or three goats a day until they were well, and the captain made him second mate.

Four years of goat and seal. No bread, no grain, no fruit to speak of. The man came off the island fitter than any sailor in a navy that was losing more men to scurvy than to the Spanish.

Defoe gave the fictional version a parrot and a man Friday. The real one had a knife and a hillside full of meat, and that was enough.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The Yorkshire pudding was invented to catch fat. Its original name, in the first recipe ever printed, was the dripping pudding.

That recipe appeared in 1737. A joint of mutton turned on a spit in front of the kitchen fire. As it roasted, the fat ran out of it and fell, hissing, into the hearth. It was the most valuable thing in the meal, and it was going up the chimney.

So some northern cook slid a pan of pancake batter underneath. The fat dripped into it for the whole of the roasting. The batter fried from below and soaked from above, and rose into something crisp, hollow and rich. The recipe tells you to shake the pan now and then, so that it is "light and savoury".

Ten years later a cookery writer called Hannah Glasse printed it again and gave it the name of the county it came from.

It was served first, on its own, with gravy. That was the point. A family filled up on pudding, which was cheap, and the joint went further. The old rule at the table was that those who ate the most pudding got the most meat.

So the nation's favourite side dish began as a device for making sure not one drop of animal fat was lost.

It still only works properly one way. The tin has to be smoking with beef dripping before the batter goes in. Made with oil it comes out pale and tastes of cardboard.

In 2008 the Royal Society of Chemistry solemnly ruled that a true Yorkshire pudding must stand at least four inches tall.

Britain kept the pudding, built a standard for it, and threw away the dripping it was designed to save.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

One of the founders of the Mayo Foundation ran a sanatorium for sixteen years in which he treated heart failure, kidney disease, high blood pressure, tuberculosis and obesity with one medicine: raw milk, several quarts a day, and nothing else.

J. E. Crewe was not a crank. He was a physician at the most famous clinic in America, and the milk cure was an old treatment he had decided to take seriously. The patient went to bed. Every half hour through the day a glass of raw milk from grass-fed cows went down, up to four or five quarts, sometimes more. No other food. Weeks of it.

He wrote it up in 1929 and the detail that stands out is the one that puzzled him most. He expected the swollen, waterlogged patients with failing hearts and kidneys to get worse on all that fluid. They did the opposite. The swelling went, the blood pressure fell, the urine cleared. One woman went from three hundred and twenty-five pounds to two hundred and eighty-four in a fortnight on four quarts a day, and her blood pressure came down fifty points with it. Diabetics improved. The tubercular gained weight. Nervous patients slept.

Crewe said the treatment was so simple it was not interesting to the profession, and so effective it made him uncomfortable in his own clinic, because it suggested most of his colleagues' work was unnecessary.

Pasteurisation came in, raw milk became a controlled substance, and the Mayo Clinic's own doctors stopped mentioning it. The article survives. The practice does not.

The most prestigious hospital in America once put its sickest patients to bed with a glass of milk every half hour and watched them get well. It is now illegal to sell that milk in most of the states it was practised in.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

This week a council approved a solar farm on two hundred and thirty-five acres of grazing, and the family who had run cattle on it for generations said it would probably finish them. The panels will be there for forty years. The cattle were there for four hundred.

The land is not the developer's. It belongs to an estate or a pension fund, and the developer offers a rent per acre no cow has ever earned. The farmer gets a letter. The council, told to triple solar by a minister who has never kept a beast, finds that the loss of a herd is not a planning consideration.

So the field goes under glass. In Britain a solar array produces for about one hour in nine. It makes most in June at noon, when the country needs it least, and nothing on a January evening, when it needs it most, so a gas station is kept idling behind every one. The panels are made in China from polysilicon out of a province the government will not name. They lose output every year they stand there, and at the end there is no plan and no bond for taking them away. A quarter of a million square metres of glass, aluminium and copper cable, in a field, with a thirty-year lease and a company that will not exist when it ends.

Under the panels the grass dies for want of light, the soil compacts under the plant, and the hedges go because the fence has to be electric and the fence has to be straight. The sheep in the brochure are for the photograph.

The cattle were a solar panel already. Grass takes the light, the cow converts it, and the output is beef, every day of the year, on no cable, no subsidy and no inverter, for as long as there is rain.

They have replaced a power station that makes dinner with one that works on a sunny afternoon and sits dead the rest of the time, and the family who ran the first one are being evicted to make room for the second.



Mike