Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

If raw milk were sold in the supplement aisle, the tub would read like this, and nobody would believe it.

- Complete protein, two kinds: whey for now, casein for later
- Calcium, with the phosphorus and vitamin D to use it
- Vitamins A, D, E and K2, in the fat that carries them
- B12, riboflavin and iodine
- Potassium and magnesium in the water
- Lactoferrin and the cow's own immune proteins
- Lipase and phosphatase, still working
- Electrolytes, pre-dissolved, no sachet
- Serving suggestion: cold, from a glass bottle
- Warning: the government has opinions about this product

The supplement industry would price that at £60 a tub and put a drawing of a bone on the lid.

It would still be selling you a copy. Every tub in that aisle is somebody's guess at what a body needs, assembled from powders in a factory and sold with a disclaimer. Raw milk is the only food on earth that was built to be the entire diet of a living creature, with nothing else allowed on the menu, and it has been passing that test for as long as there have been mammals.

The carton is that food heated until the living parts are dead and shaken until the cream can't rise, so the label can say the government is happy with it.

The cow charges grass.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr's own campaign veterans say the administration he serves has broken more than 85% of its health promises, and the weedkiller tops their list.

The scorecard came out on 8 October, drawn up by people from Kennedy's 2024 campaign, including the activist known as Glyphosate Girl. It charges the administration with breaking "more than 85% of the commitments" the movement made on food, farming and environmental health, from mercury emissions to the limits on forever chemicals in drinking water.

Top of the charge sheet: new pesticide approvals, and a presidential executive order to boost the domestic supply of glyphosate, the weedkiller sprayed on wheat and oats before harvest to dry them out for the combine.

The White House says the administration "has already secured extensive victories for the MAHA Agenda". A consumer campaigner at the Center for Science in the Public Interest put it more vividly: "What started out as a hairline crack in the coalition is now widened to be a gaping fissure."

A week later the Health Secretary's cookery series, the Real Food Show, had Lou Ferrigno on as a guest, with recipes under $5 a serving where possible. The Incredible Hulk is helping America cook, and the oats are being sprayed either way.

Monsanto has seen this film before.

In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that put DDT and the spray-everything farm on trial. The New Yorker serialised it that summer, and CBS gave her an hour of television the following spring.

Before it was out, Velsicol, the maker of chlordane, threatened to sue her publisher. The industry's spokesmen called her "a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature".

Time called the book "hysterically overemphatic". And Monsanto printed "The Desolate Year" in its company magazine, a parody of her opening chapter in which America stops spraying and the insects take the country.

The President's own science advisers backed her the following year. She died in 1964, of a heart attack, with the breast cancer she had fought all the way through the writing of the book. The EPA banned DDT in 1972. Monsanto launched glyphosate as Roundup two years later, and Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018.

The script from 1962 still works on every politician who promises to cut the spraying: describe the world without it as a famine, and the promise turns into a concern for the harvest.

The weedkiller now has a federal order to make more of it, and the Incredible Hulk is doing the cookery.



De eerste keer dat ik SH een politieke post zie maken.

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

The British sausage is called a banger because in the First World War it was so full of water that it exploded in the pan, and the one that never did was the one from Cumberland.

Before the war a butcher's sausage was pork, fat, salt, pepper and a little rusk to hold it, and it fried. During the war, with meat rationed, the makers filled the skins with water, scraps and whatever cereal they could get, and the water turned to steam in the hot fat and burst the casing. Soldiers named it, and the name stuck to the whole family for a hundred years.

The Cumberland sausage stood apart. Up in the Lake District it was made by the yard, coiled flat into a wheel rather than twisted into links, from coarsely chopped pork rather than minced slurry, heavily peppered, with no colouring and almost no filler. A proper one is more than 90% meat. The spice came in through Whitehaven, which was trading with the Indies, and the pork came from the pigs every Cumbrian farmhouse kept. You bought it by length, not by number.

If you grew up in the north it was the Sunday breakfast, a whole coil in the pan, cut into quarters at the table, with the fat spitting round it. Fried in lard, because that is what was in the pan.

In 2011 the name was protected by law. It has to be made in Cumbria, in the coil, with at least 80% meat, and the cheap imitations with a quarter of the pig and three quarters of the water had to drop the name.

The sausage in a supermarket pack is what the war taught the trade: fill the skin with water and sell the skin. The one in the coil is what a sausage was before anyone had to.

They told you sausages were bad for you. They meant the water.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass in the Arizona desert to prove that a carefully designed farm could feed humans without the outside world, and the design had almost no room in it for animals. Two years later the only thing inside that had reliably fed them was a handful of goats.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. A rainforest, an ocean, a savannah and a farm under one roof, with the door welded shut for two years and nothing allowed in or out. The farm was the heart of it, and the farm was built on the modern idea: crops first, grown intensively, with livestock as an afterthought at the edges. A few African pygmy goats for milk, a flock of chickens, and four small feral pigs chosen because they could live on scraps.

The pigs did not last the year. In a sealed box short of calories a pig is a competitor, and the crew killed and ate them. The chickens barely laid, because the glass cut the light and there was nothing to feed them that would make an egg. That left the goats, and for two years the goats were the only source of fat in a world designed around vegetables.

The accounts the crew wrote afterwards return to them again and again. The half glass of milk a day was the thing people lived for. When a kid was born it was eaten and the meal was written up like a feast. The men lost nearly a fifth of their body weight, the women a tenth, and the food they dreamed of was never the sweet potatoes they had in abundance. It was the animal they had been given too few of.

The plants were also taking the air. To make the crops grow the soil had been enriched with compost, and the microbes in that soil breathed oxygen faster than anyone had calculated. The level fell from twenty-one per cent to fourteen, the air of a high mountain, until the crew could not climb a staircase without resting and oxygen had to be trucked in from outside. The design that put plants first had removed the thing everyone needed most.

Nobody has ever run the experiment the other way, with a herd at the centre and the crops at the edge. It would not have needed a doctor to explain the results.

They were given three acres and told to feed themselves on plants. They ate the pigs, worshipped the goats, and suffocated.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

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.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

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.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In 1936 a Russian family walked into the Siberian taiga to live on what they could grow, and for the next 42 years the garden tried to kill them.

Karp Lykov was an Old Believer, from a sect of Orthodox Christians that had been dodging the Russian state since Peter the Great. When a Communist patrol shot his brother dead at the edge of their village, Karp gathered his wife Akulina and their two children and kept walking until there was nobody left to shoot at them.

Two more children were born out there. The nearest village ended up some 150 miles away.

They had no guns. They grew potatoes, rye and hemp, wove their clothes from the hemp and cut their galoshes from birch bark. By any modern definition they were the most local, seasonal, plant-based household in the world, with zero food miles and no supply chain to blame. They ate plants for the plainest reason there is: a potato stays where you put it.

They lived on the edge of famine for a quarter of a century. As the family later told it: "Every year we held a council to decide whether to eat everything up or leave some for seed."

One year the snow came in June and a frost killed everything in the garden. Through the winter that followed they ate their shoes. They ate bark. Akulina made sure whatever food there was went to the children, and in 1961 she starved to death.

What saved the rest was a single grain of rye that came up in the pea patch. They fenced it and guarded it day and night against the mice and squirrels. At harvest it gave them 18 grains, and from those 18 grains they rebuilt the crop.

The rye grain is the part of the Lykov story everybody tells. The part that gets left in the forest is Dmitry.

From the late 1950s, once he was grown, the family had begun eating animals. With no gun and no bow there was only one way to do it, and it is the oldest one we have. Dmitry dug pit traps, and when the traps failed he ran the animal down across the mountains until it collapsed.

He hunted barefoot in winter. He would be gone for days, sleep out in 40 degrees of frost, and come home to the hut with a young elk across his shoulders.

That is persistence hunting, the hunt Kalahari trackers were still running into this century, done by a young man who had never met a human being outside his own family. The body that could do it was the most useful thing the clearing ever grew.

Geologists spotted the clearing from a helicopter in 1978, and the Lykovs became the most famous hermits in the Soviet Union. In 1981 three of the four children died within days of each other. Dmitry of pneumonia. Savin and Natalia of kidney failure, the bill for four decades of that diet.

Karp died in his sleep in 1988. Agafia, the youngest, is still out there past 80, the last of them.

The grow-your-own books all stop at the potatoes. The Lykovs ran the experiment to the end, and the end of it was a barefoot boy running an elk into the ground.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Grown adults are currently trying to fix a cow's breath, and so far they have tried:

- A face mask that burns off her burps
- A royal design prize for the mask, worth £50,000
- Red seaweed from Australia, mixed into her feed
- A chemical additive, made compulsory in Denmark from October 2025
- Over 200 complaints from Danish dairy farmers within weeks
- Sick herds made exempt that November
- Dairies in Norway and Sweden pausing it altogether
- A fresh safety review ordered by Brussels in February 2026
- Breeding her to burp less, discussed at a summit in Ireland this month
- The United Nations' nuclear agency, also this month

The mask came from a team of Royal College of Art graduates and was judged by the then Prince of Wales and the man who designed the iPhone. The additive was meant to cut her methane by about a third, and Danish farmers say it cut their milk and put cows on the floor.

Every item on that list starts from the same assumption, that the problem is the cow.

She has been breathing out the same field for ten thousand years, and the only thing that's changed is the number of people standing behind her with a clipboard.



Mike