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

 

[fatsnotbad]

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.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A warning to any woman over fifty thinking of eating steak and butter instead of what the surgery gave her.

- The three o'clock hunger goes, and the biscuit tin loses its excuse
- The night sweats ease off and the spare duvet goes back in the cupboard
- You sleep through, and lose your 3am reading time
- The fog lifts, and you'll remember why you walked into the room
- The rage that arrives at 4pm stops arriving
- The waist comes back in, and the spite trousers fit
- The joints stop creaking on the stairs
- Your bones get what they're built from
- Blood sugar stops climbing after breakfast
- The bloating goes, and the hot water bottle retires
- Your doctor writes "lifestyle" in the box and asks no questions
- Your husband loses two stone by accident and takes the credit
- The soya milk goes off in the fridge
- You stop being told it's your age
- You stop apologising

Proceed with caution. The advice you were given was designed to keep a woman of 51 hungry, tired, foggy and a size bigger, and it has been working perfectly.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Melanoma in America, 1975 to now.

- Diagnoses: up sixfold.
- Deaths: flat.
- Stage zero diagnoses: up fiftyfold.
- Share of white women's melanomas now judged overdiagnosed: 65%.
- Share of white men's: 50%.
- Sunscreen use: rising the whole way.
- Seed oil consumption: rising the whole way.

The diagnoses went up because the checks did. More skin exams, a lower bar for cutting a mole out, and a pathologist with no agreed line between a mole and a cancer, who knows which way the lawsuit runs if he guesses wrong. Every diagnosis becomes a survivor, every survivor sends her friends for a check, and the checks find more.

The deaths are the number that matters, and they did not move. Forty years of factor fifty, hats and shade, and the disease kills the same number of people it did when your mother lay on the lawn in baby oil. If the sun were the problem, that line should have fallen with every bottle sold.

The sun is the same sun. The skin changed. Over those same decades the share of linoleic acid in the average American's body fat more than doubled, and skin is made of that fat. Polyunsaturated fat is the part of you that oxidises in sunlight.

Six times the biopsies, six times the sunscreen, and the same number of graves, because the thing that burns was never in the sky. It was in the deep fryer.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Milk is the only food on earth that was designed to be food. Everything else on your plate was built to be something else first.

A seed is built to become a plant, and it is armoured against you.

A leaf is built to catch light, and it is laced against the caterpillar.

A root is a plant's winter savings, and the plant defends them.

A fruit is bait. Only the flesh is on offer. The stone is poison and the skin is wax.

A muscle is built to move an animal. An egg is built to become a bird.

Milk is built to be swallowed. That is its entire job.

It arrives with its own antibodies, its own enzymes to digest itself, a protein that starves the wrong bacteria of iron, and fat packed in globules the gut was made to take.

Nothing else in nature exists for one purpose only, to raise a living creature from nothing.

Then in 1864 a chemist worked out how to stop wine going off, and in 1908 Chicago pointed the method at the cow.

Every one of those proteins is undone by heat.

This month the American Academy of Pediatrics renewed its call for raw milk to be banned from sale, for the protection of children.

Everything else in the shop is pretending to be food. The one thing that isn't pretending is the one they want off the shelf.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Seed oils were sold as paint for a century before they were sold as food, and they do in you what they do on a window frame.

Linseed oil hardens on a fence post in a few days. Chemists call it a drying oil.

Soybean oil hardens too. So does sunflower, so does safflower. They were sold to the paint trade before they were sold to the kitchen.

Linoleum was invented in 1860 and it is named after linseed oil, because that is what it is, oxidised and pressed into a floor.

The oil does not dry by evaporating. It dries by oxygen attacking the double bonds in its fats and welding them into a hard skin.

The oil in your chip pan and the oil in your body carry the same double bonds, so the same attack runs there, with aldehydes thrown off as it goes.

A painter calls that curing. A biochemist calls it lipid peroxidation. A doctor calls it inflammation and prescribes something for it.

Once the oil is in your fat, it stays about two years, drying from the inside, every time it meets oxygen or sunlight.

Butter never dried a fence post. Tallow never varnished a boat. Saturated fat has no double bond for oxygen to attack, which is why it sits in the pan for a week and why it sat in your great-grandmother's cells for a lifetime.

A fat that sets hard in the air was never a candidate for the inside of an artery.

The flooring industry understood the chemistry in 1860. The heart charity recommended it in April.



Mike

 

[maarten2]

Gekookte of rauwe lijnolie smeer ik op hout buiten, werkt puik, slijt veeel minder dan verf.
Mijn snijplank in de keuken is ingesmeerd met olijfolie, laat zich niet weg wassen in een sopje.
Wil nog andere zaad oliën proberen voor buitenhout, wellicht puik spul daarvoor.
Op mijn bootje heb ik teakhout in gesmeerd met...vele, dure, lak merken, blijft nooit meer dan één á twee jaar goed. Bij een volgende verfbeurt olijfolie proberen.
Zaadolie, best goed nuttig spul

 

[fatsnotbad]

You have a gallbladder because your ancestors ate fat, and the advice on the ward after they remove it is to eat less of it.

A horse has no gallbladder. It grazes all day and never meets a fat meal.

A rat has no gallbladder. A deer has no gallbladder. A pigeon has no gallbladder.

A dog has one. A cat has one. A wolf has one. A human has one.

A gallbladder is a storage tank for bile, concentrated up to ten times, held ready for a meal big enough in fat to need it all at once.

Eat fat and the gallbladder squeezes, the bile floods the gut, and the fat and its vitamins get through.

Eat no fat and the gallbladder sits full and never empties. Bile that sits goes still, and bile that goes still sets into stones.

A low-fat diet is the standard advice for gallstones, and a low-fat diet is on the list of things that cause them.

The NHS removes around 70,000 gallbladders a year, the commonest planned operation it does, and sends the patient home with a diet sheet that says avoid fat.

The organ was built for the fat. It stopped working when the fat stopped coming.

A horse does not need one. You were not built like a horse, whatever the plate says.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Buy the fat mince. The 20%. The 80/20 if you're American. Whatever diet you're on, whatever your doctor said, whatever the lean tray next to it is promising, buy the fat one, and buy it this week.

Mince is the whole cow in a tray. Brisket, chuck, shin, the fat cap off the rib, ground together so the poorest family on the street eats the same animal as the richest and pays for the bit the restaurant sent back. It built the shepherd's pie, the Bolognese, the chilli, the meatloaf, the burger and every Tuesday night of your childhood, and it did the lot with the fat left in.

Then somebody took the fat out and charged you for the labour.

The 5% arrived. The 95/5. The extra lean. It cost more, it went grey in the pan, it tasted of the tray, and a generation of mothers on both sides of the Atlantic were told it was the healthy one. The children pushed it round the plate. The jar of sauce moved in to do the job the fat had been doing for nothing.

The fat one browns. The fat one fries itself. The fat one makes a burger that needs no sauce and a Bolognese that needs no sugar, and it carries the vitamins, because they ride in the fat you've been paying extra to have removed.

So go to the shop. Walk past the lean tray with its little apology on the label. Pick up three of the fat ones. Fry them in butter, salt them, melt cheese over them, and feed them to someone you love. Then do it again on Thursday.

The fat was never the problem. The fat was the point.

Buy the 20%. Buy the 80/20. Buy it fat.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Shepherd's pie began as the Sunday joint being passed through a mincer on Monday, and the reason the potato lid was crisp is that it was spread with the dripping from the same roast.

The mincer was cast iron, clamped to the edge of the kitchen table with a screw, and the cold remains of Sunday's leg of lamb or mutton went through it with the fat and the gristle, because the fat was what made Monday's dinner taste of Sunday's. The mince went into a dish with an onion, the gravy from the roasting tin that had set overnight into jelly, and a shake of Worcester sauce, and the mashed potato went over the top in a thick lid, forked into ridges, dotted with dripping, and baked until the ridges browned.

The first printed version was 1791, as cottage pie, and the word shepherd's arrived later for the mutton version, which is the proper one. Beef makes a cottage pie. A shepherd minds sheep.

It was dinner on Monday in every house that had roasted on Sunday, which was every house that could. The joint fed the family on Sunday, the pie on Monday, and the bone made the soup on Tuesday, and a leg of mutton was three dinners from one animal with nothing bought in but a few potatoes and an onion.

A good one cuts clean, with the mince dark and wet underneath and the potato forming a crust that peels back from the dish, and the first forkful has the lid and the meat together. Peas, if there were peas.

The one in the supermarket chiller is made with lean minced lamb that has never seen a roasting tin, a sauce thickened with starch, and a potato topping made with semi-skimmed milk and a spread, which is why it comes out of the oven the same colour it went in.

The dripping was what made it Sunday twice.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Steve Irwin was one of the most passionate animal lovers on the planet. He also wasn’t a vegetarian, and he had a clear reason why.
In a 2001 interview with Scientific American he explained that he went through a phase where he seriously considered going vegetarian. He researched it hard. His conclusion was the opposite of what most people assume.

He used a simple land-use example: one cow could keep him fed for roughly a month. That same piece of land could still have trees, grass, kangaroos, wallabies, goannas, birds, and the rest of the Australian wildlife living in and around it. The cow and the wild animals could coexist.

A plant-only diet for the same period, he argued, required clearing more land just for crops. Once you level that ground for rice or whatever else, almost nothing else can live there except a few pest insects. Habitat gone. Wildlife gone.

He wasn’t anti-meat. He was anti-destroying habitat. And he drew a hard line on which animals should be eaten. He hated the idea of farming or eating Australia’s icons — kangaroos, emus, crocodiles. Those animals were part of the country’s identity and tourism. He wanted people eating the livestock that already occupied grazing land (beef, lamb, etc.), not turning the bush into more monoculture or harvesting the wildlife itself.

On the day he died he had a classic Aussie breakfast: bacon and eggs. He lived a high-output outdoor life and fueled it with real food, not ideology.

Irwin’s position was straightforward: protect the wild animals, keep the land working, and don’t pretend that clearing more ground for plants is automatically better for nature. A lot of modern “eat less meat for the environment” arguments still haven’t grappled with the trade-off he laid out more than 20 years ago.



Of Dr. Shawn Baker een Same Hoole wannabe is weet ik niet, maar desondanks een interessante post.

Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

A Cornish pasty was built so that a man a mile underground with arsenic on his hands could eat a hot dinner holding it by a handle he then threw away.

The crust is the point. A proper one is shortcrust rolled thick enough to survive a shift in a tin miner's jacket, crimped along one side into a thick rope of pastry that stays cold while the middle stays hot. The miner held the crimp, ate the rest, and dropped the crimp down the shaft for the knockers, the spirits of the mine, which was the polite name for keeping the arsenic out of his mouth.

Inside was skirt of beef, chopped not minced, with potato, swede and onion, all raw, sealed in and cooked together so the beef fat ran through the vegetables and the juice stayed in the case. No gravy, because gravy leaks. A good one had the initials of the man it belonged to cut into the corner so the right pasty got to the right miner. Some had meat at one end and jam at the other, and you knew which end from the mark.

It fed Cornwall's miners for two centuries, and when the mines died the miners took it to Mexico, to Michigan, to South Australia, and there are pasty shops in all three to this day with Cornish names over the door.

The thing about it is how much of the animal was in it. Skirt is the diaphragm, a cut the supermarket will not stock, cheap, hard-working, full of flavour and fat, and the whole dinner was built round it. The vegetables were there to stretch the beef and soak up what it gave off.

Since 2011 the name has been protected by law, which means the pasty in the motorway services, made with minced beef, a glossy lid and a filling that was cooked before it went in, can only call itself Cornish if it is made in Cornwall, and some of the worst of them are.

The miner's dinner was a cut of beef in a pastry handle. The modern one is a pastry handle looking for the beef.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Follow the mainstream advice to the letter and every food you remove takes a part of your body with it.

Take away cholesterol and you take away the raw material of testosterone, oestrogen, cortisol, bile and the hormone they call vitamin D.

Take away the egg yolk and you take away the choline the liver needs to ship fat out, so the fat stays in the liver and gets its own diagnosis.

Take away red meat and you take away the only iron a woman absorbs properly, and the B12, zinc, creatine and carnitine that came in the same slice.

Take away butter and you take away the K2 that sends calcium into bone instead of artery walls, which is the exact place they were trying to protect.

Take away whole milk and you take away the fat its vitamins travel in, which is why the skimmed version has to have them added back by law.

Take away saturated fat and you take away the half of every cell membrane that does not go rancid in sunlight.

Take away the fat on the chop and you take away the signal that tells you to stop, so you finish the bread instead.

Take away dripping from the chip pan and you fry in an oil that breaks down at frying temperature.

Take away the sun and you take away the hormone, and get sold a tablet made from sheep grease to replace it.

What remains on the plate is toast, a spread, skimmed milk and a banana.

What remains in the cupboard is a statin for what the butter raised, iron for what the steak carried, vitamin D for the sun, B12 for the beef, and a gel for the testosterone the cholesterol would have made.

Followed exactly, the advice turns a dinner into a pharmacy, and the pharmacy is the only part that was ever free of side effects for the people selling it.



Mike