Bamboo sheets are sold as the gentle alternative to cotton and silk, and the fabric they are made of is the one that put factory workers in asylums. Bamboo cloth is not bamboo. It is viscose. The plant is pulped, dissolved in caustic soda and carbon disulphide, and squirted through a nozzle into acid, where it sets into a thread. It was patented in England in 1892 as artificial silk, and the trade name for it was rayon. The same process makes a kitchen sponge and the cellophane on a bunch of flowers. Carbon disulphide was already notorious. French doctors in the 1850s had watched it send rubber workers blind, impotent and insane. The viscose industry needed it in enormous quantities and nothing else would do. So from the 1920s the asylums began to fill. In 1933 a doctor at a Pennsylvania rayon plant wired Alice Hamilton, the first woman on the Harvard faculty and the country's authority on industrial poisons, with a 6-word message: an epidemic of insanity has broken out. Workers were going home and attacking their wives. Men in the churn rooms were found wandering the roads. Investigators who got inside found a third of the workforce showing signs of poisoning. The companies fixed prices, sat on the evidence, and when the regulators finally came for them in the West they moved the factories to India, China and Indonesia, where the same chemical is used today. The consumer was never harmed. Only the people who made the cloth. Silk is made by a caterpillar in a mulberry tree. Wool is made by a sheep in a field. Both are a protein, same as your own hair, and both have been pulled off the animal for 5,000 years without sending anybody out of his mind. The fake silk needed a chemical that could not be made safe, and the industry's answer was to make it somewhere else.

In 1996 the BBC put two large women on a motorbike and sidecar, sent them round Britain cooking with lard, cream and butter by the block, and twelve million people a week sat down to watch them refuse to apologise for it. Jennifer Paterson was sixty-eight, a Catholic who had cooked for the staff of The Spectator and been sacked for throwing the crockery out of the window. Clarissa Dickson Wright was a barrister who had drunk her way through a fortune and come out the other side. Neither had been on television. Both had been told all their lives that the way they ate was going to kill them, and both had decided they would rather be fat and fed than thin and lied to. If you watched it you remember the sound of it. Jennifer scraping an entire pack of butter into a pan while talking about the war. Clarissa holding up a lump of suet to the camera and saying the word with relish. Game pie, kidneys in cream, bacon fat poured over cabbage, a pudding made with a pound of dripping. They cooked for monks, for lifeboatmen, for the Women's Institute, in country-house kitchens with the Aga going. And every episode had a moment where one of them turned to the lens and said what nobody else on television would. Low fat was a fraud. Margarine was a chemical. Vegetarianism was for people with something wrong with them. Clarissa said if God had not meant us to eat animals he would not have made them out of meat. It went out in forty countries. The BBC had expected a curiosity and got the most watched cooking programme it had ever made. Jennifer died in 1999, of lung cancer, with a tin of caviar on the bedside table that she had asked for. Clarissa went in 2014 at sixty-six, having spent her last years defending the butcher, the gamekeeper and the dairy farmer against a country that had forgotten what they were for. They were never right about everything. They were right about the one thing the nation was being lied to about, and they said it with a sidecar and a block of butter in front of twelve million people at a time when every other cook on television was holding up a tub of spread.

American tourist: "Do you have regular cheese? Like the slices. For a grilled cheese." Cheesemonger: "I've got cheddar." Tourist: "No, the orange slices. American cheese." Cheesemonger: "Do you know what it says on the packet at home? The small print." Tourist: "Cheese?" Cheesemonger: "Pasteurised process cheese product. It can't legally call itself cheese on its own. There's not enough cheese in it." Tourist: "How much is in it?" Cheesemonger: "Around half. The rest is water, oil, emulsifying salts and colour. That's why it melts like paint. Real cheese fights you." Tourist: "I've eaten that my whole life." Cheesemonger: "You've eaten a product named after cheese. Like a prawn cocktail crisp." Tourist: "So what's this?" Cheesemonger: "Milk, salt, rennet, two years in a cave. Nothing added, a lot taken away. The water's gone, which is why it costs." Tourist: "It smells." Cheesemonger: "It's alive. The slices have been designed not to be." Tourist: "I'll take a wedge. For the grilled cheese." Cheesemonger: "It won't melt flat." Tourist: "Why not?" Cheesemonger: "Because it's cheese."

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.

There is a fishing net somewhere in the North Atlantic tonight that has not had a fisherman for thirty years, and it is still fishing. Until the 1950s a net was hemp or cotton, a line was linen or horsehair, and a hook was tied on with gut. The sea ate all of it. A net lost overboard rotted inside a season, which is why fishermen dried theirs on the quay every night and tarred them every spring, and why the loss of one was a loss and nothing more. The sea took back what it was made of. Then nylon arrived, and polyester, and polypropylene, and the net stopped dying. The UN's estimate is 640,000 tonnes of fishing gear lost or dumped at sea every year. It does not sink and vanish. It drifts, snags on a reef or a wreck, opens, and goes on doing the only thing it was built to do. Fish swim in and die. The dead fish bring the seals and the turtles, which die in it too. The weight of bodies pulls it down, the bodies rot, it rises, and it fishes again. A whale that meets one tows it until it starves. Nobody hauls it. Nobody empties it. Nobody is paid. Nearly half the mass of the great rubbish gyre in the Pacific is not bottles or bags. It is net. We built a fishing net that does not need a fisherman, that cannot be told the season is over, and that will still be killing when the grandchildren of the man who lost it are old. The old net needed a man to work it and died when he stopped. The new one needed a man to make it, once, and never again. Every natural material rots. That was never its weakness. It was the agreement it had with the world, and plastic was the first thing we ever made that broke it.