Cottonseed oil spent its first half century in the American kitchen travelling under other people's names. In the 1870s the cotton gins of the South had a problem the size of a mountain, and it was the seed. Millions of tons a year, far more than any farm could plough back in, with an oil inside it that nobody would knowingly buy. So nobody was told. In 1881 a Georgia farm paper reported, almost cheerfully, that refined cottonseed oil was being shipped in quantity to Italy and Spain, cut two parts to one with olive oil, and sold to the world as pure olive oil. In Maine, the same paper said, herring were being tinned in straight cottonseed oil and labelled in French as sardines in the best olive oil. Then it went into the lard. By 1884 the crushers had pooled their mills into the American Cotton Oil Trust, modelled on Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and a trust that size needed a bigger customer than the sardine. In March 1888 a House agriculture committee in Washington took evidence on what the meat packers were selling as lard. Two former workers from a Boston pork packer testified that the firm made two grades, one pure and one a compound. Affidavits were read out stating that petroleum tanks had been cleaned before being used to carry the cottonseed oil. Cleaned, they wanted it on the record. The trade's answer to the scandal was a new name for the product: compound lard. In 1895 California's olive growers were still complaining in print that American cottonseed oil was crossing to Europe, being blended into olive oil, and coming home labelled pure olive oil, undercutting their own pure oil at half the price or less. The government got round to prosecuting eventually. In 1914 a New York importer pleaded guilty over a shipment labelled Lucca Oliv Oil that was largely cottonseed, with the word cottonseed printed in smaller type. His fine was $25. By then the oil had found a better disguise. In 1911 Procter and Gamble hydrogenated it into a white paste, called it Crisco, and sold it to housewives as the modern, scientific replacement for the lard it had spent the last thirty years counterfeiting. After that it went into the margarine. Then the salad oil. Then the labels stopped naming it at all and called it vegetable oil, as if a cotton gin were an allotment. French sardine oil, Italian olive oil, compound lard, Crisco, vegetable oil. It has had more names than a conman, and the one it never seems to use is its own.

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.

A New York physician who had spent twenty years failing to make fat people thin by starving them walked into the American Museum of Natural History, asked the curators what prehistoric man had eaten, and spent the next forty years prescribing fat meat and water to seventeen thousand patients. Blake Donaldson had done what every doctor did. He had put his heavy patients on low-calorie diets and watched them cheat, give up, or lose weight and put it back. So he went to look at the skulls. The teeth of our ancestors, the museum told him, were the teeth of meat-eaters, and the great weakness of the modern mouth was a sign that the diet had changed faster than the animal. Then an Arctic explorer, fresh from a year on meat in a New York hospital, told him that the Inuit lived well on fat and starved on lean. Donaldson built his prescription from that. Three meals a day of half a pound of fat meat each, three parts fat to one part lean by the calorie, salted, with water and black coffee, and a half-hour walk before breakfast. No flour, no sugar, no milk. His patients lost two to three pounds a week without hunger and kept it off. His allergy patients, he said, lost their allergies. He published it all in 1962 under the title Strong Medicine, with a line that is still quoted: there are probably only two perfect foods, fresh fat meat and clean water. The president of the American Medical Association's journal called the book unscientific. A Harvard nutritionist put it on a list of quackery that should be on nobody's shelves. That nutritionist was being funded by the sugar industry at the time, which emerged fifty years later. Donaldson died in 1966 having spent his whole career doing the one thing the establishment never managed: making his patients thin and keeping them that way. The establishment has spent the years since explaining why he should not have.