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.

The man who found out what happened to the Franklin expedition was a Scottish doctor who walked 6,500 miles across the Arctic on foot, lived off what he shot, and never lost a man. The Royal Navy never forgave him for it. John Rae was born in Orkney in 1813 and went to the Hudson's Bay Company as a surgeon. He learned to hunt, to snowshoe, to build a snow house and to sleep in it, from the Cree and the Inuit, and he saw no reason to carry a year of salt pork when the country was full of food. On his first survey he took 12 men 1,200 miles with provisions for 4 months and fed them for 15 on caribou, fish and seal. The Admiralty's expeditions went the other way. Franklin sailed in 1845 with 129 men, 2 ships, a library, silver cutlery and 8,000 tins of meat and soup, and died with every one of them. In 1854 Rae met Inuit on the Boothia Peninsula who had seen the last of the sailors, 40 men dragging a boat south, starving, and who had found the bodies after. Some had been eaten by the others. Rae reported it as he was told it. London was outraged. Charles Dickens wrote that no Englishman would do such a thing and that the natives were lying. Lady Franklin saw to it that Rae never received the knighthood every other Arctic explorer of his rank was given, and the memorial in Westminster Abbey names Franklin as the discoverer of the passage Rae had actually found. He died in 1893 at 79, still fit, still walking. The Navy's men had the best provisions in Europe and died of scurvy in a land full of game. The Orkneyman ate what the Inuit ate, walked further than any of them, and was punished for coming home with the truth.

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.