Nomad

Just back from Greece and I have a complaint about the Mediterranean diet, which is that I went to the Mediterranean and couldn't find it. I know the diet well, mind. I've had it explained to me between sets by lads who read a poster once. Olive oil, drizzled. Wholegrains. Pulses. A bit of fish. Red meat almost never. That's why the old boys on the harbour are 94. Right. So I sit down in a taverna in a village with 3 streets and wait for my chickpea. Lamb chops. A stack of them, fat burnt black at the edges, eaten in the fingers. Fine, I think, a treat, they're being nice to the tourist. Then a wedge of feta the size of a paperback. Then saganaki, which is that same sheep's cheese fried in a pan until it does something the poster would need to lie down about. And no olive oil. Not a drop. There's a dish of butter on the table. I checked twice. Butter. Maybe it's that village, I think. So night 2 I go somewhere else and get kleftiko, a mutton shoulder sealed in paper and left in the oven since lunch until the fat's gone to glass. Night 3 it's a goat, roasted whole for somebody's name day, and the grandmothers took the head. Yoghurt off a sheep so thick the spoon stood up in it, with the fat set in a crust on top. Every corner a gyros, which is pork, turning in its own dripping since breakfast. By Thursday I've had kokoretsi, lamb offal wound round a spit over coals, and patsas, which is tripe soup, which they have for breakfast after a night on the ouzo. The tomato turned up once. It was under a cheese. At this point I'm starting to wonder if anyone's told them. Greece eats more cheese per head than nearly any country on earth, almost all of it sheep and goat. Every village oven has a mutton in it. The Cretans keep a thing called staka, which is the fat off sheep's milk cooked down, and they spread it on bread and fry eggs in it, and not one poster has ever mentioned it. Then I looked it up. The survey that started all this took its Cretan numbers partly during Lent. 40 days the island gives up meat. They watched a village fasting, wrote it down as the menu, and 60 years of experts have been reading me a religious observance and calling it a diet. So that's the Mediterranean diet, from the source. Sheep, goat, pig, the cheese off the first two, the fat off all three, and a dish of butter I never asked for. It's my diet with better weather. Somebody should tell the experts. The Greeks would, but they're eating.

The strangest thing in the carnivore community has nothing to do with weight, and nobody official will touch it. People stop burning. It starts as a throwaway line in a post about something else. Out all day, forgot the cream, nothing happened. Then it is a man who used to catch it walking to the car, standing in the sun for two hours and coming in brown. Then it is fair skinned northerners in Spain with no factor 50 and no aloe vera evening afterwards. Then it is the gingers. Actual gingers. People who have spent their entire lives being told they have no business outdoors after ten in the morning, reporting that they now tan. That is the point where you stop filing it under wishful thinking. They were not looking for it. They went carnivore for their gut or their weight, and the sun thing turned up on its own, uninvited, which is not how placebo tends to work. The explanations offered so far have been generous. It is the calorie deficit. Sunlight, famously, respects a deficit. It is placebo. Thousands of people are imagining that their skin is not blistering. They are secretly staying indoors. All of them. In summer. While posting photographs of themselves outdoors. Or your skin is built out of the fat you eat. Cell membranes are made of fatty acids, and they are made of whichever ones you supplied. Fill them with sunflower and rapeseed oil, the least stable fats on the shelf, the ones that go rancid in a cupboard, then aim ultraviolet light at them. Fill them with butter, tallow and ruminant fat, which sit in a jar on the counter quite happily, and see whether the same thing happens. We changed the building material in the seventies. Sun exposure has fallen since. Skin cancer has not. Nobody in dermatology wants that sentence within a mile of them. I burned every summer as a child. Six years here, no sunscreen, not once, and I am not unusual in this crowd. Take a year off the seed oils, then go and sit in your own garden in July and find out for yourself. Nobody can stop you running that experiment.

The Brazil nut is the most radioactive food on earth, and it is sold as a health supplement. Not a figure of speech. The tree pulls barium out of the soil, radium travels with the barium because they behave alike, and the nut concentrates both. Two a day works out at up to 220 microsieverts a year, which is about 10 chest X-rays. The 2024 review that measured it called for trials on cancer biomarkers. Nobody has run them. Then the selenium, which is the reason anybody eats them. One nut can carry several times your entire daily requirement, and the content varies more than tenfold between nuts off the same tree in the same bag. So the woman eating two a day for her thyroid has no idea what dose she just took, aiming at a mineral whose toxicity shows up as splitting nails, hair coming out, and breath that smells of garlic. The barium comes with it. On the published figures, two a day can exceed the tolerable daily intake, comfortably so for anyone under 60 kilos. And the mould. Brazil nuts have never been farmed. They fall from wild Amazon trees in heavy pods and lie on wet forest floor until somebody collects them, sometimes weeks later. Aspergillus is already working. Aflatoxin damages DNA, causes liver cancer, and does not cook out. In 2003 the European Commission shut in-shell Brazil nuts out of Europe over it. Named ports, certificates, testing before release, loads sent back or destroyed. One food. A radionuclide, a heavy metal, an uncontrolled dose of a mineral with a narrow safety window, and a liver carcinogen. It is in the healthy snack aisle at a premium, and the bag says raw, natural and single origin.

Mincemeat is called mincemeat because it was meat, and the last trace of the animal was quietly removed from most jars within living memory. The medieval version was a way of keeping meat without salting or smoking it: minced mutton, beef, ox tongue, venison or tripe, packed with dried fruit, spice and spirit, sealed under a crust. Henry V had one at his coronation in 1413. The spices came back from the crusades and never left. It hung on far longer than people assume. Eliza Acton's mincemeat in Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845 uses ox tongue. Mrs Beeton in 1861 printed two recipes, one with meat and one without, and only later editions dropped the meat one. The 1931 Joy of Cooking still calls for 4 pounds of lean beef, chopped. By the 1997 edition the beef has gone. So the fruit stayed and the meat went and the name stayed, which is how a nation ends up eating something it cannot explain the name of. The suet held on longer than the beef did, and it was the last animal left in the jar. Beef suet is the hard fat from around a bullock's kidneys, and its job in mincemeat is chemical rather than sentimental. Cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and citrus oils are all fat soluble. The suet holds them and releases them slowly across the whole mouthful, which is why a mince pie made with it tastes of spice for several seconds and one made without tastes of sugar immediately and then of nothing. Then that went too. Read the jar on the shelf this December. Sultanas, sugar, apple, glucose-fructose syrup, vegetable suet, candied peel, glycerine. Vegetable suet is palm oil shredded into wheat flour so it behaves like fat from an animal, and it is sold in mincemeat under the name of the animal fat it replaced. So the jar now contains fruit, three kinds of sugar and a palm oil substitute impersonating beef fat, and it is called mincemeat, and it has neither. The original was meat preserved in fruit and spirit. The thing sold under its name is sugar preserved in more sugar. Ask your butcher for a lump of fresh suet. He has it, it costs almost nothing, you grate it frozen, and mincemeat made with it keeps for a year in a cupboard without a fridge, which was the entire point of the stuff.

My mutton grew on a hill that has never produced a single thing a human can eat, and it is the one they want off the shelf. My mutton did not need child labour. The cocoa did. My mutton did not need a gallon of water per nut. The Californian almond did. My mutton did not need bees trucked across a continent. The almond did that too. My mutton did not burn a rainforest. The palm oil did. My mutton did not need men shelling it with their hands burning. The cashew did. My mutton did not sterilise the workforce. The banana did. My mutton did not need a cartel. The avocado did. My mutton did not kill songbirds by the million. The Spanish olive did. My mutton did not empty an aquifer. The Peruvian asparagus did. My mutton did not need a heated glasshouse in February. The tomato did. My mutton did not fly. The berries did. My mutton walked to the field, ate the grass, and walked out once. One animal. One death. The whole of it used, down to the fat and the bones. Every one of those has its dead. They are four thousand miles away, and somebody else does the looking. Plant-based was never a smaller body count. It was a longer supply chain. The virtue is not in the harm you avoid. It is in the harm you have arranged not to see. And my mutton is the one they demonise for exactly one reason. It is the only death on that list you have to look at.

Mutton is the best meat in Britain and most people under 60 have never eaten it once. It is the only food in this country whose name is an insult. Nobody says beef dressed as veal. What a shoulder gets you: - An animal that lived two years or more, nearly all of it outside - A fat cap thick enough to be worth the name - Fat that carries the vitamin A, D and K2 with it - Rumen hydrogenated, so the grass is filtered before it reaches you - Darker than lamb, because older animals carry more iron - Collagen through the shoulder that goes to silk in a low oven - Flavour that lamb has not lived long enough to develop - A life, rather than a spring - A fleece for every year she stayed alive - British heritage meat, and you can hear Elgar from the oven - One ingredient, and no list on the back A cull ewe fetches around £130 while lamb sits at record money. The animal that ate the most grass, lived the longest and carries the most fat is the one worth least on the day. Most of it goes to the halal butchers and the kebab trade, who buy it deliberately, having noticed. The supermarket sells you the five month old version at several times the price and calls it premium, which is the only industry on earth where the more finished product costs less. Cooking it is not a skill. Shoulder, low oven, seven hours, nothing on it. If you can leave a room for an afternoon you are qualified. British farming needs us to eat the whole animal and the whole flock, not just the young and the tender. Ask your butcher for mutton. He will either have some, or look at you the way a barman looks at a man ordering a drink his grandfather used to order.

No anthropologist has ever catalogued a vegan society. They have looked. No country has climbed out of poverty and spent the money on lentils. No famine was ever caused by a shortage of meat. It was always the crop. No hunter-gatherer group has been found walking past a carcass on principle. No expedition has crossed ice on grain. Men hauled dried meat and fat a thousand miles instead. No religion that gave up the meat gave up the butter. The ghee stayed holy throughout. No mother has ever produced low fat milk. The organ has no interest in the guidelines. No plant has ever made B12, retinol, K2 or creatine in a quantity worth the trip. No Blue Zone has survived inspection as vegan. There is always a pig at the back. No ruling class in any century has eaten what it was feeding the poor. No vegan diet has ever been recommended without a tablet attached to it. Two million years. Every climate, every landmass, every religion we have managed to invent. Nobody arrived at this. Nobody has ever needed to be talked into eating meat. Except us. First people in history with enough of it to have an opinion.

Raw milk is the most heavily policed food in the country, and it makes about 761 Americans ill a year. Leafy greens make 2.3 million. Chicken, around 1.17 million. Raw oysters, 52,000, out of a much smaller crowd eating them. Total foodborne illness in America: 48 million cases a year. Raw milk is 761 of those. Call it one and a half thousandths of one per cent. The per-eater numbers are the ones nobody prints. Roughly one raw milk drinker in fourteen thousand gets ill in a year. For leafy greens it is one in a hundred and forty. For chicken, one in three hundred. For raw oysters, one in sixty-six. A bag of washed salad is a hundred times likelier to make you ill than the milk, and it comes with a picture of a field on it. The salad is triple washed in chlorine, shipped from another state and sold with no warning label. The milk comes from a herd tested for tuberculosis and brucellosis, from a farm inspected twice a year, and it carries a printed health warning. Now look at what each one is actually delivering. The milk: complete protein, butterfat, calcium, vitamins A, D, K2 and B12, and enough of it to raise a calf from ninety pounds to four hundred. The lettuce: ninety-five per cent water, a bit of fibre, and pesticide residues found on the overwhelming majority of samples the USDA tests. One is a food that builds a mammal. The other is crunchy pesticide water with a field printed on the bag. Twenty states ban the milk. Nobody has ever banned romaine. And when somebody gets ill from a bag of leaves, it is a recall. When somebody gets ill from raw milk, it is a reason.

RFK Jr. pointed at the colon cancer figures in young adults this week, and within about four hours the response had arranged itself into the same two instructions we have been issued since 1982. Eat less red meat. Eat more fibre. Red meat has a scheduling problem. American beef consumption peaked in 1976 and has fallen by roughly a third since. The generation now being diagnosed at thirty-five ate less of it than any generation of the last century, while early-onset colorectal cancer doubled in two decades. A suspect who has been leaving town for fifty years, still in the dock, still not asked to explain himself. Fibre did worse. They ran it properly, twice, in two countries, thousands of people, years of wheat bran and extra fruit and veg, watching for polyps. The polyps came back at exactly the same rate as in the people eating none of it. Nobody withdrew the advice. Nobody ever does. Then last year a team sequenced 981 tumours from eleven countries. Certain E. coli strains make a toxin called colibactin, which snaps both strands of DNA and leaves a signature so distinctive you can read it off a tumour decades later. In patients diagnosed under forty it turns up 3.3 times more often than in patients over seventy. And they could date it. The mutations were laid down in the first ten years of life. So the damage that produces a tumour at thirty-five was done before that person was old enough to buy anything, choose anything or cook anything. Whatever they had for lunch last Tuesday is not in the frame and never was. Colibactin is also pathetically short lived. It only works on contact. The bacterium has to be physically pressed against the colon lining, and it cannot get there, because the inner mucus layer is a sterile exclusion zone that holds the entire microbiome at arm's length. Something has to take that barrier down. Carboxymethylcellulose. Polysorbate 80. Industrial detergents, filed under emulsifiers, because emulsifier sounds like something a chef does. They are in the ice cream, the bread, the sauces, the protein bars and most of what gets handed to a child. Feed carboxymethylcellulose to healthy adults under supervision and you can watch their bacteria move in and take up residence against the wall. The toxin is thousands of years old. The barrier it has to get through is the thing that changed, it is on the label, and everybody in this argument is busy discussing a steak.

Jeremy Clarkson spent a year unable to buy or sell a cow, and the first thing he did when the padlock came off was drive four hundred miles to Scotland to find some. His post about it was mostly about the view. He had never been able to decide between North Devon and the Yorkshire Dales, spent three days in the Scottish Borders, and settled the argument. Then, at the end, almost as an afterthought: also, I bought some cows there. Buried in that afterthought is a decision most people would not recognise as one. Scotland has been officially TB free since 2009. It is the cleanest cattle ground in Britain, and going that far north to restock a Cotswold herd is what a careful man does after a breakdown. It may not be enough. Around thirty per cent of breakdowns recur within two years of restrictions being lifted. One in three farms that get the all-clear are back in it, and there are only three ways that happens. Infected animals the skin test missed. Wildlife. Or the replacement cattle. The first and the third are the same problem, because the skin test is not a good test. It misses a meaningful share of infected animals every time it is run, which is why a herd can pass, and pass again, and still be carrying it. Every animal any farmer buys anywhere in Britain has been cleared by that test, and nobody has ever had anything better to go on. Northern Irish research into long-running breakdowns found bought-in cattle were the strongest single source of infection. Ahead of badgers. Ahead of the neighbours. So the machinery works like this. The state takes your cattle. You cannot buy or sell for months. When it finally lets you go, you have empty sheds and a business that only exists if there are animals in them, so you go and buy some. Buying cattle is the riskiest act in the trade. You are required to do the thing most likely to put you back where you started. Which is why a great many farms simply stop. They take the compensation, sell what is left, and never keep cattle again. No policy, no protest, no headline. The sheds get rented for storage and the grass goes to somebody else's sheep. That is how a national herd disappears. One farmer at a time, deciding he cannot go through it twice. Clarkson has the television money, the film crew and the shop, so he got in the car and drove to Scotland. The bloke with three hundred acres works out that he cannot afford the drive, or the risk, or another year of a padlocked gate.