TheNoticer

Women have been handed the plant version of every nutrient for fifty years and then told the tiredness is just being a woman. Told to eat spinach for iron. Spinach iron absorbs at about 2%. The iron in a steak absorbs at up to 35%. Told to take flax for the omega-3. The body turns a few percent of it into the fat the brain actually uses. A mackerel arrives with it done. Told to swap the milk for oat. The milk was where the iodine was, and the thyroid runs on iodine. Told to get B12 from nutritional yeast. Yeast has none until a factory sprays it on. Told to get protein from tofu, which has half what a lamb chop carries and none of the fat to use it. Told to cut the yolk for the cholesterol. The yolk was the choline, and the choline was the baby's brain. Told to go low fat in 1985 and to count calories in 1995, and the hunger that followed got a diagnosis of its own. Three women in ten on earth are anaemic. The advice for all three has been a leaf. Every substitution on that list took the animal off her plate and handed her the deficiency, and then handed her a label for the deficiency. Hashimoto's. Fibromyalgia. Chronic fatigue. Low mood. Perimenopause, arriving at thirty-eight. She was never short of a plant. She was short of a cow. Fifty years of being told to eat like a rabbit, and the fatigue filed under hormones.

Every food a child has ever been bribed to eat is a plant, and every bribe has been an animal or a sugar. No child has ever been bribed to eat butter. No child has ever been bribed to eat bacon. No child has ever been bribed to eat the crackling. No child has ever been bribed to eat a sausage, a chip fried in dripping, or the skin off the roast chicken. No child has ever been bribed to drink full-fat milk. Every child has been bribed to eat broccoli. Every child has been bribed to eat the sprouts, the cabbage, the spinach, the peas, the swede and whatever that was on the side of the plate on Sundays. Nobody has ever hidden steak inside a vegetable to get it into a child. Entire cookbooks exist for hiding vegetables inside cheese. Three more bites. Finish your greens. No pudding until the plate is clear. The deal in every kitchen is the same: eat the plant and you may have the thing you actually wanted. Children have been making this trade for a hundred years and losing every time, because the thing they wanted was the nutrition and the thing they were forced through was the ballast. No parent has ever said finish your steak and you can have a sprout.