Carl Day

Grass grows. Cow eats grass. Human eats cow. The simplest agricultural equation on the planet, and somehow the most controversial. Compare it to the alternative being proposed. Petroleum is drilled in the North Sea. Shipped to a refinery in Rotterdam. Converted into nitrogen fertiliser via the Haber-Bosch process at 450°C. Shipped to Brazil. Sprayed on soy planted where rainforest used to be. Soy is harvested by a combine made in Illinois running on Saudi diesel. Shipped to Belgium. Extracted with hexane, a petroleum solvent. Hexane is mostly removed. Isolate is shipped to a food-tech start-up in California. Combined with methylcellulose, beetroot extract for the blood effect, coconut oil, sunflower oil, gum arabic, yeast extract, and twelve other ingredients you wouldn't feed a dog. Extruded through a high-shear processor to mimic muscle fibre. Shipped to a supermarket in Hackney. Bought by a man with a tote bag. Tote bag man eats the product, gets indigestion, and posts a video about how the cow is the problem. Eight thousand miles. Sixteen industrial processes. Four continents. Three solvents. One marketing budget the size of a small country's GDP. Or. Grass. Cow. Human. Three words. Same field for a thousand years. We have somehow convinced ourselves the eight-thousand-mile version is the sustainable one. The greatest piece of stagecraft in human history.