Gary L #GreenParty #SaveOurNHS #BrexitShambles

Look at the human body as a weapon. It is embarrassing. No claws. Fingernails that lose a fight with cardboard. No fangs. Flat little teeth that struggle with a tough steak. No armour. Skin a bramble can open. No fur. Cold kills us in a night. No speed. A squirrel outruns us. A toddler loses to a goose. No strength. A chimp half our weight could take us apart. No venom. No shell. No horns. No wings. Pound for pound, the softest large animal in the field. And we hunted every one of them to the edge. Because everything went into one organ instead. The brain. A fifth of your energy, run by a body that skipped every other upgrade. And it is built from animal food. DHA from fish and meat. B12 found in no plant alive. Cholesterol, the scaffolding of every brain cell you own. The ape that started eating meat grew the brain. The brain made the spear. The spear ended the argument with every animal that had the claws and the fangs and the speed. A soft, slow, clawless creature became the apex predator of the planet, on the strength of one organ made of the exact food we are now told to cut out for our health. We ate our way to the top of the food chain. Now they want us to eat our way back down.

A plant-based diet is a full-time job, and no human has ever been hired for it. A cow has 4 stomachs, a 150-litre fermentation tank in the first one, and spends 8 hours a day chewing and 8 more chewing it again. About 40,000 jaw movements a day to turn grass into beef. A gorilla eats 18 kilos of leaves and stems a day, half its waking hours on the job, and runs the lot through a colon that takes up 60% of its gut. A panda spends 14 hours a day eating 12 kilos of bamboo and digests about a fifth of it. It has the gut of a carnivore and the diet of a lawnmower, and the result is an animal famous for being exhausted. A koala sleeps 20 hours a day because eucalyptus gives it almost nothing, and has a brain the size of a walnut rattling about in a skull built for something bigger. An elephant eats for 18 hours and passes half of it undigested. A horse has 30 metres of gut and will colic and die if it stops moving through. A rabbit is so bad at it that it eats its own droppings for a second pass. Every one of those animals carries the equipment. The vat, the extra stomachs, the 30 metres of pipe, the bacteria, the 18-hour shift. The human has 1 stomach, no vat, 7 metres of gut, no enzyme for cellulose, and finishes dinner in 12 minutes. Then he is told to eat 30 plants a week and wonders why he is bloated, tired, hungry by 10 and back at the fridge by 11. He is doing a cow's job without a cow's stomach, on a cow's hours, and the cow at least gets to lie down.

Customer: "Suet, please. It's Stir-up Sunday in a fortnight." Butcher: "Good. I've a lump of the proper stuff off a kidney. I'll grate it for you." Customer: "I was going to get the box from the supermarket. It keeps." Butcher: "Do you know what's in the box?" Customer: "Suet." Butcher: "The green box is palm oil and sunflower oil pressed into pellets. There's no animal in it. The blue box is beef fat dusted in rice flour so it doesn't clump. Either way it's been sat on a shelf since last Christmas." Customer: "My mother used the box." Butcher: "Your mother used the blue box. Your daughter buys the green one and thinks it's the same thing." Customer: "What does the real stuff do?" Butcher: "Melts late. The pudding steams round it for six hours and the fat holds the shape until the last minute, then lets go. That's why a proper pudding's light. The palm oil melts early and you get a brick." Customer: "How much?" Butcher: "Nothing. It was going for rendering. Bring me a slice on Boxing Day and we'll call it a deal." Customer: "And if I bring you one made with the green box?" Butcher: "I'll know. So will you."