Grown adults are currently trying to fix a cow's breath, and so far they have tried: - A face mask that burns off her burps - A royal design prize for the mask, worth £50,000 - Red seaweed from Australia, mixed into her feed - A chemical additive, made compulsory in Denmark from October 2025 - Over 200 complaints from Danish dairy farmers within weeks - Sick herds made exempt that November - Dairies in Norway and Sweden pausing it altogether - A fresh safety review ordered by Brussels in February 2026 - Breeding her to burp less, discussed at a summit in Ireland this month - The United Nations' nuclear agency, also this month The mask came from a team of Royal College of Art graduates and was judged by the then Prince of Wales and the man who designed the iPhone. The additive was meant to cut her methane by about a third, and Danish farmers say it cut their milk and put cows on the floor. Every item on that list starts from the same assumption, that the problem is the cow. She has been breathing out the same field for ten thousand years, and the only thing that's changed is the number of people standing behind her with a clipboard.

"We'd start you on the weekly weight-loss injection. Around 15% off in the first year." And when I stop? "We don't think of it as something you stop." Humour me. "In the trial, people put two thirds of it back inside a year." So it rents me a break from the hunger. "It manages a chronic condition." What comes off, exactly? "Weight." What kind? "...Mostly fat." And the rest? "In the trial, about four kilos in every ten were lean tissue." So I pay monthly to get smaller and weaker, and the month I stop I get bigger. "That's one way to put it." How do you put it? "Lifelong therapy."