Beaver Spit

Roman slaves ate bread, olives and porridge, washed down with vinegar. Roman senators ate boar, dormice and peacock. Egyptian labourers raised the pyramids on bread, onions and beer. The pharaoh ate beef. Spartan helots ate barley and figs. The Spartans who owned them ate a black broth of pork and blood. Chinese peasants ate millet and rice. Genghis Khan's horsemen rode over them on mutton and mare's milk. Indian lower castes ate rice, lentils and flatbread. The Mughal emperors ate lamb off gold plates. Japanese peasants ate rice and pickles. The samurai ate fish and game. Medieval serfs ate pottage and black bread. The lord ate venison, and blinded a serf for touching a deer. Tudor commoners ate bread cut with chalk. Henry VIII's court went through thousands of cattle a year. Irish cottiers ate potatoes, and in 1847 they ate grass. Their landlords ate beef, and shipped the rest to England past the dying. Plantation slaves ate cornmeal and a weekly scrap of fatback. The planter ate ham, oysters and cream. Victorian mill hands ate bread, tea and jam. The Victorian aristocracy ate beef, game and butter. Soviet collective farmers ate black bread and cabbage soup. Stalin served his inner circle roast meat and caviar until four in the morning. Every civilisation. Every century. Every continent. The poor got the plants. The powerful took the animals. Nobody in five thousand years ran a trial on it. They watched which men grew tall and which men obeyed, and kept the meat for themselves. Then in 1977 a wheat-state senator, a Harvard professor on sugar money and a reporter with no training told the world the slave's plate had been the healthy one all along. No pharaoh ever fed the pottage to his own son. They fed it to yours.