Fakeologist (eff/off)

How butter is made. Take cream from a cow. Shake it. Pour off the buttermilk. Salt it. Three steps, and a child can do all of them. How seed oil is made. Take seeds. Cook them at 88°C to split the cell walls and kill the proteins. Crush them under tonnes of pressure. Soak the paste in hexane, a petroleum solvent used to strip grease off engine parts. Boil most of the hexane back off. Some stays in. The regulators have had a think and decided they are relaxed about it. Wash the brown, stinking sludge in caustic soda, because the oil has gone rancid before it has left the factory. Bleach it through clay, so you never find out what colour it really is. Steam it at 240°C under vacuum for an hour to take the smell off, because without this step no human being would let it near a frying pan. Pour the clear, odourless, flavourless result into a plastic bottle and put a heart on the label. Nine steps, a chemical plant and a fire certificate. But yes. Healthier than the one the child made.

They attacked butter, and sold you margarine, then seed oil, then a statin for what the seed oil did. They attacked leather, and sold you plastic shoes that split in a year and never rot in the landfill. They attacked wool, and sold you polyester that sheds plastic into the sea every time you wash it. They attacked lard, and sold you shortening that had to be pulled from the shelves for the trans fat. They attacked whole milk, and sold you skimmed milk with the vitamins removed, then oat water with the vitamins sprayed back on. They attacked eggs, and sold you a breakfast cereal with a cartoon on the box. They attacked the sun, and sold you factor 50, then a vitamin D tablet for what the factor 50 did. They attacked salt, and sold you low-sodium ready meals with four times the sugar. Now they're attacking beef, and the offer on the table is textured pea protein extruded in a factory, with a share price. Every one of these swaps had the same two results: the thing replacing it was worse for you, and somebody owned the patent. Nobody owns a cow's patent. Nobody owns a sheep's fleece, a hen's egg or a June afternoon. That is the only crime any of them ever committed.

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.

A restaurant makes more on the pasta than the steak, and the entire food system worked that out before you did. The ribeye is £42 on the menu. It cost the kitchen about £14 to put on the plate. The pasta is £18. It cost about £2.50, most of which was the parmesan. The salad is £14. It cost about £2, and the lettuce was the expensive bit. The risotto is £19. It is rice, stock and a knob of butter, and the stock was free. The steak returns twice what it cost. The pasta returns six times. The salad returns six times. So the chef's special is the pasta, the salad gets a paragraph on the menu, and the steak sits at the bottom with no adjectives. Now scale the restaurant up to a country. A box of cereal is 20p of grain and £3.50 on the shelf. A plant-based burger is pea flour, rapeseed oil and a red dye, and it sells for more than the beef one it is pretending to be. An oat drink is oats and water and sells at twice the price of the milk it replaced. Every tier of the trade makes its margin on the plant, because a plant is nearly free and an animal takes two years of grass. Bill Gates owns more farmland than any other man in America, holds stakes in the fake meat firms, and told the rich world to switch to synthetic beef. The pattern in the restaurant and the pattern in the policy are the same pattern. Talk down the expensive ingredient. Sell the cheap one at the expensive price. Keep the difference. The advice you were given about meat was written by people who make eight times more when you order the pasta. Nobody is giving you a diet. They are giving you the menu with the margins folded over.