Alex100🤍✝️

Pancake Day was invented to get rid of the animal fat. The flour was only there to carry it. For most of a thousand years Lent meant forty days without meat, and without eggs, milk, butter, lard or dripping either. The Church was thorough. So on the last day before the fast every household in England had a problem sitting in the larder: a crock of fat, a bowl of eggs and a jug of milk, all about to become forbidden. The answer was a batter that is almost entirely egg and milk, fried in as much fat as the pan would take. The day before had its own name, Collop Monday, when the last slices of bacon were fried and eaten with eggs, and the fat left in the pan was kept for the pancakes next morning. The French call the day Mardi Gras. It means Fat Tuesday, and they were not being poetic. Church bells were rung to tell the parish to start frying. The women of Olney have raced with a hot pan since 1445, because one of them is said to have heard the bell mid-pancake and run to church still holding it. So a pancake was a way of eating three animal foods at once before the priest took them away. The flour was the plate. It is now sold as a carbohydrate, shaken up from a bottle of powder and water, fried in a spray and dressed with juice from a plastic lemon. Lent used to ban everything that made a pancake worth eating. We have managed it voluntarily, all year round.

The warmest filling ever put inside a quilt cannot be farmed or made in a factory. It is left behind by a wild sea duck that has chosen, for about a thousand years, to nest next to one particular kind of person. The eider breeds on the coast of Iceland, and the female lines her nest with down plucked from her own breast. Each tuft is a tangle of microscopic hooks that cling to each other and trap air. Nothing synthetic has matched it, and the people who make polyester hollowfibre have been trying since the 1950s. Eiders are wild. They can nest anywhere on four thousand miles of coast. Year after year they come back to the same few hundred farms and settle within yards of the house, in old tyres, under upturned boats, against the doorstep. They come because of what the farmer does. For the six weeks of nesting the family stops farming and stands guard. They shoot the foxes and the mink. They string flags and old CDs to keep the gulls and ravens off. Some sit up through the white nights with a rifle and a flask. A duck that nests on a guarded farm raises her brood. One that nests on the next headland feeds a fox. When the ducklings have gone to sea, the farmer walks round and picks up what is left in the empty nests. It takes about 60 nests to make a kilo. Iceland gathers some three tonnes a year, most of the world's supply, and killing an eider has been against Icelandic law since the 1840s. Nobody owns the ducks. Nobody feeds them, fences them or breeds them. Each side simply worked out that it does better with the other one there. The polyester duvet on your bed was named after this bird. It is the only thing the two have in common.

How long an animal can go without food tells you what it was built to eat, and you can go weeks. A rabbit that stops eating for a day is a vet emergency. Its gut stalls and its liver starts to fail. A pony off its food for a few days can flood its own blood with fat and die of it. A cow needs grass going in around the clock to keep the microbes in her rumen alive. A lion eats up to 40 kilos at a sitting, then nothing for days. A wolf can bolt a fifth of its body weight in one meal, then go a fortnight without. A crocodile can go a year between meals. A pregnant polar bear digs into the snow and goes up to eight months without eating, giving birth and suckling her cubs on the way. An emperor penguin father stands through the Antarctic winter with an egg on his feet and eats nothing for about four months. A human stomach stretches from about a litre to four. A lean human can go about two months without food, living off fat that every other primate barely carries. Hunters in every culture ate until they couldn't move after a kill, and went without until the next one. The body was built to feast and fast like a predator. The diet sheet feeds it like a rabbit, a little every few hours, in case it panics.