rickybobbyns

NASA's first job, before it put a man in space, was to find the meal that leaves the least behind. The answer was steak and eggs, and it has been the launch breakfast for 65 years. The problem was the suit. A Mercury astronaut was sealed into a pressure suit, bolted into a capsule the size of a phone box, and left on top of a rocket for hours. He could not take anything off. There was no toilet, and no plan for one. So in July 1960 the Air Force handed the question to a nutritionist called Beatrice Finkelstein. She had to feed the man so he stayed strong, clear-headed and full, for as long as it took, on the least possible waste. She wrote a menu for the last 3 to 4 days before flight. High protein, low residue. Meat, eggs, very little else. Residue is the polite word for whatever the body cannot use and has to send back out. On her figures, beef and eggs produced almost none. The body took nearly all of it. On the morning of 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard sat down to steak and eggs, went out to the pad, and became the first American in space. It worked so well that nobody dared change it. John Glenn ate it. The crew of Apollo 11 ate it on the morning they left for the Moon. Shuttle crews ate it. Astronauts are superstitious, and this is the one ritual with a medical file behind it. Look at what that file says. The best funded engineers on earth needed a food that was nearly all nutrition and next to no waste, to fuel a man through the most demanding day of his life, and they did not pick porridge. Down here the same breakfast comes with a warning, and we are advised to swap it for the bran. NASA ran the test in 1960. The bran is the residue.

In 1970, a Monsanto chemist named John Franz was working through a batch of compounds the company had bought from another lab. The third one he tested killed weeds with what the trade press would later describe as a once-in-a-century efficiency. It killed every broadleaf plant it touched. It killed the roots. It did not, by the testing standards of 1970, appear to kill anything else. The compound was glyphosate. Monsanto paid Franz five dollars for the patent. By 1974 the product was on the market under the brand name Roundup. By 1996 Monsanto had engineered soybean, corn, and cotton varieties that were genetically resistant to it, allowing farmers to spray entire fields and kill everything in them except the crop. By 2014 American agriculture was applying it at roughly 250 million pounds a year, more than any other herbicide in history. In 2015 the World Health Organization's cancer agency classified glyphosate as Group 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans. By 2018, Bayer, which had bought Monsanto for sixty-three billion dollars, was facing more than 100,000 lawsuits from American agricultural workers diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The settlements have, to date, cost Bayer somewhere north of eleven billion dollars. Bayer continues to sell the product. Bayer also continues to argue, in press releases and in court, that the product is safe, while paying out a sum that, in any other industry, would constitute an unambiguous admission. The patent has expired. Generic glyphosate is now manufactured globally and sprayed on roughly seventy food crops. In a substantial proportion of those crops, it is applied as a pre-harvest drying agent, sprayed directly onto the standing crop seven to ten days before harvest to accelerate ripening and kill the plant on a predictable schedule. The crop absorbs the chemical while it is still alive and still drawing it into the grain. The grain goes to the elevator. The elevator goes to the mill. The mill goes to the factory. The factory goes to the porridge oats, the breakfast cereal, the granola bar, the wholewheat loaf, the chickpea flour, the lentil dahl, and the oat milk your barista is fitting a cardboard sleeve around right now. The compound John Franz received five dollars for is in approximately the entire middle aisle of the supermarket. The marketing does not mention this. The packet does not mention this. The wheat would mention it, in fairness. The wheat is not in a position to.

A cow eats grass. The grass grows from sunlight, rain, and soil. The grass does not require ploughing. It does not require irrigation. It does not require synthetic fertiliser. It does not require pesticide. It does not require herbicide. It does not require fungicide. It does not require the destruction of native ecosystems to be planted. The grass grows itself. The cow walks over to the grass. The cow eats the grass. The cow produces, as a byproduct, manure, which fertilises the grass, which grows more grass, which feeds the cow. The cow also produces, as a byproduct, the most nutrient-dense food on earth. When the cow dies, the leftover material that humans do not eat is returned to the soil. The soil becomes deeper, richer, and more capable of supporting life. A functioning grass-fed ruminant system, properly managed, sequesters carbon in the soil at rates that match or exceed the methane the cow emits. The net result is carbon negative, restorative to the land, and increasing in biodiversity over time. The system has been in operation, somewhere on earth, for roughly four million years. The grasslands of the world co-evolved with the ruminants that grazed them. Without the ruminants, the grasslands die. The alternative being proposed is: - Clear the grassland. - Plough the soil. - Plant a monoculture. - Spray it with herbicide. - Spray it with pesticide. - Harvest it with diesel machinery. - Process it in a factory. - Extrude it into a shape that resembles meat. - Market it as the ethical option. One of these systems sustains itself indefinitely. The other depletes the soil, destroys the biodiversity, depends on petroleum, and requires a marketing budget to be eaten at all. The cow is not the problem. The cow was the solution before there was a problem. The cow is being blamed because the cow does not have a PR firm.

Things considered safe by mainstream medicine: Hexane-extracted soybean oil, heated, bleached, deodorised, sold by the litre. Maltodextrin, derived from corn, with a glycaemic index higher than table sugar. Industrial sugar replacements that were once a pesticide. A vaccine schedule consisting of 72 doses by age 18. Six different SSRIs prescribed in rotation to a 14-year-old girl. Statins for children. Things considered dangerous by mainstream medicine: Butter. A boiled egg. The yolk of a boiled egg, specifically. Sunlight. The fat on the edge of a chop. A glass of full-fat milk. Have a look at the two lists. Have a long look. Then decide which institution you would still hand your blood pressure to.