Ride The Lightnin'

Nine in ten American strawberries come from a few valleys in California where the soil is killed with a First World War gas before every planting, and the fields are visible from the road because they are wrapped in plastic to keep the gas in. Chloropicrin was made for the trenches. It was a lung and eye agent, a vomiting gas, fired in shells to force men out of their masks. Now it is injected into the ground at Watsonville and Oxnard every year, under tarps that hold the fumes down for a week, and it does to the soil what it did to a trench: everything in it dies, the fungi, the bacteria, the worms, the insects, until the dirt is as sterile as a hospital tray. Then the strawberries go in, on raised beds of plastic, fed by drip line with everything a living soil would have given them, and the plastic and the gas go in again next year, because a dead soil has no defence against the one disease that gets through. For forty years the gas was methyl bromide, which eats the ozone layer, and when the world banned it in 2005 California's strawberry growers got themselves an exemption and kept using it for another decade, the last major crop on earth to do so. Chloropicrin was the replacement, and the state's own pesticide regulator lists it among the commonest causes of farmworker poisoning in California. The men who apply it are mostly undocumented, the drift has emptied a school in Monterey County, and the strawberry has topped the list of the most pesticide-contaminated produce in America for most of the last decade. Every year the industry calls it a heart-healthy antioxidant superfood, and every year the field it came from is gassed. The cow in the pasture next door has never once needed the soil under her sterilised. The strawberry cannot be grown at that scale without it, and the war gas is the price of a punnet in January.

People ask me why I'm so obsessed with ruminants. I've given it some thought, and my conclusion is that I'm not obsessed enough. A cow walks onto a wet hillside that grows nothing a human can eat, puts her head down, and comes back with steak, butter, cream and a pair of boots. She does it with a 150 litre fermentation tank she carries inside her, stocked with more bacteria than there have ever been people, which she feeds, waters and keeps at blood heat herself. Grass goes in. The bacteria take apart the one thing no animal can digest, and she lives on what they make. Then she digests the bacteria as well. Nothing is wasted. Even the fat comes out the far side rebuilt into something stable enough to fry in. Fuel: rain and sunlight. Emissions: next year's grass. She repairs herself, builds her own replacement every spring, and improves the ground she is standing on while she works. The finest engineers alive have spent billions trying to copy one chamber of her stomach in a steel shed, and so far they have made a paste. We have leaned on that machine for everything. The word capital comes from cattle, because a herd was the first bank. Domesday Book is written on sheep, and so was every deed in England for 500 years. Ruminants clothed our armies, lit our houses and carried our laws. Civilisation is a thing that happened to people who kept them. And they are such good company about it. A sheep remembers fifty faces for two years, which is forty-six more than I manage. A cow has a best friend, and her heart rate drops when that friend is beside her. A goat that cannot solve a problem will turn and look to you for help, as a dog does, and then ignore your advice. Let a herd out onto spring grass after a winter indoors and half a tonne of animal will skip. They ask for grass, rain, and to be left to get on with it. After ten thousand years of feeding, dressing and housing us, they will still walk over to the gate to see who you are. So no, I will not be calming down.

Bamboo sheets are sold as the gentle alternative to cotton and silk, and the fabric they are made of is the one that put factory workers in asylums. Bamboo cloth is not bamboo. It is viscose. The plant is pulped, dissolved in caustic soda and carbon disulphide, and squirted through a nozzle into acid, where it sets into a thread. It was patented in England in 1892 as artificial silk, and the trade name for it was rayon. The same process makes a kitchen sponge and the cellophane on a bunch of flowers. Carbon disulphide was already notorious. French doctors in the 1850s had watched it send rubber workers blind, impotent and insane. The viscose industry needed it in enormous quantities and nothing else would do. So from the 1920s the asylums began to fill. In 1933 a doctor at a Pennsylvania rayon plant wired Alice Hamilton, the first woman on the Harvard faculty and the country's authority on industrial poisons, with a 6-word message: an epidemic of insanity has broken out. Workers were going home and attacking their wives. Men in the churn rooms were found wandering the roads. Investigators who got inside found a third of the workforce showing signs of poisoning. The companies fixed prices, sat on the evidence, and when the regulators finally came for them in the West they moved the factories to India, China and Indonesia, where the same chemical is used today. The consumer was never harmed. Only the people who made the cloth. Silk is made by a caterpillar in a mulberry tree. Wool is made by a sheep in a field. Both are a protein, same as your own hair, and both have been pulled off the animal for 5,000 years without sending anybody out of his mind. The fake silk needed a chemical that could not be made safe, and the industry's answer was to make it somewhere else.