Brave Little Poaster

The year is 180. You are a gladiator in Ephesus, and the films will give you a body like a bronze statue. You are fed barley porridge and beans, and the crowd calls you a barley man to your face. The porridge puts a layer of fat over your muscle so the cuts bleed instead of killing, which is good for the show. The man who owns you dines on dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed. When your bones are dug up eighteen centuries later they are full of barley and almost nothing else, and a man at a university will call your diet plant-forward. The year is 1300. You are a villein on a Hampshire manor, living, as the brochure will one day put it, in harmony with the land. The land gives you pottage: peas, beans and oats in the one pot, every day, until you die of it at forty. The hall above you smells of venison from the lord's own park, roast pork, eel, swan, butter from cows you milked before dawn. Take one deer from his wood and you lose a hand. The court that decides it sits in his hall, after dinner. The year is 1755. You are a Highland tenant eating oatmeal three times a day, and in London Dr Johnson has just printed his dictionary. Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. The laird at the head of your glen finds this very funny over his beef. The beef was driven to market past your door. The year is 1795. You are a Berkshire farm labourer and a clergyman is at your table with a notebook, writing down what your children eat. Bread. Tea. A little cheese. Bacon on Sunday if the pig did well. He prints it as a national disgrace. The squire you work for has a joint every day of the year and is told from the pulpit that your trouble is thrift. The year is 1847. You are in County Clare and the potatoes have gone black in the ground for the second year running. Your family lived on them, ten pounds a day for a working man, and you are sitting in a cabin with nothing. At the harbour the ships are loading cattle, pigs, butter and bacon for England, under armed guard. The agent on the quay looks well. So does the bullock walking up the gangplank past the people who raised it. The year is 1933. You are in a village outside Kharkiv. The grain quota has been collected, then collected again, then the brigades have come with iron rods to probe the floors for anything buried. Your children are eating boiled bark, and the dog next door has stopped barking. In the district town there is a shop for Party members with a curtain over the window. Behind the curtain there is sausage. The year is 1997. You are in North Pyongan and the rations stopped months ago. You are stripping the inner bark from pines and boiling grass, and the famine will take hundreds of thousands before it ends. The Dear Leader's personal chef is flying to Japan for tuna, to Denmark for pork and to Iran for caviar, and will write a book about it. The year is 2026. You are in a supermarket in England. The posters say eat less meat for the planet. The spread is plant-based, the cereal has a heart on the box, and the beef carries a warning about its footprint. You take the lentils, because you are a responsible person, and you pay more for them than the villein's pottage ever cost anyone. The people who put the posters up flew to the climate conference, and the menu had beef on it. They eat what the lord ate, what the laird ate, what the agent on the quay ate, what the man behind the curtain ate. Two thousand years, and the diet of grain and beans was always what the powerful handed down to the people beneath them. Everyone at both ends of the table knew what it meant. Now it has a name, a logo and a moral, and for the first time in history the peasant is paying extra for it.