Rick White

Only a fat animal can be properly aged, and that is the real reason most supermarket beef tastes of so little. Dry ageing is the oldest trick in butchery. The meat hangs in a cold room at a degree or two above freezing, with air moving across it, for three weeks or more, and two things happen. The meat's own enzymes slowly break down the muscle fibres, so it turns tender. Water evaporates out of it, so the flavour concentrates, until at five or six weeks it tastes deep, nutty and almost like cheese. It loses a fifth or more of its weight to drying and trimming along the way, which is part of why it costs what it does. The thing that makes it possible is the fat. The cap of fat on the outside is the animal's own jacket. It keeps the meat underneath from drying to leather, and it lets a rib hang for weeks. A lean carcass with a thin covering cannot go the distance. Hang it and it dries out, darkens and wastes away into trim before it gets anywhere good. So the lean beef the market has demanded since the 1980s is beef that cannot be aged the old way, and it gets rushed through instead. That is where the word matured comes in. Unless the pack says dry-aged, matured usually means wet-aged: sealed in a vacuum bag and left in a chiller for a few weeks. It goes a bit more tender, the bag keeps all the water in, and none of the flavour arrives. At the butcher, ask three things. Is it dry-aged, how many days, and is it on the bone? A butcher who dry-ages will usually show you the cabinet, and every rib in it will be wearing a thick white coat, because no other kind is worth the room. The fat was never only the flavour. It bought the time for the flavour to happen.

Your gallbladder needs about 10 grams of fat in one sitting to empty properly, and a low-fat diet that never gives it that is how a person ends up on a surgeon's list. The gallbladder is a small bag under the liver that stores bile, and bile is how you digest fat. When fat reaches the gut, a hormone called CCK tells the bag to squeeze, and it empties into the intestine. It only does the job properly when there is enough fat to justify it, and the threshold researchers work to is around 10 grams in a meal. Below that, the bag barely moves. The bile sits there and thickens, and the cholesterol in it starts to crystallise the way anything does in still water. Crystals become sludge, and sludge becomes stones. In 1996 a group of dieters were put on a 520-calorie plan with under 2 grams of fat a day, and another group on 900 calories with 30 grams, including one 10-gram meal put there for no reason except to make the gallbladder empty. Four of the six on the fat-free plan grew gallstones. None of the seven on the fatty plan did, and the trial was stopped early on ethical grounds. Women grow gallstones at about twice the rate men do, and they are also the most likely to have spent twenty years on skimmed milk, egg-white omelettes and chicken breast. So give it the signal every day, in one meal with real fat in it. Ten grams is two whole eggs, a thick slice of cheddar, or a thumb of butter on the steak. A ribeye with the cap on gives it four or five times that, and the bag empties clean. If yours is still in there, it is asking to be used. Use it.

People wonder why I'm so obsessed with donkeys. I've looked into it, and my only finding is that the rest of you are underdoing it. The donkey was built for the ground where everything else gives up. It lives on thorn and scrub that a horse would starve beside, climbs rock on hooves like chisels, cools itself through those ears, and can lose nearly a third of its body weight in water, carry on eating, then drink 25 litres in three minutes and walk off as if nothing happened. We tamed it 7,000 years ago in the dry country of East Africa, and it has been the animal of the hard places ever since. So it was the donkey, long before the horse, that carried civilisation on its back. One of Egypt's first pharaohs was buried at Abydos with ten donkeys laid in graves beside him, every spine worn from a lifetime under loads. The grain, the salt, the copper and the news of the ancient world moved at a donkey's pace, and wherever a hill is still too steep for a wheel, they still do. The same animal fed our babies. Donkey milk is the closest milk on earth to a human mother's, Hippocrates prescribed it, and the foundling hospital in Paris kept a stable of jennies so the orphans could be put straight to the udder. A fair share of Europe's abandoned children owe their first month to a donkey, and most of those donkeys carry a dark cross down the back and across the shoulders, which the old story says was given to them on Good Friday. It carried our wounded too. On the beach at Gallipoli a stretcher-bearer from South Shields found a stray donkey, and for 24 days the two of them walked up and down Shrapnel Gully under fire bringing broken men down to the boats, until a machine gun got the man. The donkey went back up with the next one. Of everything the Anzacs brought home from that campaign, the thing they chose to remember was a donkey. Then there is the stubbornness, the one fact everybody is sure of, and it is the opposite of the truth. A horse meets danger by bolting, which is why horses die on cliff paths. A donkey stops, looks at the thing in front of it, and makes a decision, and it will refuse to step into water it cannot see the bottom of because it is right not to. For 7,000 years we have been calling a risk assessment an attitude. Put one in a field of ewes and it appoints itself. A fox or a loose dog comes through the hedge and the donkey goes at it, head down, front feet first, and keeps going until the thing has gone. Nobody trains that in. It decided they were its sheep. It remembers a face and a field after 25 years. It will stand over a dying companion for a day. It lives to 40 and outlasts half the people who ever owned it. There are about 50 million of them alive, carrying water, firewood and children for the poorest people on earth, and close to 6 million a year are now killed for their hides, boiled down into a gelatine sold as a tonic. The animal that did the most work for the least thanks is being melted into a wellness product. Seven thousand years of hauling us uphill, feeding our orphans and carrying our wounded, and the best we managed in return was to turn its name into an insult. So no. Not nearly obsessed enough.

Visitor: "Where's the fruit? Gorillas eat fruit." Keeper: "Not here. We took it off the menu in 2014. Most big zoos have since." Visitor: "Why would you take fruit off a gorilla?" Keeper: "Because it isn't fruit any more. Everything in a supermarket's been bred for a century to be sweeter. A wild fig's about as sweet as a carrot. A supermarket banana's a pudding." Visitor: "And the gorillas?" Keeper: "Got fat. Teeth went. Two of the males were pre-diabetic. The vet said feeding them modern fruit was like feeding them chocolate bars with the wrapper left on." Visitor: "What do they get now?" Keeper: "Leaves, stems, a bit of veg. They sulked for a fortnight and lost the weight." Visitor: "So the fruit was too sugary for a 180-kilo animal built to eat it." Keeper: "That's the paperwork, yes." Visitor: "I've got a bag of grapes in the buggy for my two-year-old." Keeper: "Lovely. We'd not be allowed to give those to the chimps."

1900: Everybody cooks in tallow, lard and butter. The word diet means what a person eats. Obesity rate: 3%. 1911: "It's all vegetable!" Crisco, boiled out of cotton mill waste, goes on sale in a tin. Obesity rate: 3%. 1948: "The fat on your plate is killing you." A physiologist with a graph and a magazine cover. Obesity rate: 10%. 1961: "Swap the butter for polyunsaturated oil. Your heart will thank you." Obesity rate: 13%. 1977: "Eat less fat. Eat more grain. We have thought about this." Obesity rate: 15%. 1980: "Avoid too much fat, saturated fat and cholesterol." Printed, posted, taught. Obesity rate: 15%. 1984: "Hold the eggs and butter." A face made of bacon on the front of Time. Obesity rate: 15%. 1990: "Get the beef tallow out of the fryers." The chips have never tasted the same since. Obesity rate: 23%. 1994: "Fat free! Eat as much as you like." And they did. Obesity rate: 25%. 2000: Seed oil is now in the bread, the hummus, the baby formula and the drip. Nobody mentions it. Obesity rate: 30%. 2010: "Keep saturated fat under 10% of calories." The one food group still falling. Obesity rate: 36%. 2015: "Replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats." The same sentence, 54 years running, read out by new people. Obesity rate: 38%. 2020: Seed oil is a fifth of every calorie in America. Obesity rate: 42%. 2022: "Take the injection." Weekly. For life. Obesity rate: 42%. 2026: "It's the saturated fat." Obesity rate: 42%. Every instruction on that list is still in force today. Not one has ever been withdrawn. They have never once gone back down the list to see which rung the fire started on. They just screw the next one on and tell you to keep climbing.