J Jon

The year is 200 BC. In China, your classics teach that a barbarian is someone who does not eat grain. The Xiongnu live on meat and milk and prize strength above everything. Their boys learn to ride on sheep. They trap your emperor on a hill for seven days with 300,000 archers, and China pays them in silk and princesses for the next sixty years. The year is 9 AD. Your general thinks the Germans are men only in voice and limbs, savages to be tamed with Roman law. Caesar wrote that milk, cheese and meat make them enormous. Within four days 15,000 of you are dead, and your skulls are nailed to the trees. The year is 60 AD. Rome files the Britons as savages who sow no grain and live on milk and meat, yet British boys in Rome stand half a foot taller than the tallest Romans. You live in Londinium when Boudica arrives, a woman taller than any of you, and 70,000 die in three burning towns. The year is 449. Your historians call the Huns two-legged beasts, all thick necks and hard limbs, who warm half-raw meat under their thighs as they ride. Your emperor pays them 2,100 pounds of gold a year. At Attila's feast you eat off silver. He eats nothing but meat, off a wooden plate. The year is 1012. Your Church condemns the Danes as heathens who eat horse. Raised on beef and soured milk and led by Thorkell the Tall, they winter on your cattle and take 48,000 pounds of your silver. When the Archbishop of Canterbury refuses to be ransomed, they pelt him with ox bones and split his skull with an axe. The year is 1241. Your chroniclers call the Mongols monsters who drink blood and tear raw flesh. Raised on meat and mare's milk, they ride from the age of three. They destroy the army of Hungary in a single morning, and in 1258 the Tigris runs black with the ink of Baghdad's libraries. The year is 2026. You are taught that red meat causes cancer, that raw milk is a danger to the public, and that anyone living on steak and butter is a caveman. For two thousand years the civilised have been taught to sneer at the people raised on meat and milk, and for two thousand years those people have stood taller and lived freer than the ones sneering. Which side would you rather be on?