Ray Smith

Chris Packham went on Gogglebox last week, watched the cartoon at the start of Clarkson's Farm, and announced that most farms are horrible monocultures sprayed with deadly chemicals, the ground pumped full of fertiliser, the animals indoors in crates being crushed and kept in the dark. A cartoon. Not a farm, not a documentary. The little illustrated title sequence. Clarkson replied in his Sun column and it is the best two hundred words he has written in years. He called Packham endlessly angry. He noted that the man had erupted in blind fury at the Winnie the Pooh-ish opening credits of a television programme. He pointed out, patiently, that it was a drawing. Then he dropped the actual grenade. Packham has been to Diddly Squat. In 2012. He drove there, on purpose, to look at the birds and do a bit of foraging. Sit with that one. The naturalist who tells a primetime audience that British farms are lifeless, poisoned industrial monocultures once picked a British farm as the place to go and enjoy the wildlife. And to gather food off the ground. Voluntarily. For pleasure. If the fields are sprayed dead, what were the birds doing there. And if the animals were indoors in crates in the dark, you would think he might have raised it at the time, rather than waiting fourteen years and bringing it up on a sofa while looking at a cartoon. He has doubled down on Instagram since, with a graphic about glyphosate and pig housing, asking whether it is really all happy smiley down on the farm. Which is a fair question to put to a farm. It is a strange question to put to an illustration. Here is the part that should genuinely annoy people. Clarkson's Farm has explained British agriculture to the British public better than every campaign, report and documentary of the last twenty years put together. Subsidies, weather, supermarket margins, the lot. Packham had the platform to join that conversation. He used it to lose an argument with the title sequence.

Activist: "Your cattle are pumping carbon into the atmosphere." Farmer: "Whose carbon?" Activist: "His." Farmer: "He hasn't got any. Nothing on this farm makes carbon. Show me the seam." Activist: "It comes out of him." Farmer: "It goes through him. That's the whole argument." Activist: "Through him from where?" Farmer: "That grass. Spent all spring pulling carbon down out of the sky and building itself out of it. That field is last April's air with roots on." Activist: "And he eats it." Farmer: "He eats April. Some walks about as bullock, some goes on the ground as muck, some he breathes back where it came from." Activist: "It's still up there now." Farmer: "It was up there before. He borrowed it for a season." Activist: "So take him out." Farmer: "Then it dies in October, rots in the wet, and goes back up on its own. Same air, same field, nobody fed." Activist: "That can't be the same." Farmer: "There's no hole in the ground at either end of it. What's in your petrol tank has been under Norfolk a hundred million years and it isn't going back. He's been in that field since Tuesday."

"Dairy isn't carnivore" My brother in Christ, dairy is an animal product. It comes out of a cow. Butter, cheese, cream, the lot, all of it made by an animal, most of it just fat and protein with the bits that bother people strained out. That's not a grey area. That's the most animal food there is, produced fresh every morning by the animal in question. And it isn't just "allowed." Dairy is a superfood. Fat, complete protein, calcium, K2, the whole package in one glorious lump. The only skill involved is being smart enough to pick the forms you tolerate. Milk not sitting right? That's the lactose, and butter and ghee have next to none of it, and hard aged cheeses have lost most of theirs before they reach you. There's a version for nearly everyone. Carnivore is the simple diet. Eat animals. It doesn't come with paleo's clipboard of arbitrary bans, where some inspector clocked off at 10,000 BC and everything since is contraband. Butter isn't disqualified for being delicious. Pick the dairy you tolerate. Then eat the superfood.

What people think cholesterol does: - Clogs arteries What cholesterol actually does: - Fills your brain (a quarter of your cholesterol sits there) - Insulates your nerves (no cholesterol, no signal) - Builds your sex hormones (testosterone and oestrogen, straight from it) - Becomes vitamin D (sunlight turns it into the hormone in your skin) - Makes the bile that digests your fat (and unlocks vitamins A, D, E, K) - Runs your stress response (cortisol is built from it too) - Repairs every cell you have (it stiffens the walls) Your liver makes around 1,000mg a day on purpose, because you cannot run without it. They named the most vital molecule you produce the villain, then sold you a pill to lower it.

Stomach acid pH across species: Sheep: 5.0 - dedicated herbivore Horse: 5.5 - dedicated herbivore Gorilla: 4.5 - dedicated herbivore Dog: 2.0 - carnivore Wolf: 2.0 - carnivore Lion: 2.0 - carnivore Human: 1.5 - more acidic than all of them Vulture: 1.0 - obligate scavenger Hyena: 1.5 - bone-crushing scavenger We didn't evolve as herbivores who occasionally ate meat. We evolved as scavengers who moved up the food chain. That pH 1.5 isn't designed to digest salad. It's designed to kill the botulism in a three-day-old carcass. You have the stomach of something that ate whatever was dead and available. Your ancestors were not fussy. They were alive.