Brendan Munnelly

The year is 1087. The king's forester rides up to the door. The deer in the wood are the king's now, and a man caught with venison in his pot is blinded for it. Your father ate deer. You will eat oats. The year is 1217. The king's men come every third year with a block, a chisel and a mallet. Your dog's forefoot goes on the block and three claws come off at one blow, so he can never again run down a stag. The fine for a dog with his feet intact is three shillings, a month of your labour. The law never says you may not eat meat. It only takes the dog's toes. The year is 1400. The priest comes every spring. For 40 days there is no meat, no butter, no milk, no eggs, and with the year's other fasts the Church takes about 150 days of flesh off your table. It is for your soul. The bishop keeps his capons. The year is 1649. You put your cow on the common, because the grass grows for nobody. The gentlemen ride up the hill with clubs and beat her until she is not expected to live. A poor man with a cow does not need a landlord. That was the offence. The year is 1666. Parliament declares Irish cattle a common nuisance and bars them from England. The herds that fed an island for 2,000 years go for salt beef, and the island goes onto the potato. In 1847 the ships still leave Cork with butter and bacon under armed guard, past the people dying on the quay. The year is 1915. The professors come with a calculation. The pig eats food fit for people, so the pig must go. Millions are slaughtered in a season. Then there is no pork, no lard, no manure for the fields, and around 750,000 civilians starve in the winter remembered by the turnip. The year is 1940. The man at the door has a ration book. Meat is bought by the shilling, and it stays rationed until 1954, nine years after the war ends. It is for the nation. The restaurants of Mayfair were never on the book. The year is 1961. A professor is on the cover of Time. The doctor tells you the fat on your meat is clogging your arteries, and the butter must go for the oil. The study has 6 countries in it. 22 were available. The year is 1977. A Senate committee issues the country with a diet, the first government on earth to do it. Less meat and fat, more grain. The obesity line, flat for 50 years, turns upward within the decade. The year is 1992. A pyramid arrives in every classroom, 6 to 11 servings of bread at the base and the meat squeezed up near the point. The woman who drew the first draft had put the grain at 2 to 4. The Secretary's office changed it. The year is 2015. The World Health Organization puts your bacon in the same cancer category as tobacco. The spinach carries 100 times the nitrate and no label. The year is 2019. A commission funded by a billionaire publishes a diet for the planet. Red meat: 14 grams a day. Half a rasher. The members fly in to announce it. The year is 2026. The man at the door carries no chisel, no ration book, no map. He carries a carbon target. The cattle on the hill are to be culled for the climate, the farm taxed on death until it sells, and you are asked to give up meat for the good of everyone, by people who have never gone a week without it. The deer were the king's. The cow was the lord's. The fast was God's. The fat was the heart's. The planet is the latest owner of your dinner. A thousand years, and the reason has changed every century. The plate never has. Nobody has ever banned meat for the common man. They just come to the door every generation with a very good reason, and take three claws at a time.

Every time the science has been settled, somebody paid for the settlement, and the bill has a name on it. 1747: James Lind cures scurvy with lemons. The Navy keeps it settled as a disease of damp air for forty-eight years and loses more sailors to it than to the French. 1799: Bleeding is settled. George Washington is drained of nearly half his blood for a sore throat and is dead by evening. 1847: Childbed fever is settled as bad air. Ignaz Semmelweis washes his hands and the deaths on his ward fall from one mother in ten to one in a hundred. He is sacked, committed, and beaten to death in an asylum. 1915: Pellagra is settled as an infection. Joseph Goldberger proves it is the corn diet of the poor by injecting himself with sufferers' blood. The South keeps the corn, and 100,000 Americans die of it. 1941: The lobotomy is settled, and about to win a Nobel. Rosemary Kennedy, twenty-three, is left unable to walk or speak, one of 40,000 Americans put under the pick. 1956: The pregnancy X-ray is settled as harmless. Alice Stewart shows one scan doubles a child's chance of cancer. She loses her funding and the scans run for another quarter century. 1961: Thalidomide is settled as safe for morning sickness. Ten thousand babies. 1971: DES is settled as a pregnancy protector. The daughters of the women who took it develop a cancer nobody has seen before. 1972: Sugar is settled as harmless. John Yudkin writes that it is not, and the fat men and the sugar men end his career between them. 1984: Fat is settled as the killer, and a generation of mothers swaps the butter for a tub of oil. 2004: Vioxx is settled as a safe painkiller. Up to 140,000 heart attacks before it is pulled. The science was settled every single time. The only thing it ever settled was who took the blame afterwards.