Dr. Evan

Buy the fat mince. The 20%. The 80/20 if you're American. Whatever diet you're on, whatever your doctor said, whatever the lean tray next to it is promising, buy the fat one, and buy it this week. Mince is the whole cow in a tray. Brisket, chuck, shin, the fat cap off the rib, ground together so the poorest family on the street eats the same animal as the richest and pays for the bit the restaurant sent back. It built the shepherd's pie, the Bolognese, the chilli, the meatloaf, the burger and every Tuesday night of your childhood, and it did the lot with the fat left in. Then somebody took the fat out and charged you for the labour. The 5% arrived. The 95/5. The extra lean. It cost more, it went grey in the pan, it tasted of the tray, and a generation of mothers on both sides of the Atlantic were told it was the healthy one. The children pushed it round the plate. The jar of sauce moved in to do the job the fat had been doing for nothing. The fat one browns. The fat one fries itself. The fat one makes a burger that needs no sauce and a Bolognese that needs no sugar, and it carries the vitamins, because they ride in the fat you've been paying extra to have removed. So go to the shop. Walk past the lean tray with its little apology on the label. Pick up three of the fat ones. Fry them in butter, salt them, melt cheese over them, and feed them to someone you love. Then do it again on Thursday. The fat was never the problem. The fat was the point. Buy the 20%. Buy the 80/20. Buy it fat.

You have a gallbladder because your ancestors ate fat, and the advice on the ward after they remove it is to eat less of it. A horse has no gallbladder. It grazes all day and never meets a fat meal. A rat has no gallbladder. A deer has no gallbladder. A pigeon has no gallbladder. A dog has one. A cat has one. A wolf has one. A human has one. A gallbladder is a storage tank for bile, concentrated up to ten times, held ready for a meal big enough in fat to need it all at once. Eat fat and the gallbladder squeezes, the bile floods the gut, and the fat and its vitamins get through. Eat no fat and the gallbladder sits full and never empties. Bile that sits goes still, and bile that goes still sets into stones. A low-fat diet is the standard advice for gallstones, and a low-fat diet is on the list of things that cause them. The NHS removes around 70,000 gallbladders a year, the commonest planned operation it does, and sends the patient home with a diet sheet that says avoid fat. The organ was built for the fat. It stopped working when the fat stopped coming. A horse does not need one. You were not built like a horse, whatever the plate says.