Grateful Fred

Helge Ingstad walked out of his own law firm in 1926 to live on caribou with the hunters of the Canadian Arctic, proved at 60 that the Vikings beat Columbus to America, and died at 101. He was 26, a successful attorney in a small Norwegian town, and bored to the bone. He sold the practice, sailed to Canada, and spent four years as a trapper in the Barren Lands east of Great Slave Lake, a good part of it travelling with a band the neighbouring peoples called the Caribou Eaters. They earned the name. The herd came through, they killed, and for months on end the menu was meat, fat, marrow and tongue, with nothing green in sight. He wrote that he had never been in better condition in his life. He came home, wrote a bestseller about it, and was promptly made governor of a slice of East Greenland, then of Svalbard. He went to live among the Apache. He went to live with the inland Eskimo of Alaska, who also ate caribou and very little else, and stayed a winter. Then, in his sixties, he took up a problem the professors had filed under legend. The sagas said Norsemen had reached a land west of Greenland around the year 1000. Ingstad read them as sailing directions, worked along the coast of Newfoundland by boat asking fishermen about old ruins, and in 1960 a man in a village called L'Anse aux Meadows walked him to some grassy bumps by a stream. His wife Anne Stine, an archaeologist, dug them. Eight Norse buildings, a forge, a bronze pin. Five hundred years before Columbus. He was still writing at 100. Every dietary guideline issued in his lifetime would have classed his four formative years as a slow suicide. He outlived the authors of most of them by a comfortable margin, and rewrote the history of a continent on the side.

Me: The sirloin, please. What's it cooked in? Waiter: Oil. Rapeseed, I think. Me: Could the chef use butter instead? Waiter: Is it an allergy? Me: No. Waiter: Only I need a reason for the kitchen. Me: Butter's the reason. Waiter: The system wants allergy, intolerance or religious. Me: Which one gets me the butter? Waiter: Allergy. But then they change the pans and the gloves, and the manager comes out with a form. Me: And religious? Waiter: Nobody checks religious. Me: Religious. Waiter: Which religion, if they ask? Me: My nan's.

American surgeons pull around 10 million wisdom teeth a year, mostly from teenagers. Jay Friedman, a public health dentist who spent three decades fighting the practice, worked out that at least two-thirds of them were doing no harm whatsoever. The reasoning is an old one. Everybody's go eventually, so have the lot out young, the sound ones with the bad, before they cause trouble. Four at once, usually under a general anaesthetic, followed by a week of soup, ice packs and photographs of chipmunk cheeks. It is so routine that the teenager who keeps all four is the one who gets asked questions. In 2007 Friedman added it all up and called it a public health hazard. About 5 million Americans go under every year, at a cost of over $3 billion. They lose around 11 million days a year to pain, swelling and missed school or work. Tens of thousands are left with lifelong damage, many with a lip, chin or tongue that never gets its feeling back because the drill clipped a nerve. Most of the pain blamed on wisdom teeth, he found, was caused by the surgery. Then came the comparison his profession hated most. The share of wisdom teeth that ever turn nasty is about the same as the share of appendixes that turn into appendicitis, and nobody takes every teenager's appendix out just in case. By his estimate the average oral surgeon in America was making about half a million dollars a year from wisdom teeth. His colleagues called him a traitor. The following year the American Public Health Association came out against pulling healthy wisdom teeth. Britain had got there first. The very first ruling NICE ever issued, in 2000, told dentists to leave healthy wisdom teeth where they were. America carried on, and still does. Wisdom teeth arrive on schedule in every mouth. What has changed is the jaw they are meant to fit into. A jaw grows to the work a child's food gives it, and years of soft, sweet, mushy food build one too small for the teeth it was always going to grow. Impacted wisdom teeth are rare in skulls from before farming. In ours they are a rite of passage. The face shrank to fit the food, and the teeth that no longer fit the face come out at seventeen, as a precaution, at a profit. Every generation finds a new set of teeth to blame for the menu.