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The reason most women give up on carnivore arrives in month three, in the plughole, and hardly anyone warns them it's coming. Hair grows on a cycle. Any big shock to the body, a crash diet, a baby, an operation, a fever, a fast drop in weight, tips a whole batch of follicles into their resting phase at once. A resting hair sits tight for about three months and then lets go. So the handful in the shower in March was ordered in December, by a change the body has long since got over. Doctors call it telogen effluvium. New mothers get it and are told it's normal, because it is. Marathon runners get it. Everyone who has ever lost two stone quickly on any diet ever written has had it, and blamed whichever diet they happened to be on. On carnivore one thing makes it far worse, and it's the habit she brought with her. She has eaten like a sparrow for thirty years on instruction. She arrives, the hunger goes quiet for the first time in her adult life, and she takes that as permission to eat even less. Small plate, lean cut, lunch skipped. A follicle can't tell a diet from a famine, and it shuts up shop. The fix is the least ladylike advice she will ever be given. - Two full plates a day, minimum - The fatty cut, with butter on it - Egg yolks, all of them - Red meat daily, for the iron and zinc hair is built from - No fasting for the first three months - Eat past polite The hair that fell was pushed out by the new one growing underneath it. It was on its way back before she noticed it going. She was warned this diet would make her hair fall out, by people who have never once explained why hair falls out. Eat more. It's already growing.

When Europe was starving in 1945, America's answer was to put 300,000 farm animals on ships and send 7,000 farm boys to look after them. The idea belonged to an Indiana farmer called Dan West. He had spent the Spanish Civil War ladling out powdered milk to children, never with enough to go round, deciding each morning which ones got a cup. He came home saying the same thing to anyone who would listen: "not a cup, but a cow." His church took him at his word, and when the war ended the United Nations' new relief agency needed stockmen. So the Brethren recruited them. They were aged from 16 to 72. Farm lads, schoolteachers, conscientious objectors, a good many of whom had never seen the sea. The newspapers called them the seagoing cowboys. They sailed on converted Liberty ships with the holds fitted out as stalls. Heifers and horses for Poland, Greece, Italy and Czechoslovakia. They mucked out in Atlantic gales, calved cows in mid-ocean, and walked their animals down the gangway into ports that were mostly rubble. Fewer than 4 in every 100 animals were lost on the way. West's own heifers came with a condition. The family that received one signed for it, and the promise they signed was that her first heifer calf would be given to a neighbour. That was the whole of post-war relief as these men understood it. A hungry family needs milk tomorrow, and the year after, and so does the family next door, and only one thing on earth supplies all of that from grass. The agency that shipped those cows is the ancestor of the ones now holding conferences on how many cattle the world can do without. Nobody has ever been asked to pass a sack of flour on to the neighbours.

NASA's first job, before it put a man in space, was to find the meal that leaves the least behind. The answer was steak and eggs, and it has been the launch breakfast for 65 years. The problem was the suit. A Mercury astronaut was sealed into a pressure suit, bolted into a capsule the size of a phone box, and left on top of a rocket for hours. He could not take anything off. There was no toilet, and no plan for one. So in July 1960 the Air Force handed the question to a nutritionist called Beatrice Finkelstein. She had to feed the man so he stayed strong, clear-headed and full, for as long as it took, on the least possible waste. She wrote a menu for the last 3 to 4 days before flight. High protein, low residue. Meat, eggs, very little else. Residue is the polite word for whatever the body cannot use and has to send back out. On her figures, beef and eggs produced almost none. The body took nearly all of it. On the morning of 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard sat down to steak and eggs, went out to the pad, and became the first American in space. It worked so well that nobody dared change it. John Glenn ate it. The crew of Apollo 11 ate it on the morning they left for the Moon. Shuttle crews ate it. Astronauts are superstitious, and this is the one ritual with a medical file behind it. Look at what that file says. The best funded engineers on earth needed a food that was nearly all nutrition and next to no waste, to fuel a man through the most demanding day of his life, and they did not pick porridge. Down here the same breakfast comes with a warning, and we are advised to swap it for the bran. NASA ran the test in 1960. The bran is the residue.