Andrew S

Food security is national security - how have commodity prices changed so far in 2026? Can your chickens go outside? What are the new nature investment standards? All the answers and more here! linkedin.com/pulse/food-sec… via @LinkedIn

@SamaHoole I don’t think I have ever seen a poster warning about scurvy. And just been to my local butcher. Couldn’t afford a carnivore diet even if I thought it would be good for me.

"You'll get scurvy without fruit." The dreaded scurvy. The sailor's disease. The reason a five-year-old child apparently needs to eat eight servings of fruit a day according to a poster in a doctor's waiting room. Here is the thing nobody printing those posters wanted to mention. The vitamin C requirement on a carnivore diet collapses to a fraction of the official RDA, because the RDA was set against a diet groaning with refined carbohydrate, and glucose competes directly with vitamin C for cellular uptake. Same transporter. Same receptor. Glucose wins, every time, because there is more of it. Remove the glucose flood and the body suddenly needs vanishingly little vitamin C to do the same job. Nanograms, not milligrams. The amount that exists, quietly, in fresh muscle meat, in quantities that have kept Arctic populations alive through nine-month winters without a single orange in sight. Scurvy is a disease of sailors eating hardtack and salt cod for six months. It is not a disease of people eating beef. Big OJ would prefer you didn't know this.

@SamaHoole I like to blend oats with some fruit and kefir to make a great tasting smoothie. With a bit of local honey to ward off the hayfever. Variety is the spice of life.

Oatmeal was peasant food for a reason. In 18th century Scotland, oats were what you ate when there was nothing else. Cheap. Filling. Storable through winter. The English famously dismissed oats as fit only for "horses and Scotsmen." Dr Johnson's dictionary recorded it directly, and not as a compliment. The Scottish poor ate it three times a day because they had no alternative. The lairds in the same glens ate venison, salmon, beef, mutton, butter, and game. Two diets. Same country. One built bodies. The other kept them alive. Workhouse rations across Britain in the 19th century leaned heavily on porridge for the same reason. It was the cheapest way to keep a body upright on minimal cost. Now it's marketed as a superfood. Wrapped in a sachet. Photographed under a blueberry. Sold with a wellness influencer on the lid. The same gruel the laird's gamekeeper would have considered an insult is positioned as the breakfast of the metabolically optimised. The lairds' diet of beef and game, meanwhile, is dismissed as unhealthy by people who couldn't field-dress a rabbit. They've convinced you that poverty rations are premium nutrition.

@utch_coolidge1 @SamaHoole Mammalian species have not been popping down to the dairy for 195 million years! You can’t compare breast milk with the unpasteurised milk that some farms sell. If you trust your local farm to have great hygeine, that’s one thing, but the general supply chain? That would be brave

@AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole Mammalian species have survived on raw milk for 195 million years. Only in the last 75 years did the u.s. mandate "cooked" milk. Turns out it loses over half of its health benefits and all of its taste. Pre and probiotic enzymes and healthy bacteria. Im lucky to have a dairy near

When butter was demonised, Unilever sold margarine. When tallow was demonised, Procter and Gamble sold Crisco. When eggs were demonised, Kellogg's sold cereal. When red meat was demonised, Cargill sold soy. When raw milk was demonised, Nestle sold infant formula. When leather was demonised, BASF sold PVC. When wool was demonised, ExxonMobil sold polyester feedstock. When animal fat was demonised, the seed-oil industry grew from a niche product to the most consumed food ingredient on earth. Every demonisation of an animal product made a specific group of shareholders very rich. Every one of those products had been eaten by humans for thousands of years without incident. The science changed the moment a substitute existed to sell. Follow the money. The advice will start to make a lot more sense.

@Charles19427662 @SamaHoole I checked with my wife and she has never heard anybody refer to breast milk as raw milk. It is what it is: breast milk. Have you ever heard of ‘non-raw’ breast milk? Whereas cow’s milk can be sold as raw, pasteurised etc.

@AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole I'm confused, mother's milk is raw milk, why wouldn't anyone acknowledge it?

@SamaHoole Butter is clearly the more natural product, but I think people will take your posts as suggesting it is ok to eat limitless amounts of it and fats like lard. There is still clear evidence that too much saturated fat in your diet is not good for you.

Margarine was the great winner of the low-fat era. It is worth being honest about what it actually was, and what it still is. The cheapest vegetable oil on the planet, beaten with hydrogen gas under pressure until it stopped behaving like oil and started behaving like a solid. The reaction produced trans fats. Molecules so structurally wrong the human body cannot metabolise them. Molecules that lodge in cell membranes where the fat that built you used to sit, drive inflammation, and raise the exact cardiovascular risk margarine was being sold to prevent. Trans fats are now banned or restricted across most of the developed world because they were, conservatively, killing tens of thousands of people a year. This is what an entire generation of mothers was told to spread on their children's toast instead of butter. Butter, which is cream that has been shaken, eaten by humans for somewhere between four and ten thousand years. Margarine, an industrial product invented in 1869 to feed Napoleon III's army on the cheap, reformulated repeatedly as each version was quietly found to be more harmful than the last, and marketed each time as the heart-healthy choice. The adverts showed sunflowers. The tubs were yellow. The names suggested a farmhouse. The product inside was an industrial fat the human body had no machinery to process, sold against the real food it had been brought in to replace, in the name of preventing the disease it was actively causing. And here is the part nobody mentions. The trans fats were quietly removed in the 2000s. The new version is a blend of rapeseed, palm, and sunflower oils, processed with hexane solvent, deodorised, bleached, and emulsified into a tub. Still industrial. Still seed oil. Still nothing the human kitchen had until a hundred years ago. It still sits on the shelf next to the butter. Still in the same yellow tub. Still marketed as the heart-healthy choice. The little symbol on the lid still tells you a charity has approved it. The butter was never the problem. The thing they told you to replace it with was the problem then, and a reformulated version of the same thing is the problem now. The cow was right. The factory was wrong. It is still wrong. They just changed the wording on the side of the tub.

@JackENissen @SamaHoole Not now🙈

@SamaHoole @AndrewrhShirley 😅 1st margarine made with tallow as a cheap "food". betcha straight tallow was cheaper

@utch_coolidge1 @SamaHoole Yes, but who actually calls it ‘raw’ milk? It’s just breast milk.

@AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole Breast milk is raw milk

@Andrew_MC7 @SamaHoole Their mother’s milk. Who calls that raw milk?

@AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole Every single baby ever

@mikecarroll1974 @SamaHoole Nope. Two kids who were exclusively breast fed. I’ve just never heard anybody call breast milk raw milk. That’s weird.

@AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole Tell me you are childless without actually saying it.

@Charles19427662 @SamaHoole Bit confused by the apostrophe, but why would anybody refer to breast milk as ‘raw’ milk? Never heard it baked that. I thought the OP was talking about feeding babies raw cows’ milk.

@AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole Mother's fool

@JeanneD60158 @SamaHoole Why has it been ‘disastrous’?

@AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole I think we can all agree when and why the mass sale of margarine rather than butter went 'viral'... no matter when or where it was invented. And how disastrous that has been.

@LDonivan @JeanneD60158 @SamaHoole It is very much cheaper. But many of the spreads you get these days aren’t actually margarine anyway, they have bit of milk or olive oil in them.

@JeanneD60158 @AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole I know lots of ppl to this day who still buy margarine - not bc of health reasons, but bc it's cheap. Even more true of cheap polyester clothes.

@LDonivan @JeanneD60158 @SamaHoole No idea what miracle whip is. Sounds quite gruesome. Cotton or linen best on hot days. Wool is for when it’s cold.

@JeanneD60158 @AndrewrhShirley @SamaHoole I'm willing to sacrifice in other places to have real butter, but that's partly bc it tastes so much better. Same reason I use mayo instead of Miracle Whip. I don't wear polyester bc it's hot and uncomfortable.

@RandySens @SamaHoole To me, raw milk is unpasteurised cows’ milk sold in shops. Breast milk is just natural milk.

@RandySens @SamaHoole Yes, but it’s there own milk. Not raw milk from a different species, which is what I think the OP was referring to. Apologies if I misread that.

@SamaHoole Interesting you choose to use a pic of a Highland cow in a bucolic landscape rather than a load of cattle grazing on land that used to be Amazonian rainforest or a 100,000-head US feedlot. Context is everything.

An appreciation post for the 1.5 billion cattle currently on Earth, quietly holding the whole thing together while receiving nothing but criticism in return. Consider, for a moment, what these animals actually do: - They turn grass, a thing no human can digest, into steak, a thing every human thrives on - They graze the two-thirds of farmland that grows nothing else, asking for no thanks and receiving none - They carry the most bioavailable iron, B12, and zinc on the planet, and deliver it on the hoof - They produce butter, which on its own would justify the entire arrangement - They fertilise the soil for free, through a process we are all too polite to describe in detail - They build topsoil and sequester carbon into pasture, while being blamed, somehow, for the reverse - They give us tallow, leather, marrow, suet, and gelatine, with no waste and no complaints - They restore land that crops have exhausted, turning the worn-out and the marginal back into something living - They stand in the rain for years on end and never once bring it up Ten thousand years of domestication. Ten thousand years of being the most useful animal in the field, the foundation of the food system, and a keystone of every landscape lucky enough to hold them. They are not the problem with the planet's future. They are, quite plainly, the shape of it. We repaid all of this by putting them on the front of climate reports. Magnificent animals. Owed an apology.

@SamaHoole So you are saying we shouldn’t eat vegetables?

Watch a toddler with a piece of slow-cooked beef. No negotiation required. No games. No aeroplane noises. The meat goes in, the eyes light up, the small hands reach for more. They will gnaw a lamb chop down to the bone and look up expecting applause. Now watch the same toddler presented with a pile of boiled broccoli. Suddenly there's a hostage negotiation. There's a sticker chart. There's "two more bites and you can leave the table." There's the aeroplane, the train, the increasingly desperate parent doing a small performance for a vegetable that the child has correctly identified as not worth eating. A child has no agenda. A child has not read the guidelines. A child is running on instinct alone, and the instinct says the meat is food and the bitter green thing is to be treated with suspicion. That suspicion is not fussiness. That is a few hundred thousand years of evolution doing its job. Bitterness is the plant telling you it would rather you didn't. The child believes it. The child is right. Then we spend the next ten years overriding it. We bribe, we shame, we cajole, we put it on posters, we make it a moral category. We teach the child that the food it instinctively wanted is a guilty pleasure, and the food it instinctively refused is virtue on a plate. By adulthood the conditioning is complete, and a grown man will feel vaguely sinful about a steak and vaguely righteous about a kale smoothie he is visibly not enjoying. The kids had it right the first time. We talked them out of it.

@WilliamClouston This comment seems disconnected from modern life where both parents often have to work and leave home early to get to their jobs in time.

All children should receive a good lunch at school. Breakfast, however, is a family responsibility. In a healthy society the state has no business here.

@jardeneria @WendyMissons @WilliamClouston You look about the same age as my mum and I am pretty sure she was getting a family allowance for my sister and me.

@WendyMissons @WilliamClouston How do we do that ? Giving their parents money is not the answer I fear--they spend it on themselves.When I had children many years ago --I did not expect the government to fund them --that was our responsibility as their parents !