Financial Physics

The coconut milk is the gentle choice. Dairy-free, kind, a little tropical halo poured into the curry and the morning smoothie. No cow was troubled in the making of it. A monkey was. Across southern Thailand, the main source of the world's coconut milk, the harvest runs on pig-tailed macaques. They are an endangered species. Many are taken from the wild as babies, which is illegal, and sold into what the industry cheerfully calls monkey schools, where they are chained, tethered, and broken until they will obey. Their canine teeth are sometimes pulled out so they cannot bite the handler. Then they spend their working lives on a chain, sent up trees thirty metres tall to twist down the fruit. A monkey can be made to pick a thousand coconuts in a day. A human manages about eighty. So the maths does the rest, and the animal that shares most of your instincts spends a decade choking against a metal collar, tied to an old tyre between shifts, so a carton can say plant-based on the front. Investigators have documented it four times over. The Thai industry keeps promising it has stopped. It has not, so most British supermarkets quietly pulled their own-brand Thai coconut milk rather than keep swearing it was clean. No cow was troubled. Just a primate on a chain, doing your picking.

Cops and prosecutors don't care about truth, they care about convictions. It's shocking how many people don't understand this. The state is not on your side. The system prioritizes its own survival over justice and your freedom.