Wayne Crawshaw

If you are old enough to remember driving in Britain in the 1980s, you will remember the windscreen. You could not see through it by July. A journey from Leeds to London in August ended with a front bumper that looked like it had been through a war and a windscreen that needed a proper scrubbing with a sponge at the services. Insects on the headlights. Insects in the wing mirrors. Insects packed into the radiator grille so densely that mechanics had to fish them out. This was simply the weather of the British summer, the cost of moving through a country that was still, in living memory, full of flying things. Get in a car now. Drive the same route. Stop at the services. The windscreen is clean. The Bugs Matter survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife since 2004, has been measuring exactly this. Volunteers clean their numberplate, drive a journey, count the splats on a grid. Between 2004 and 2021, the UK average fell by roughly 59 per cent. England alone: 65. Kent: over 70. The 2024 update found a further 63 per cent drop on top of that. The windscreen phenomenon has the data to back it up now. And not just the insects. Between 1970 and 2024, the UK Farmland Bird Index fell by 62 per cent. Turtle doves down 99. Grey partridge down 94. Tree sparrow down 90. A generation of British children has grown up without ever hearing a turtle dove call, because there are, in functional terms, no turtle doves left to call. Defra's own bulletin lists the causes without embarrassment. Loss of mixed farming. The switch from spring to autumn sowing, which took away the winter stubble the small birds had been feeding on since the Neolithic. The grubbing up of hedgerows to make fields bigger for bigger machines. Increased fertiliser. Increased pesticide. Specifically, the pesticides. Neonicotinoids on oilseed rape. Glyphosate sprayed as a pre-harvest desiccant on wheat and barley. Chemicals applied in combinations and volumes that would have seemed psychotic to a farmer in 1950, applied to grow the crops that feed directly into the plant-based shakes marketed to people who believe they are helping the environment. The insects died in the fields where the crops were grown. The birds that used to eat the insects, starved. The windscreen, accordingly, is clean. None of this happened on the permanent pasture that cattle graze. A herb-rich meadow grazed by cattle has more pollinators, more ground-nesting birds, more beetles, more everything per hectare than the arable field next door. The South Downs and the Welsh uplands and the Cotswold commons where sheep and cattle have been grazing for a thousand years are the places British biodiversity is still, just, holding on. The countryside did not empty because of the cow. It emptied because we replaced the cow with the combine harvester, the meadow with the oilseed rape, and the hedgerow with another half-acre of monoculture that needed spraying fourteen times a season to keep it alive. When someone tells you eating a steak is destroying British wildlife, ask them what was on the field before it became the soy farm, the rape farm, the wheat farm that produced the oat milk in their fridge. It was grass. And on the grass, there were cattle. And when the cattle were there, the windscreen needed cleaning.

In 1776, when the American colonies broke from the British Empire, the average American man was 5'9". This was three inches taller than the average Englishman. It was taller than the Dutch, taller than the French, taller than the Swedes. George Washington, at 6'2", was tall by any standard, but his soldiers were not the Lilliputians the popular image suggests. At 5'7" the average Continental Army private was significantly taller than a typical European soldier, because he had grown up on a diet that the typical European soldier had not. The diet was meat. Dairy. Eggs from the back garden. Game from the woods that belonged to nobody. The abundance of colonial America, where the protein was not controlled by a landlord or rationed by a church or restricted by a forest law, had produced a population that was, by the skeletal standards of the eighteenth century, the tallest on earth. Americans stayed the tallest people in the world for nearly two hundred years. Then they stopped. American height plateaued in the 1950s. It has not meaningfully increased since. The average American man born in 1996 is approximately 5'9", which is the same height as the average American man born in 1950, and roughly the same height as the average American man in 1776. In the same period, the Dutch grew six inches. The Scandinavians grew five. The Germans grew four. The South Koreans grew nearly four. One by one, the European populations that had been shorter than Americans in 1900 overtook them. The Dutch, who had been among the shortest Europeans in 1860, are now the tallest people on earth at an average of 6 foot for men. Americans have dropped to 37th. Thirty-seventh. The richest country in the history of the world, spending more per capita on food than almost any other nation, is now shorter than the Dutch, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Germans, the Croatians, the Czechs, the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Slovenians, the Montenegrins, the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Icelanders, the Belgians, the Austrians, the Swiss, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Canadians, the Bermudans, and the Finns. The conventional explanation blames inequality. Healthcare access. Poverty. These are real factors. They are also downstream of something more fundamental. The American diet changed. In the 1950s, the average American ate butter, whole milk, eggs, and red meat as the nutritional backbone of the diet. By the 1990s, the average American was eating margarine, skimmed milk, egg whites, chicken breast, and a long list of processed foods that had been reformulated to remove animal fat and replace it with sugar and seed oil, because the dietary guidelines had told them to. The Dutch, in the same period, continued eating dairy. Full-fat dairy. Roughly a kilogram per person per day. Cheese for breakfast. Cheese for lunch. Milk with dinner. Butter on everything. The Dutch ignored the American dietary guidelines and kept eating the food that was making them tall. The Americans followed the guidelines and stopped growing. The Dutch ignored the guidelines and became the tallest people on earth. The experiment has been running for fifty years. It is running in real time. The results are in the conscription records and the school growth charts and the anthropometric surveys that are published every year and that nobody in a position to update the dietary guidance appears to be reading. America was the tallest country on earth when it was eating butter. America is the 37th tallest country on earth now that it is eating the guidelines. The guidelines have not been updated. The Dutch are still eating the cheese.

NBC CITING SOURCES: TRUMP IS EXPLORING MEASURES THAT COULD HELP EASE THE SURGE IN PRICES, INCLUDING RESTRICTIONS ON U.S. EXPORTS