Green foods fail Olympics

The first occupants of the Olympics village in Paris quickly taught the caterers that athletes did not favour their "climate-friendly" diet of things like avocados on toast plus almond-milk coffee. The athletes demanded more meat and eggs.

Paris Olympics CEO, Etienne Thobois, told reporters they suddenly needed more animal protein, causing them to order "700 kilos of eggs and a ton of meat, to meet the demands of the athletes."

The Olympic caterers should have read a bit of French history – Vikings brought cattle to Normandy in the 10^th century and valued them for both meat and milk.

The Paris organisers could also have also looked at some French cave paintings, such as the one in Lascaux, which depict aurochs, the ancestor of domestic cattle, being attacked by ancient hunters.

The Normans took their love of beef to Britain. In 1611 King James, according to legend, knighted his loin roast so it could be a worthy item on a King's table – since then it has been known as "sirloin".

That old enemy of Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, knew that his army could not survive without beef. Britain is famous for great beef breeds such as Herefords, Angus, Scotch, Welsh and Orkney beef. So the Duke's red coat armies often had their own cattle herd bringing up the rear. Fresh beef was supplemented by salt pork, flour (often fortified with weevils) and a tot of rum before battle.

Beef was also the favoured food of the new world. Spanish and Portuguese colonists took horses and cattle to the Americas and from these developed the wild longhorn cattle of Mexico and Texas. Many covered wagons of the American west were pulled by mules or oxen – and if they ran short of food, they ate some of them.

Native Americans soon learned to steal or catch horses and used them to hunt their favoured food – buffalo. Their mounted cavalry quickly conquered the prairies; and when they wore out their horses, they ate them.

As the buffalo were hunted to extinction by white and red hunters they all turned to longhorns and then to softer easier-handling British breeds like Hereford.

Soon American demand for beef prompted Texas cowboys to fight Indians, drought and wild-fires to send big mobs of beef cattle towards big meat centres such as Chicago. This Eastern demand for beef then supported the growth of transcontinental railways.

In Australia, great cattlemen like Sidney Kidman ("The Cattle King") learned to move cattle along the Channel Country from north to south on a string of Kidman properties, the cattle growing as they travelled.

And on every road entering Australia's beef capital, Rockhampton, there is a statue - not a green-skinned avocado, but a red-blooded bull.