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.

The staple food of the Anzac warriors was canned "bully beef", billy tea and hard biscuits. Bacon, eggs, a tot of Bundaberg rum and some Anzac biscuits were the luxuries.

Green propagandists such as the Paris caterers are doing tremendous harm to our health and our food supply by attacking animal foods, and promoting grains, vegetables, seeds and fake foods for humans.

As far back as we have recorded history, humans have been hunter-gatherers. They hunted, cooked, ate and sometimes farmed cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, ducks, turkeys, swans, antelope, buffalo, caribou, mammoths, deer, bears, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, seals, herrings, prawns, oysters, crabs, clams, cod, whales, sharks, salmon, kangaroos, possums, rabbits, hares, rats, mice, dogs, cougars, eels, snakes and even other humans. (Aboriginal cannibals on the Palmer River gold field in early Australia preferred to eat sweet Chinamen who ate lots of rice rather than oversalty Britishers who ate lots of salt beef.)

When the hunters were successful, ancient tribes rejoiced and feasted mightily before the meats spoiled. But when the hunters failed and starvation threatened, they relied on the gatherers for ripening fruits, honey, tubers, wild onions, nuts and laboriously harvested grains. They learned that some plant foods, especially grass seeds, were toxic unless treated in special ways by grinding, roasting, fermenting and cooking. Meats were the favoured food but some tribes also consumed raw milk, butter, cheese and blood from their animals. Some ate fish and water fowl. Fruits were seasonal foods and tubers, onions and grains were survival foods. Party foods like sugar, alcohol and apple pie were more recent inventions.

Human teeth reflect the foods they are designed to use – canine eye-teeth for gripping and ripping meat off bones, incisors for cutting bite-sized bits, and molars for chewing and grinding. And humans have the forward-focussed eyes of predators, not the all-round eyesight of their wary herbivore prey.

Men have always battled over hunting, fishing and farming territory, but now greens are trying to lock all humans out with national parks, world heritage declarations, and bans and quotas on farming, fishing and hunting. They subsidise the sterilisation of farms and grasslands with wind and solar "farms", access roads and spider webs of power lines. They also promote the conversion of grasslands and farmland to bush and encourage offshore bird choppers whose sonic noise upsets neighbours and seems to addle the navigating abilities of some sea creatures.

Now greens are attacking our carnivore diet and promoting a granivore-vegetarian diet for humans. Politicians should be free to choose their own diet but they should not force meat lovers to pretend they are granivores – they have no crops for sprouting grains nor gizzards for grinding them. Humans are also not plant-eating ruminants with extra stomachs and who spend ages regurgitating and re-chewing the cuds of slowly digesting vegetables.

The world's teeming cities are becoming increasingly reliant on grains, sugars, oil seeds, fruits and vegetables grown by intense farming and heavily dependent on irrigation, herbicides and chemical fertilisers. Grain-dependent feedlots produce much of our beef, pork, mutton, salmon, prawns, chickens and eggs, and factories produce our baked, frozen and canned foods. Now greens are promoting denatured fake "meat" and "milks" containing no meat or milk.

Whilst intense farming has fostered a dramatic increase in human population, the human food chain is swamped with grains, greens and seed oils with their unhealthy lectins, glutens, oxalates, phytic acid, harmful oils, artificial sweeteners and chemical additives and sprays. This process parallels a dramatic deterioration in human health. Like green energy, green food for humans is proving a disastrous choice.

Pretending humans are herbivores and granivores has accompanied an epidemic of ill health. Obesity, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimers, leaky gut, fatty liver, dental caries, heart failure, cancers, brain fog, knee replacement, stomach stitching, birth defects and gender confusion seem to be hall-marks of our age. The surgery waiting lists keep expanding.

But instead of trying to fix our dietary problems, we have created a massive new "health" industry. While human diets race off in the wrong direction, health research seeks magic bullets and focusses on profitable vaccines, patentable medicines, expensive surgery and genetic wizardry.

Grazing animals once lived mainly on grasses and herbs (with a little ripening grass seeds just before the hard times of winter). Too many animals are now confined in food factories, with little exercise and encouraged to gorge on farmed grains. Free range animals like pigs, chickens, cattle and sheep now stand in pens and feedlots eating grain-rich feeds.

The bun, chips, salad and sauces have swamped the meat in the "beef" burger and there is often more batter and potato than seafood in "fish and chips". Breakfast cereals have replaced bacon and eggs, and fake "meats" and fake "milks" are lauded as healthy choices.

We can see the obese results of this green food revolution waddling down the aisles of supermarkets and ordering green smoothies and muffins in the food courts.

Green energy will prove a disaster for our economy, and green foods will be a deadly choice for human health.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics now reports that 67% of all Australian adults and 25% of children are overweight or obese. Future footpaths will be crowded with mobility scooters and hospitals and care homes will be overwhelmed by unhealthy aging vegans.