Try explaining the modern food system to a farmer in 1955. Go on. Watch his face.
"So you've given up butter."
"Mostly. We were told it was killing us."
"By whom?"
"The experts."
"And the cream off the top of the milk?"
"Down the sink. Then we buy the vitamins back as a powder."
"You pour the best bit away, and then purchase it again."
"It's more convenient."
"You eat the egg but not the yolk, and the chicken but not the skin."
"The good parts, yes. Those are the risk."
"And what is it you cook in?"
"Oil. Pressed out of a flower. With a solvent. In a refinery."
"...Go on."
"Bread too. Grain we've never seen, baked by a machine five counties off in about an hour."
"And after all this prudence, you're healthier than we are?"
"Not exactly. Diabetic by forty. On tablets by fifty."
"And the cause of all this, you've decided, is the cow."
"Yes."
He considers this for a moment, then goes back to laying the hedge. There is nothing in any of it he can use, and a great deal of it he is quietly relieved to have been born too early for.