Glad you like it. There is no book on the subject, but all the best history is 'oral tradition', particularly regarding the food chain, right?

This is my own pet thesis, there is fact rather than myth that backs up the story. You can truly enjoy the fact checking though. For instance have a look at pastoral scenes painted by the grand masters of old. Cows are smaller, a lot smaller, and these are not errors in painting to scale. Children can reach out to cows without them the cow towering above. The history is right there in paintings that you probably had no interest in the first time you saw them and decided not to major in 'Art History'.

Same with the Chicken Tax related part of this 'thesis', along the way you can learn how the VW camper van became a thing - it was a tax workaround to put seats in the van so it wouldn't be a 'van'.

We also imagine Darwin started from a blank canvas, really that was not the case at all. Not trying to dismiss his work, but he was standing on the shoulders of giants too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturali...

He was the chap who turned cows from beasts of burden to beef. His work was what Darwin wrote about to 'prove there is a god'. Yeah.

Also check out the humble turnip. The turnip made the British Agricultural Revolution possible, without the turnip there would not have been the British Empire as we know it. The turnip was a crop that could be fed to livestock, planted in the 'fallow' year it nitrogen fixed the soil making it good to go for other crops. Nowadays the turnip is just a Blackadder joke.

The Moldboard Plough was another part of the puzzle, the Chinese had this first, the Dutch copied it and they got it hooked up to horses. I don't have a handy reference for that, particularly how the harness worked. There is plenty to study though, Jethro Tull being an interesting chap for the 'seed drill' that ended this random scattering nonsense.

Dutch Golden Age paintings have the clues to the story in them, I have my 18 month old niece to help me research this, although she can't talk she is good at pointing at cows, in art and in fields. She goes 'Maggie Simpson' on me at times, I would not have spotted unusually small cows in paintings without her help and would not have gone down the rabbit hole of working out the why questions without her promptings.

So much of the politics of food is based on belief and opinion. Various diets are nonsense. I don't want another religion, I just want to understand. History gives the answers. And art history that has bored me to date comes to life when I am looking at paintings for things like how people ate, how big various animals are and what 'tech' was used on the farm. There is no longer a need to aesthetically decide if a painting is pretty or not, I find so much more in what I see when it is for this type of personal research.

Forgot to mention sheep - in the part of the West Country (UK) that I know the lucky mix of fortune that made the area prosperous included Fullers Earth, used to get wool nice and clean from grease etc. There were export restrictions on Fuller's Earth, so precious it was! The final product - cloth - ended up in those red uniforms that the British Army conquered the world with. The Cotswolds also had a lot of rain and very steep hills. So waterwheels and canals were part of the story. Plus the wonders of capitalism, with cottage industry making way for bigger mills and eventual decline...

I owe a great deal of thanks to some old people who are not here any more for taking the time to show me the relevant industrial archaeology. A retired gentleman who I used to deliver newspapers to as a teenager took the time to take me to local places so I could draw things for school history projects. In today's 'stranger danger' world where newspapers aren't delivered by 14 year old kids this type of thing would not be possible.

Only recently have I wondered, 'okay I know a bit about the wool, what about the sheep?' and wondered what amount of lamb/mutton was on the menu then. Nobody has studied that bit, so again I am in my favourite realm of history, where it becomes fascinating. It is so nice to escape the 'dull' world of people lecturing others to be vegan or not, to explore this realm of 'oral history'. I am glad someone out there likes it too.