**10. Back to colonial times: Space and Race**

It is useful here to differentiate between "settler" colonies, the "plantation" and the "conquered" states. "New Europe's" such as in Australasia were similar to the Americas in that, at the expense of genocides/holocausts of indigenous populations, they created a meat surplus to export to the European core [138, 139]. Plantation colony peoples (other than the "planters"), suffered from a deterioration in their diet as land and labour were swept up in cash crop farming. Conquered states, such as India, had peasants taxed (providing the European centre with "free lunches"), in a "beggar thy neighbour" policy reducing incomes and impoverishing an already vegetarian diet - with no mercy given in the book-end Bengal famines [140–144]. Repercussions of these policies often born during the cotton empires continue to shape our world with little sight of reparations and restitution to those worst affected [145–148]. For instance, it is well established that dietary intervention during pregnancy improves birth weight and development and academic achievement and blocks the programming of future ailments (including the metabolic syndrome) as first noted in the Dutch "Hunger Winter" of 1944 [149]. So it is important that "battle fatigue" does not set in to this opportunity to correct constructively a past injustice.

More positively imperialism did, like the Columbian Exchange, lead to significant transfers of plants with nutritional or economic - such as rubber) or medicinal value (such as quinine) largely by the Kew garden network instigated by botanists Banks and Hooker) - and animal species, some more productive such as the Hereford and Aberdeen Angus cattle (that largely replaced the shorthorn and Texas longhorn in all but the most arid areas) [150–152].

### **11. 1850s meat transition in Western Europe**

After the 1700s when only the rich ate much meat a meat transition started in Britain ("Rosbifs" as depicted by Hogarth) with its "Hungry Empire" [153]. These times had started with well documented ill health, height and opiate and alcohol issues and (Chartist) hunger-revolts and "knife and fork" "milk famine" issues that spawned the luddites and trades unions as incomes were falling (some families living on boiled nettles). The new Poor Laws were harsh and the country flirted with revolution as happened across Europe [154]. Meat intake then doubled [155, 156]. Innovative agricultural practices and stock breeding increased production that just about kept up with population growth. The important increase came from imports from the "settler" colonies, and "Atlantic" cod, aided by advances in steam transportation and refrigeration (frozen meat imports to Britain were 200,000 tons in 1900 and 350,000 tons a decade later), with price drops that, for a change, benefited the urban poor, all paid for by profits from the cotton trade and other plantation income [157]. Britain accounted for a huge proportion of the transcontinental and transequatorial meat trade [158]. Repeal of the Corn Laws and repeal of excises on meat also helped the working class [23]. This was a period of significant food price deflation with cheap meat and vegetables attributed to increased productivity from technological improvements (including the cotton gin market but the market collapsed triggering the pellagra outbreak in the Americas) [159]. The influence of luminaries such as Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" (1791) [160] and Robert Owen (1813) [161] "*man's in-humanity to man*" helped let alone Marx and Engels (Condition of the Working Class in England) and the Quaker movement. All efforts contributed to better diet and better (brain) health and longevity.

Infectious diseases particularly Tuberculosis virtually disappeared even if replaced by autoimmune diseases whilst fertility declined completing the first modern disease and demographic transitions [162, 163].
