Silas Kerr. Eighteen years a formulation chemist. Now a farmer.
Nothing in that packet is an accident.
The sweetness, the softness, the crunch, the shelf life, the point at which you put it down — every one of those was decided by somebody in a room. For eighteen years that somebody was me.
I still have the folder of specifications I wrote. Some of those products are on the shelf this morning. What they do to a man is not dramatic, and that is exactly the trouble: you never notice a bad week. You notice a bad decade. Softer round the middle than you have ever been. Slower getting up off the floor. Flat by three in the afternoon, hungry an hour after eating, and no single day you can point at and say — that one, that is where it started.
At forty-one my own body made me stop. I farm now, and I have spent every year since working out what to eat instead.
What I got wrong about getting older
I thought the way I felt at forty was age. It was not age. It was the same four or five things, done every single day, for twenty years — and most of them came out of a packet I had helped design.
The last of the samples, and the coat I wore while I made them.
I kept notebooks in those years. Not recipes — formulas. How to keep a thing edible long after it has stopped being food. How to make the second bite taste better than the first, so that stopping never quite occurs to you. Which of the cheap ingredients could carry the flavour once the expensive one was taken out.
What twenty years of that does to a body was not a question anybody in that room was paid to ask. I have asked it since, from this side of the fence, and I have written down what I found — including the part nobody told me: what actually helps. Not a cure and not a supplement. Plain things, most of which I had to find out the hard way.
Read this list slowly. See how much of it is yours.
- Getting out of a low chair takes a moment now. You have started using the arms, and you did not decide to.
- By the middle of the afternoon there is nothing left in the tank. You have built your day around knowing that.
- Your knees have something to say about the stairs. Your hands have something to say about a cold morning. Neither of them used to.
- You are foggier than you were. Slower to the word, less sharp, less bothered — and you have quietly decided that is simply what happens to a man your age.
Not one of those turned up on a particular day. That is exactly what makes them so easy to file under getting older and never look at again.
I filed all four of them under forty-one. I was wrong about every one, and I had spent eighteen years in the industry that should have made me the first to see it. That is not a comfortable thing to write down, and it is the reason I am writing the book.
I am not going to promise you that what happened to me will happen to you. I am going to tell you exactly what I stopped doing, what I started doing, and why — and you can make up your own mind. If you are on medication, take it up with your doctor first. I mean that.
It is nearly finished.
This table, most mornings, before there is anything else to do.
It is the notebooks, written out for somebody who does not work in a laboratory. What is really in the packet and why somebody put it there. What twenty years of it does to a man. And then the unglamorous half: what I eat now, what I stopped, and the handful of things that made the most difference — in the order I would do them again.
Leave your address and you will know the day it is ready. That is the whole promise. No pre-order, no price, no launch, nothing to buy today.
One email now to check the address is really yours. After that, nothing until there is something worth telling you.
I use your address for one thing: to tell you about the book and to send the occasional letter about what I am growing, eating and reading. Never sold, never passed on. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and you can ask me to delete your address at any time. The details are in the privacy notice.