It appears that the new five pound note contains traces of tallow which is fat from a cow. Very small traces as I shall demonstrate below but that has not stopped more than 100,000 snowflake millennials signing an online petition calling for the notes to be withdrawn and the bankers responsible to be hung drawn and quartered.
Okay I made the second bit up but an awful lot of folks are getting angry on behalf of vegans, Hindus, Jews and all sort of other minorities. As it happens the Jews are quite cool about it. The board of deputies says no Jews would have a problem unless they tried to eat the notes. How sensible but elsewhere the faux anger grows. It is the sort of faux anger Dan Hannan discusses in his super video of yesterday here.
Even if some daft vegan was unable to handle this dirty money there are ways around it. They could send any dirty fivers in the post to me. Or they could just refuse to accept fivers demanding change or tenners instead. Or they could put it into context.
Vice Magazine does the maths for the vegans below:
Tallow is rendered cow or mutton fat, but for the sake of argument let's go with cows here.
How much do cows weigh? Between 1,100kg for a male (bull) and 720kg for a female. So, on average, a cow weighs 910kg. The body fat content of an average cow is 25 percent. Therefore, the amount of fat in an average cow's body is 227.5kg.
How many kilograms of this fat is contained in offcuts you could use to make tallow? About 40kg, according to a man at the James Elliott butcher in Islington. How much tallow is used in one note, according to the Bank of England? "A trace", which chemically means less than 100 parts per million, or 0.01 percent. A polymer consultant I called confirmed that the tallow present in a given polymer would be a fraction of a single percentage.
New £5 notes weigh 0.7g, therefore there is roughly 0.00007 g of tallow present in one £5 note. How many fivers are in circulation now, and therefore will be around by May of 2017, when all the old paper ones have been phased out? 329 million notes.
To work out how much tallow will be used in total in all of these fivers, we need to multiply 0.00007g by 329 million, which gives us 23,030g, or 23kg. And if you get about 40kg of tallow-worthy fat from the average cow, how many cows would you
need to make every single £5 note in circulation?
JUST OVER HALF OF ONE COW
Ends.
All this energy over half of one cow? Are there no more pressing issues in the world of animal welfare today? But as Hannan notes, the point of this protest is not about changing anything it is about giving a feeble generation a chance to say how fucking pious they are and how it is all about them.