Where selenium used to come from

Steak and kidney pie was not a coincidence. For a few hundred years the offal came home with the meat and the cook found a use for it, and kidney went into the pie because it was there and it was cheap, and because it happens to be one of the very few real foods with any real amount of selenium in it.

Selenium is a mineral most of us have never given a thought to. In Britain and much of Europe the soil is low in it and has been getting lower, and unless you eat a lot of fish or a handful of Brazil nuts, kidney is about the only place on a normal plate it turns up. Selenium contributes to the normal function of the immune system and to normal thyroid function.

So it is in the pouch. Grass-fed bovine kidney, a small amount of it in every scoop, doing the job the pie used to do.

We know kidney is a hard sell. Nobody is asking you to cook one. That was rather the idea of putting it in a tasty natural vanilla powder.