Norman Borlaug

How many peoples’ lives have you saved this year? Obviously most classy men manage to scrape low double digits, what with foiled muggings, smuggling Jews out of Germany, and the charitable foundation you are loathe to lend your name to lest it seem gauche.  Maybe you are in the armed forces, a doctor, or a firegent and save a few hundred a year. Sterling work. But today’s classy gent makes off with the garibaldi. From his birth in 1914 to his death in 2009, this man is estimated to have saved over a billion lives. A billion! That’s about as many people who live in India, if it was in US dollars it would be enough to hire Cristiano Ronaldo for 44 years, and is almost as many people has the last Prime Minister of Italy raises his eyebrows suggestively at on a trip to the shops.

As a classy gent, you clearly don’t waste your time buying food just because it’s called organic and comes in brown paper with “scrummy lovely homemade middle class abuse” written on it in something close to, but not quite comic sans. You realise that the human race shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and embrace higher yielding crops, Borlaug’s legacy.  He revolutionised agriculture in many developing countries, saving the aforementioned lives in the process. So the next time you are getting preached at by someone back from a gap year sporting a bindi to make a point, and ordering something pretentious: take solace in the fact they’re diverting investment from one of the most important advances in human history. Oh, and if you want to take it up with the great man himself, he’s dead, cool your jets. But as a collegiate wrestler he could probably still give you a lesson.  Of his wrestling days he said:

“”Wrestling taught me some valuable lessons … I always figured I could hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough. Many times, I drew on that strength. It’s an inappropriate crutch perhaps, but that’s the way I’m made”

On that evidence maybe we should rethink wearing unitards and rolling around in the United Kingdom… perhaps not. Nevertheless, Norman Borlaug is your classy gent of the day.