This is from an essay called "Surfaces, Depths,
And Plenitude."
And I'm just going to read this first part.
And you'll see as I mentioned, krill.
They look like shrimp.
But they're even tinier than shrimp and hamburgers.
But this is what I like about facts.
The humpback whale travel--
the humpback whales, plural, sorry,
travel over 5,000 miles toward Antarctica short summer
in pursuit of a paradox, a tiny plenitude.
They are hungry.
They are huge.
At 50 tons apiece, they consume more fish
than all the teenagers and all of Utah must consume Big Macs.
The food they're looking for are tiny fish called krill.
Fortunately, even at these times of scarcity,
there is still a lot of krill.
The krill mass exceeds that of all human life, even the mass
of all the Big Macs.
Krill collection is an orchestration
worthy of the kind they teach at Hamburger University,
where would be McDonald's employees
learn to work as cogs in machines.
Like the combined effort of the drive-thru cashier,
the guy in the grill, the woman with her hairnet on the fry
basket, humpback whales use their individual jobs
to create a perfect system together.
One whale exhales to create a net made of oxygen bubbles
to startle the krill.
Another whale sings loudly to create confusion.
Another whale herds the krill upward.
All the whales blow together to make something researchers call
a bubble net.
Together, they package the krill into tightly wrapped fillets
of fish, quarter pounders, and French fries.
Once the krill are at the surface,
the whales open their mouths wide
and eat them like McDonald's employees
eat French fries on their breaks.
With no thought of the future, worrying about cholesterol
is for old people, not McDonald's employees or whales.
There are about 30,000 to 40,000 humpback whales
left in the wild.
Here's a map coming up.
Each one eats nearly 1.5 tons, 3,500 pounds of krill per day.
Sorry, I don't think I mentioned that.
Meaning, humpback whales alone--
oh, I do clarify.
Meaning humpback whales alone consume nearly 105 million
pounds of krill per day.
McDonald's sells 75 hamburgers every second,
680,000 hamburgers per day.
Each hamburger patty is 1/8 of a pound,
so they will sell two pounds of hunger every second.
Of 10, apparently and I cannot see this font.
They will sell 10 pounds of hamburger every second,
which equals 864,000 pounds of hamburger a day,
which comes from 5.5 million heads of cattle a year,
just in the United States, just from McDonald's.
Recently, scientists have discovered
that whales help sequester carbon in the atmosphere, which
is handy because beef, in the form of cows, add the gases
that help create global warming.
Ironic that this almost extinct but returning species
is here to help us and our hamburger-loving ways.
The whales, while coming back, aren't quite keeping up.
Americans eat almost a ton of food per year,
185 pounds of that are meat.
That's 600 billion pounds of food eaten by Americans.
Whales may provide an antidote to beef eating at McDonald's,
but they have a lot of recovering
to do in their own numbers before they
can compete with the appetite of hungry Americans.