Chompin Humans

Does anybody ever wonder how much we, humans eat?

Ok. I may be a bit too fast. Let me tell you why this question popped out of my mind.

Rewind…

One night, just like any normal night I am sitting in front of my computer. My well cushioned seat is already warm with my natural butt warmth, a sign that I am still alive and clicking (mouse) and also an indication that I have been sitting there far too long. And what am I doing? I’m browsing a page popularly known as Facebook. Typing some comments on pictures and statuses of my friends which I hope would make me look either witty or funny.

Let’s face it, everyone does.

Facebook has become a phenomenon. It also defied all the privacy rules our elders once protected so valiantly during their days. Today most people who visit this so called social networking page do these; Allow their friends (and strangers) know where exactly they are at that precise moment, share what they are currently doing and feeling and tell and show what places they have visited.

In short, we allow other people to have a peek into our everyday lives and have a bit of an access to our brains as well. The scope of the word privacy is getting smaller each day.

Another fun thing that we love doing these days is posting pictures, everybody has gone digital when it comes to pictures. We now see it every single day. Face pictures with tongues sticking out , portraits of people flashing the “peace” sign (hippie’s rules!), photos of girls blowing their mouth which honestly looks ridiculous to me, photos of half-drunk men raising their glass to the person holding the camera, almost anything we think worth posting, we post.

But there is something I noticed which made me wonder on my very first question above.

For the past two or three years I have seen so many pictures of food which I only see on cookbooks and McDonalds counter before this phenomenon existed. All of a sudden, pictures of food and people eating are flooding the facebook pages. It doesn’t matter if they are showing the people with food or the food itself, they are everywhere.

We love food, period.

People gather for special occasions like birthdays, Christmases, Thanksgivings, weddings etc. And to make everybody happy we put food on the table. It won’t be a successful gathering if we go home with our bellies empty. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time people come to eat. Every one is a cookie monster, so to speak. We chomp and we chomp and we chomp. We are all like a pacman, no wonder it was a phenomenon in its own right back in the eighties. We are born to live and to live we EAT, simple as that.

So it is now clearly established that people love to eat. We do this repetitively on an average of three times a day, seven days a week, thirty or so days a month and so on and so on. With this in mind and with information at my fingertips (google) I did some clickin, typin and computin ( I dunno, I just felt cool omitting the ‘g’ from those words). And what did I stumble upon will shock every human being who would read this (I am guessing somewhere between four and five, my wife and I included).

Are you ready? Here goes:

Fact, Earth is about 4.55 billion years old. Fact, there are currently close to 7 billion people on this planet. Fact, 50 years ago (1960) the population is almost half of the population today registered at just over 3 billion. Fact, the earth’s mass is 6.0 × 1024 kg, or simply 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.6 sextillion) short tons (6.0 sextillion metric tons). Now that’s quite heavy.

Where am I getting at? Here, if our population growth becomes steady for the next millennium or two which means double every 50 years and each human continues to eat an average of 1 Kilogram of food per day, the mass of food we would have eaten would equal to the mass of… wait for it… the ENTIRE EARTH.

Yes, according to my calculations it is safe to say that we could have eaten the entire planet in a little over 15 centuries that is one and half millennium from today. You might say my theory is absurd and bizarre but it’s a plausible theory nonetheless.

Can you imagine? Us the people living on earth can actually eat food equal to the mass of the planet we are living in, less than two millenniums from today. That is mind boggling. It’s like Burrrrgggggee... (mind blowing, with hand gestures and spit flying).

Not to mention the amount of food we Homo sapiens have eaten for the past 4.55 billion years. WOW! That is awesome! Think about it.

Now, there are only two things I can conclude based from what I have written above, either I have a very playful imagination or I just have way too much free time on my hand to actually take notice of this.

You decide.

I’m HUNGRY. :o)