World Spirit

There are certain moments when history descends in all its glory to inhabit the flesh. This is the sense in which Hegel glimpsed the world-spirit in the figure of Napoleon: “an individual who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”¹ And maybe once, through certain rituals—the condensation of collective will in fire and blood—the soul of humanity could wear the skin of an emperor for its costume, inhabiting the man much as the overwhelming force of the divine might be expressed for a moment in the way the skinless light catches against the surface of the ikon. But today things are different. Perhaps something broke a long time ago and after that everything just kept breaking. Whatever the reason, the spirit can no longer live in a person. It is instead expressed in the alien immensity of commodities: oil burned to warm the world like a lantern smoldering overbright in the darkness of the swamp, the million machines seething in the bellies of the factories that garrote the city, the myriad objects cast across the surface of the Earth in arcs patterned on the falling stars. These are not living things, but they are nonetheless animate. So maybe we can say the world-soul requires a new flesh for its habitation. Something that, like it, lies beyond life and death. Not an emperor concentrating the collective will but an industrial abomination—a monstrous nexus of petroleum, grain, and thrashing metals—into which the toil of the species has been sluiced like offal into the waste lagoon. It must be some image bearing an uncanny intimacy. An object wrought of other flesh that becomes our flesh but is something also beyond the flesh. In other words, a hamburger: the world spirit glimpsed in glistening meat.

This is a horror story about hamburgers. But, like all stories, it is not about the thing that it speaks of, and, like any good horror story, it is something that your body already knows. And every story needs an adequate setting: a campfire, a cavern, a conclave. Ours must befit the burger. So, imagine that we are in one of those lonely late-night diners out somewhere along the rolling darkness of the interstate. You know exactly the place. Black coffee, the little sugars in their pastel prisons. We order hamburgers, of course. And, when they come, they arrive in the proper vestments: dull reflective foil and wax paper that crinkles louder than it should, like the sound of something scraping within your ear canal. This packaging is important. To reach the meat, you must first perform the ritual unfolding. Each layer is flayed—an act that always feels somewhat prurient, burger-steam like hot breath against your palm, the oil dripping out as you grip the bun and press into the flesh between. It is disgusting, really. But hypnotic. You are tired. You are hungry and the world outside is dark. We float in the fluorescent light. Imagine that I have just come from work, and I am a bit unkempt, eyes bloodshot, hands weary. I am explaining something, but you cannot quite follow as I scribble my arcane numbers on the back of a burger wrapper. Imagine the taste of the grease in the air, the smell of the grill in the back. You hold the burger and yet you know you are within the burger also. You consume it and yet it encompasses you. Imagine the burger embraced by tongue and stomach, meat dropping into the mitochondrial fire as you stare down into the black coffee like a pit of tar. Imagine that we are drowning in that pit, preserved, perhaps, in our last lonely moments.

 

The Grid

The story is very simple: place your ear to the horror that is the hamburger and you will hear the truth whispered to you in drips of grease, the entire lattice of our society unfolded like a lotus blooming from the mud. In the winter I would leave every night to go to work sometime around 10 p.m. and, if the ignition had not been gouged out of my beat-up truck by some hapless thief, I would drive through the murk toward the shining new logistics complex built on a marshy floodplain just beyond the port. The facility was so enormous that the entire regional fleet of delivery trucks took up only a small sliver of the floorspace. The rest was committed to special zones for sorting small packages, for loading heavy or irregularly-shaped items onto autonomous carts that could be chained together to slither slowly through preprogrammed routes across the facility, for handling hazardous materials in an area called “the cage,” for managing various mechanical systems, for processing air freight—in a fenced-off zone that required a special license from Homeland Security to enter—and, above all, for loading and unloading the containers being shuffled into slots along the outside of the building. The building was cavernous, two or three stories in height but containing only a single floor. Walking to any given workstation, you would pass under “the grid,” a giant computerized nexus of conveyer belts and catwalks punctuated by bright glass cubes glowing with fluorescent lights, each capable of scanning the labels on fast-moving packages from any angle and shunting them to the correct station.

Walking under the grid for the first time in training, I could not help but imagine it as a sort of microcosm. After all, in the port outside, commodities moved along a similar network at larger scale, as new cars robed in white plastic were unloaded into giant parking lots or containers shunted from ship to dock to truck or train. And of course the port itself was but one node in an even more gargantuan grid running from the miserable cobalt mines of Kolwezi to refineries in Zhejiang and from there to component plants in the sweltering factory districts of Bắc Giang, the newly-mechanized production lines in Shenzhen, and at last, as “finished products” through the Port of Hong Kong across the Pacific to the Port of Tacoma and into trucks unloaded at warehouses much like my own, from whence the myriad objects will spill out into similar grids designed by industrial engineers in Germany, managed by software composed further north in Seattle, and run by hardware designed in Silicon Valley and San Diego on chips printed in Hsinchu or Kaohsiung, Taiwan, scanned by cameras designed in Tokyo using components supplied by Seoul. And, in each instance, the commodities are shaped and reshaped in the hands of workers passing along their own grids from overpriced apartment to underpaid job where they are monitored by similar camera systems and similar supervisors who are all assholes in similar ways, all working to enrich similar owners who are similarly distant from each worksite producing its similar surplus of profits funneled into similar shareholding systems, which will then be funneled back into the system via similar means of reinvestment.

In other words, the grid seemed to represent the ominous, all-encompassing rule of that strange horror called “the global economy.” Our training was led by a supervisor who can only be described as a sort of Punished Dilbert: a balding, middle-aged man with beady eyes who, as he himself explained in great detail, was suffering from a neurological issue of unidentified origin. He had become sensitive to light, often grew dizzy for no reason, would have sudden muscle spasms, and would frequently lose his train of thought mid-sentence. Unable to work in the warehouse, he had been assigned to training the new recruits and completing miscellaneous office work. Nonetheless, he was that classic breed of bootlicker who revels in a sort of self-flagellation, gesturing toward six-day work weeks in a tone somewhere between bragging and pleading for it all to end. He explained how he spent most of his days at the hospital getting test after test to determine his mystery condition and then most of his nights here at work, leading new trainees on tours through the labyrinthine grid. Though he was a “part-time” employee, like us, the company had him working full-time hours for the four or so months of the holiday season. Throughout, he repeatedly emphasized his general misanthropy and stated that the only thing he cared about in the world was his wife and son. He explained that he works as hard as he can just to make it all go by quicker so that he can finally reach the hour or two of the day between work and hospital when he will see his family, like a prisoner awaiting his monthly visit. His life was already over, he said, and his only hope now was that his wife and son would inherit whatever he could scrape together before one of his many miseries finished him off.

In between safety videos, he would tell self-deprecating jokes: how the better-off managers on earlier shifts would steal all his highlighters and sticky notes, how he was the only supervisor without a walkie-talkie so if there was an evacuation he’d just be out with his group alone in the parking lot on the far side of the building waiting in the rain, muttering, with no way to know when to come back in: “There’s no way those guys are going to remember to text me.” Because of the neurological issue he often gets lost, unable to find where he’d parked or remember where he was going after getting in the car. On multiple occasions he’d even forgotten how to find his way home. And, after mentioning this, he liked to tell a joke that was not really a joke, noting with a laugh that he always remembers how to get to work, no matter what. “I wish for once I’d forget how to make my way here,” he laughed bitterly, “but that’s the only thing I can’t seem to forget.” If he ever forgets his way home, he just makes his way to the warehouse. The first time he said it I thought of how I’d read once about a paramedic who, failing to resuscitate a patient with CPR or defibrillator would, as a last-ditch effort, simply scream into their ears: “You’re going to be late for work! Wake up! You’re going to be late for work!” and how—this is the truly awful part—the method would sometimes work, the poor soul awakening from death wild-eyed, imagining that they’d overslept and reaching not for the hands of their loved ones in their final moments but for their phone to turn off the alarm and send a text to the boss: I’m late but I’m on my way.

After training, we were thrown out into the grid, where the workflow was very simple: freight trucks come into the outside yards and dump their containers, which are picked up by lighter-weight drayage vehicles and plugged into numbered bays, then detached. Once in place, the rolling door on the bay is opened from the inside and either a conveyer or a chute linked to the grid above is extended into the depths of the container below. Unloaders pull packages out of the containers and onto the conveyer belts, where they are fed into the vast constellation of machine systems humming overhead. Any heavy, oversize, or oddly shaped packages are manually pulled out and placed on caterpillar-like autonomous vehicles for slower transit. Most boxes ascend up into the grid, where they are scanned and routed to the correct loading bay. The grid then casts the packages at high speed down a chute into the container trucks, where loaders pull them off the rollers and restack them into a series of floor-to-ceiling walls, advancing until the container is nearly full, at which point the irregular packages are loaded in at the tail. In the idealized image of the work reproduced in training videos and media materials, the loader lifts a box from waist height and then merely twists and places it in its location on the growing wall, then awaits the next box and does the same. Once your wall reaches a certain height, you are supposed to drag over a special stepladder to make sure you’re rarely reaching overhead. It is presented as a simple, slow game of Tetris. Older training videos even show two workers in every container, each tasked with constructing a separate section of the cardboard wall that then meets perfectly in the middle.

But the training video is a lie. In reality, the pace of the flow is almost always impossible to match. In the chill of winter, you’ll start working with a hoodie on, ice-cold rain pattering against the ceiling of the container and, by the time you can fight your way out for a drink of water, your clothes will be soaked through with freezing sweat. Boxes come down the chute at high speeds and at volumes determined by the sorting algorithms that run the grid, bruising arms and ribs and often spilling off the rollers to clutter the floor. Only the fastest-flowing lines have two workers to a truck. When the shift is short-staffed (almost always), you’ll even be working multiple lines at once, running between loading bays and wading through a thick rubble of cardboard to reach the always-crumbling wall at the back of each container. At worst, it feels like you are slowly being buried alive. For several hours every night, you desperately try to dig yourself out of a grave that is filling faster than you can empty it. Periodically, the grid itself jams and supervisors clamber up the catwalks to pry the packages loose. The smartest, most senior workers know to avoid the entire ordeal. One of the oldest workers at the facility would just drive around in a special cart with a Bluetooth speaker playing Creed and 3 Doors Down at maximum volume wearing a dirty hi-vis jacket obscured under his long white beard. At first, I had no clue what his job was, since he never seemed to be working. But then, when the grid jammed and an entire section had to be shut down, he arrived out of nowhere, ascending into the labyrinth above with a look of glorious purpose. Mere minutes later, the broken machine was fixed, the grid was humming again, the bearded man had returned to his cart, and I could hear the Creed lyrics slowly receding into the distance.

Though we were taken up into the catwalks during orientation, the vast majority of workers never had any reason to climb up into the grid. It remained an opaque, vaguely malicious entity, its body stretched out spiderlike across the sky. It was impossible to take in the whole system from any physical vantage point. In fact, taking any sort of photograph anywhere in the facility is punishable by immediate termination. Only the tech team in a separate room can see it in its entirety and, even then, only as a simplified model of input, output, and flow. Gazing on the grid is therefore prohibited, but the grid can always gaze on us. Each bay has a camera and a spotlight pointing into every container, actively monitored by a room full of security and technical personnel. Similarly, the entire facility is covered by cameras with lenses powerful enough to zoom in and read any label on any package moving through the system at any given moment. The only blind spots that exist are areas where the grid is knit so tightly that it creates a cold cavern of steel beneath the churning conveyor belts, or accidental overflows where packages stack so high they block the view of the cameras. In addition to monitoring the pace of work, the surveillance system is also tasked with recording theft. Anyone caught stealing is not only fired but also charged with the maximum possible criminal penalty. Entering and exiting the building, workers have to pass through a metal detector, place their baggage in an X-ray machine and, upon leaving, also unlock their smartphone in front of one of several guards to demonstrate that it is, indeed, their phone. You then walk to your car as the rain glistens under the spotlights and the dew gathers on the branches of the surveillance cameras that sprout from every corner of the building.

 

Mathematics of Meat

Work is, fundamentally, a mathematics of meat in motion. Everyone brings snacks packed in their bag to consume during the sole, facility-wide 15-minute break for the shift. Since this was a night shift in a sleepy northwestern town veiled in the winter’s rain, however, the only place still open on the way to work was either a gas station, where you might find a pre-packaged sandwich, or a McDonalds. This was near the peak of the inflationary wave that hit in the early 2020s in a state with an aggressive sales tax, so a Big Mac, priced at $6.84 (for just the sandwich, I’m not joking) cost roughly $7.50 after the 10.3 percent local tax rate was applied. If you wanted to buy a real hamburger at some bar nearby, you’d be paying 12 dollars minimum, no fries. And despite being a “good union job,” in the parlance of the pathetic progressive, we part-timers—who compose the majority of workers at the company—only made about 20 dollars, after tax, which was about the same as the non-union warehouses down the street. So you get 2.66 Big Macs for one hour of work. Or you can buy between 1 and 1.66 actual hamburgers. Here, we’ll keep it conservative, assuming we lowly warehouse workers can’t afford a real burger and have to buy the Big Mac, which weighs around a quarter of a pound and covers all your basic macronutrients.

But work is also the mathematics of meat as muscle. The boxes at the warehouse weigh between 10 and 70 lbs. each. The actual average shifted wildly on any given night but, for convenience, we can assume it was something like 30 lbs. Starting, you are expected to load between 500 and 700 boxes per hour (bph) over the course of a shift, which might last anywhere from three to five hours at full flow, six hours if someone fucked up or if half the shift called in sick. In other words, somewhere between eight and sixteen hamburgers. After a month, your average should be around 1,000 bph, expended in more or less continuous reps of lifting and lowering at peak hours, and then in sudden bursts of high-intensity activity toward the end of the flow. These numbers can therefore be used to calculate what, in weightlifting, would be called a training volume: the rough estimate of the total weight lifted over the course of an entire session. If we multiply our company-mandated bph by our average package weight of 30 lbs., that’s roughly 30,000 lbs. lifted per hour, or 15,000 lbs. that must be lifted before you can buy one hamburger. Altogether, that adds up to 90,000 lbs. (45 tons, ~8 hamburgers) on the shortest shift, or 180,000 lbs. (90 tons, ~16 hamburgers) on the longest. But let’s assume hiccups in the flow and pace of work cut the actual figure roughly in half: 45,000 lbs. (~22 tons) for an 8-hamburger night, and 90,000 lbs. (45 tons) for a 16-hamburger night. But these are usually incremental movements, lifting the box only a foot or two and setting it down within a slightly wider range. Most of the muscle exertion comes in the form of twisting and stabilization. In other words, the weight is moved in a fashion more similar to a kettlebell core exercise than a deadlift. When the flow is fast and there is no time to get the stepping stool, however, the work also entails repeated overhead lifting, which is almost guaranteed to cause a shoulder joint injury given that pace and weight.

Technically, the work is “part-time.” The hours vary depending on the flow, somewhere between twenty and thirty, with optional extra work often available at peak season for other shifts. Many new hires take this at face value and try to pair it with another part-time job in the day. Soon, however, they find out that it is basically a full-time expenditure of energy packed into a narrow, part-time window. Even worse, night shifts have a clear, clinically proven link to a series of health problems ranging from heart disease to cancer risk. But the night workers are not paid more than the daytime shifts and, like all the part-timers, are only eligible to receive the renowned union healthcare package after a grueling nine-month trial period. Almost no one makes it through the trial period. Those with day jobs involving any sort of manual labor begin to drop off first, showing up at work late from a full day of equally miserable work elsewhere or stumbling to their car at 5 a.m. to make their morning shift at 6, praying they don’t fall asleep at the wheel. The students and the ones with sit-down day jobs find it more feasible, but only barely. They drop off in a second wave, more subtle. And even those trying to live solely on the part-time union job they’ve secured soon find themselves worn down. Ask any of your longer-term coworkers and they’ll recommend you put your name down for lighter work as soon as possible (these assignments are determined solely by seniority) and try to pivot into a supervisory role, where much of the job entails frantic running between disasters while yelling into a walkie talkie, interspersed with slow opening and closing-shift hours where you can scroll idly on your phone. After a single round of hiring, nearly two-thirds are gone within the first few months and, of those that stay, only a small, masochistic handful remain in loading or unloading.

All meat math can be reduced, ultimately, to the burning of calories. Most variation in an individual’s basal metabolic rate is accounted for simply by their size (particularly the fat-free mass of muscles and organ systems) and roughly 60 percent of daily calories are burned by our resting metabolism. Ignoring details such as fat content and height, the simplest, back-of-the-napkin calculation used for how much a person’s basal metabolism burns—for average individuals of reasonably athletic builds between 20 and 60 years old—is simply multiplying weight in pounds by ten: so a 180 lb. person would burn roughly 1,800 calories. Basic daily activities then add roughly 20–30 percent to this, placing the range somewhere between 2,160 and 2,340 for a relatively sedentary individual. But intense activity burns more calories, though exactly how much varies substantially based on the specific exercise. For an individual who is 180 lbs. (roughly the average weight of an American), an hour of “low impact” aerobics is estimated to burn a bit less than 500 calories, while “high impact” aerobics are estimated to burn closer to 600.² Though difficult to measure in any exact fashion, the warehouse job likely approximated “high impact” aerobics or “vigorous” calisthenics, burning some 600 to 700 additional calories per hour. Most of these would be burned in the two to three hours of peak flow, tapering off at the end of the shift. If we make a conservative estimate, then, we can assume that the intensity of the job burns another 1,500 calories on a given night. Added onto the range above, that would be a total of between 3,660 to 3,840 calories for a person of average size.

The weight loss associated with exercise occurs when you are in a caloric deficit, burning more than you are consuming. Those who stayed on the job for more than a month almost always began losing weight rapidly, despite also eating more to try to keep up. According to McDonalds’ own measurements, a Big Mac contains about 590 calories. For simplicity, let’s disregard the question of nutrient composition and just assume that the calories are good enough to live on. If one hour of work buys 2.5 hamburgers, that means our extremely intense expenditure, perhaps some 600 calories per hour at the lower range, buys us 1,475 calories of burger. The three hour, or eight hamburger night therefore obtains some 4,720 calories, enough to survive for around 1.2–1.3 workdays, and a long six hour, sixteen hamburger night returns 9,440, enough to survive for 2.4–2.6 workdays or even to feed one other family member for the day. Let’s assume an average week lies somewhere in the middle, twelve hamburgers a night, or 7,080 calories, just under twice our minimum daily needs. For every day we work, we must consume half of our hard-earned hamburgers (six a day), otherwise we will slowly starve to death. In other words, of the total of sixty hamburgers we receive each week for working our “good union job,” we must eat thirty in order to have enough energy to do the job in the first place. Then, if we remain sedentary on our weekend (assume ~2,100 calories), we’ll have to eat another seven or so hamburgers (3.5 each day) even though we are earning none. If we have no other hungry family members awaiting us, we can save the remaining twenty-three hamburgers to trade for other necessities. Over the entire month, we’ll have an excess of ninety-two hamburgers to use as we see fit.

We live in a society of unprecedented material wealth, which uses greater quantities of energy and moves more raw mass than any other species in the entire history of the planet. Capitalist society has, in fact, become a geospheric force with a clearly measurable impact on the major biogeochemical cycles of the planet. And yet the burger tells another story: the energetic gains wrought through this vast metabolic bonfire only barely warm the bellies of those at the bottom. Imagine the vast mountains of concrete and steel moved by humanity, the oceans of grain, the swarms of cattle roaming like locusts. There are more cows alive today (~1.5 bil. in 2020) than there were humans two hundred years ago (~1 bil. in 1820).³ And now imagine your pittance of burger stacked up against this vast pyramid of seething matter. A bit less than a hundred surplus hamburgers for a full month of backbreaking labor against this backdrop is basically a joke. Even if we pretend that we could do the job full-time—physically, a near-impossibility for most, requiring energy expenditure on par with that of elite endurance athletes—an additional one or two hundred hamburgers doesn’t change the basic outcome. Statistically, you and I and everyone you know own nearly nothing. And this is even true if you are a well-off white-collar worker making six figures in US dollars and therefore bringing home some 1,111 in real hard hamburger every month, of which you must consume a mere 111 (3.7 a day), assuming your office job allows you to live a sedentary lifestyle, leaving you a full 1,000 greasy pustules to enjoy as you see fit. Certainly more than my ninety-two hamburgers. And yet even a thousand is barely a single cow.

You might protest here that of course the individual is but a small pebble but, in aggregate, we compose the vast, crushing avalanche of moving matter that is the “global economy.” And yet even here the math does not quite add up. The medium income for a household in the US is roughly 80,000 dollars a year, or 6,666.67 dollars a month, which, using the Big Mac Index average of $5.69 per burger for the entire US (let’s charitably ignore sales tax), is roughly 1,171 hamburgers a month. Except the median family size is 2.5, meaning that, if each family member consumed a mere 100 hamburgers a month on average (we’ll assume the children eat slightly less, the parents more) and all live largely sedentary and cartoonishly American lifestyles gobbling burgers and doing little else, that leaves only 1,071 extra hamburgers each month, or 428.4 hamburgers per person. But this average fails to capture the US income distribution. Nearly a third of the US population makes less than 56,000 dollars a year (less than 228 surplus hamburgers per person per month). Many make far less than that. Meanwhile, the income of the richest individuals is astoundingly large. In fact, rather than an aggregate of all the little piles of hamburger owned by the world’s poor, that surging mass of moving matter that composes the economy—conventionally represented by sums of money but more accurately seen in mounds of glistening meat—is mostly composed of property owned by the richest of the rich. Elon Musk makes some 32,242 dollars every single second. In other words, every two seconds, he earns the same quantity of hamburgers that many Americans make in an entire year. In a single month, he makes some 1.3 billion dollars, or 228.471 million hamburgers. Even if we assume he gorges himself on 200 hamburgers a month (6.7 Big Macs per day), he still has 228.47 million remaining.⁴ In the space of a year, he makes some 15.6 billion dollars, or 2.74 billion hamburgers. Since big numbers like this are difficult to fully imagine, let’s put this into a temporal perspective: the six-figure employee earning some 1,000 surplus hamburgers a month (100 times more than the warehouse worker) would need to work for 225,000 years to earn the same quantity of hamburgers as Elon Musk makes in a single year. That is roughly the same estimated age of “Mitochondrial Eve,” the most recent matrilineal common ancestor of all humans currently alive.

 

Metabolism

Human history also places these numbers into perspective in another sense. Most people would assume that, despite all its drawbacks, our “modern” society must certainly be able to guarantee greater caloric returns per unit of work than earlier, far less technologically advanced modes of production. And yet even here the evidence is ambiguous. In the warehouse, I could earn some 1,475 calories per hour by lifting 1,000 boxes weighing some 20,000 lbs. in total, likely burning 600 calories in the process. The Hadza people in Northern Tanzania are a frequent point of reference in both anthropology and in studies of human metabolism, since they offer one of the last living case studies of an almost entirely hunter-gatherer society. And, while their hourly Caloric gain is less than that of the warehouse worker, it is not that far off:

Hadza men and women acquire 500 to 1,000 kilocalories [i.e., calories] of food an hour, on average. Ethnographic records from other groups around the world suggest these rates are typical for hunter-gatherers. Five hours of hunting and gathering can reliably bring in 3,000 to 5,000 kilocalories of food, enough to meet a forager’s daily needs and provision the camps’ children.⁵

In other words, the Hadza earns just a bit less than one to two Big Macs per hour, all while working the same shift hours as the warehouse worker. So it is true that the warehouse job offers a marginal advantage, earning a caloric surplus roughly double that of the hunter-gatherer.

The advent of agriculture brings us closer to an adequate equation. The same study cited above also compares the Hadza to the Tsimane, a population of farmers in the Bolivian portion of the Amazon who mostly deploy traditional agricultural methods, growing heritage crops and supplementing their agricultural plots with hunting, fishing, and gathering: “With farmed foods as their energy staple, they produce nearly twice as many calories an hour as the Hadza.”⁶ Meanwhile, most estimates of average physical exertions in premodern societies are close to those of the warehouse worker, at roughly fifteen MJ/day or roughly 3,500 calories.⁷ In fact, human metabolic rates appear to be remarkably similar across societies, differing primarily due to age and fat-free mass.⁸ Accepting the estimate that the agriculturalists produce twice that of the hunter-gatherers, this would amount to some 1,000–2,000 calories per hour, or between 1.7 and 3.4 Big Macs, which averages out to roughly 2.5, almost the same number of hamburgers I earned per hour in the warehouse. And yet, if I had been making the local minimum wage of $16.28 per hour, that figure would have dropped to something closer to 2 hamburgers per hour, or 1,180 calories, at the very bottom of the range for the agriculturalists and the very top for the hunter-gatherers. If I had been making the national minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and purchasing a national-average Big Mac of $5.69, I would be earning a mere 1.23 hamburgers per hour, or 725.7 calories: roughly the same as the average hunter-gatherer. Thus, despite the vast technical advances of “modern” society, poor workers in a wealthy metropolitan region in the richest country in the world are given, per hour, roughly the same amount of protein-rich subsistence acquired by the average peasant or hunter-gatherer.

Translated to the global scale, however, the picture is far more grim. While popular statistics list out startling declines in global poverty—trends which, even in the rosiest estimates, have reversed over the course of the 2020s—the burger again tells us a different story. Among the most widely-used measures of global poverty was the $1.90-a-day poverty line, now updated to $2.15-a-day. Each is an arbitrary number, but has been widely used by the World Bank, aggressively promoted by the philanthropic business interests of billionaires like Bill Gates, and widely publicized by pro-capitalist clerics like Stephen Pinker, all of which made it into the de facto standard for policymakers.⁹ When compared to subsistence needs, however, the entire narrative of global poverty alleviation visible under this measurement collapses. As Jason Hickel pointed out in 2019, when the $1.90 measure was still the standard:

Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty. But note that the UN’s FAO says that 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity. 1.5 billion are food insecure, and do not have enough calories to sustain “normal” human activity. And 2.1 billion suffer from malnutrition. How can there be fewer poor people than hungry and malnourished people?¹⁰ 

Of course, the trend makes perfect sense when appraised in quarter-pounds of flesh. For example, in India, where some 12.9 percent of the population falls under the $2.15 poverty line, a Big Mac costs $2.75. In other words, a substantial share of the population (here ignoring cultural prohibitions against beef) could not afford a mere 590 in burger calories per day.

Although we can obviously assume there exist other, cheaper food sources, the FAO data on food insecurity and malnutrition suggests that these, too, are ultimately insufficient. While the 1–2 hamburgers per hour of the hunter-gatherer may seem meager in certain respects, the data very clearly demonstrates that the society of the Hadza is nonetheless able to supply nutrition, one of the most fundamental human needs, more effectively than our own. Moreover, the Hadza are able to do this despite the tight social surplus afforded by their relatively limited productive power. By contrast, the mass malnutrition within our own global society exists alongside—and in fact helps to generate—a metabolic capacity unprecedented in the entire history of the species. The current world per capita energy supply available from all foods per day is slightly under 3,000 calories, or between 1.5 and three times as much as the hunter-gatherers. It is highest in North America, at 3,587 calories, and lowest in Africa, at 2,573 calories, but there is no continent on the planet where it is lower than the daily needs of the average person.¹¹ And this figure is only the food that is already produced and makes it to market, simply averaged out over the entire global population. Obviously, we also have the technical ability to increase food production and to recover and restore many of these calories already lost. But even these 3,000 calories are only half of the edible food we actually produce (i.e., the real per capita average is closer to 6,000 calories), since much of this output is instead fed to animals, with a non-negligible share also lost to harvest inefficiencies, poor market conditions, or industrial use, all of which combine to form the burger.¹²

 

Paid in Flesh

So why is it that the warehouse worker, living in one of the wealthiest parts of the most calorie-rich region of the planet and supporting no additional family members, is only barely able to cover their daily energy expenditure? In fact, the warehouse does not even allow this. Since we cannot survive on hamburgers alone, we must instead trade the surplus meat retained at the end of the month for luxuries like shelter, electricity, water, a car, the gasoline to power it—the busses do not run for night shift workers—and god help you if you have a child: in cities like Seattle, childcare for anyone with a fulltime schedule averages nearly a thousand dollars a week or, assuming slightly less than forty hours, an average monthly cost of around 3,000 dollars (somewhere between 400 and 500 hamburgers).¹³ Over the past decade, the cost of all of these necessities has also seen substantial and sustained inflation, a trend which has only accelerated in recent years.¹⁴ Between May of 2020 and May of 2021, the cost of all items had increased some 5 percent and, by May of 2022, the cost of all items had increased by another 8.6 percent, shelter had increased by 4.1 percent while food had increased some 10.1 percent and energy a whopping 34.6 percent.¹⁵

In the years since, inflation has remained positive for all categories other than energy, led by increases in the cost of shelter: housing costs rose 5.5 percent between May of 2021 and May of 2022, a further 8 percent between May of 2022 and May of 2023, and then another 5.4 percent by May of 2024. In Tacoma, Washington, where I live, the average one-bedroom apartment now costs 1,432 dollars a month, or 190 hamburgers (at the local cost of $7.50 after tax—which has since lowered slightly). In neighboring Seattle, conditions are much worse: 2,050 dollars (273 hamburgers) per month for a one-bedroom, and 1,502 dollars (200 hamburgers) for a studio.¹⁶ Solely taking rent into consideration, a surplus of ninety-two hamburgers is simply not enough. Despite draining a full day’s energy, the warehouse job is, after all, only “part-time.” But even if we imagine that we were to find another perfectly complementary job making that exact same pay and requiring little extra energy to raise our hours to forty per week, we would only have a total surplus of 252 hamburgers per month—if we use all the same presumptions as above. This may sound like a lot, but at the going rate of 273 burgers per month, it is not even enough to rent a one-bedroom in Seattle. In Tacoma, it is barely sufficient to rent a one-bedroom, leaving a mere 62 hamburgers left for car payments, gas, utilities, and “luxuries” such as clothing, phone data, internet access, and perhaps even a morning coffee (which, at the very cheapest, will cost you half a hamburger).

In other words, even working full time at twenty dollars an hour, you will be spending nearly 100 percent of your non-food income on rent and utilities if you want to live alone in an apartment where the bedroom is separated from the main living space. This basic condition is what is referred to as the “Housing Crisis,” for which neither of the major political parties fielding candidates in the last election offered even a hint of a solution—because, in the end, any real solution to this problem requires violating the sanctity of property. It’s easy enough to capture in conventional data: From 2001 to 2020, “median rents grew by 21 percent, after inflation, while renters’ incomes grew by 2 percent.”¹⁷ Then rental costs skyrocketed even further in the wake of the pandemic. By 2022, half of US renters paid more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities. A quarter of all renters in the country were paying more than 50 percent of their income in rent.¹⁸ These figures are particularly high in the coastal centers, especially on the West Coast, where nearly all of the metropolitan areas in Southern California see more than 30 percent of their populations paying more than half their income on shelter. And, despite rightwing talking points about the failures of liberal governance, the same trends are visible in leading conservative states such as Florida, where almost all urbanized areas see even worse rent burdens than in California. In storm-wracked Tampa Bay, 30 percent of the population was paying more than half their income for shelter as of 2022, in the sinking cities of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, the share was 34.7 percent, and, in Gainesville, the figure was as high as 36.7 percent. Nor is the problem limited to large coastal cities. In Boise, Idaho, 51.9 percent of the population paid over a third of their income for rent and utilities, with 23 percent paying more than half. In Duluth, Minnesota, the numbers were 50.5 percent and 32.2 percent, respectively.¹⁹

Despite extremely rapid buildouts of new apartment complexes in almost all urban areas of the country, often justified as constructing the supply necessary to balance demand and thereby bring down prices, the total number of low-rent units has in fact fallen across the board. When adjusting for inflation and affordability, by 2022 there had been no growth in affordable housing whatsoever. Instead, there had been an effective “loss of 2.1 million units since 2012” even while the number of total rental units had grown. Driving past gutted cars and screaming homeless people each night on my way to the warehouse, I would pass five or six new condo complexes run by corporate landlords, each containing the absolute legal minimum of “affordable” units required to obtain tax write-offs—many of which are, in fact, 300-square-foot flats that would require a mere 75 percent of my warehouse income to afford—with the rest of the building given over to luxury condos marketed to remote workers or commuters with tech jobs in Seattle to the north or government jobs in Olympia, the state capital to the south. Even a year after construction, many of these remain mostly dark at night. At the end of 2023, some 6.6 percent of rental units were officially reported as vacant across the country, though the real figure is likely double this, taking into account misreporting and units purchased for short-term re-rental via platforms such as Airbnb, and is of course much higher in certain cities.²⁰

Given that the caloric returns earned from warehouse work roughly approximate those earned by peasants living a largely agrarian lifestyle, perhaps it is only natural that, like the average peasant, we too must pay an inordinate share of those calories into the coffers of the local landlord. In total, “residual incomes—the amount of money available after paying for rent and utilities to cover other needs—have dropped significantly.” But you already know this, having experienced it yourself year after year. On average, households that earn less than 30,000 dollars annually (a bit less than what we’d make if we could have worked full-time shifts at the warehouse) “had an all-time low median residual income of just 310 dollars per month in 2022, down 47 percent from 2001 after adjusting for inflation.”²¹ That’s a mere 54 hamburgers, using the national average price without taxes. Unlike our more honest measures of surplus meat, however, that figure does not already include food expenditure. Divide the number by the ~30 days in a month, and you are left with a mere 1.8 hamburgers per day, with absolutely nothing left over for additional expenses. Clearly, these conditions are already inhumane. But what happens when you are in this lowest of income brackets and therefore cannot acquire enough hamburgers to give to your local lord?

One option is to prostrate yourself before another. In other words, if you cannot afford rent and food and utilities and clothing and whatever other necessities you need you can, of course, go into debt. However, this is only possible if you have good credit to begin with, which is to say if you come from a wealthier family or if you, like me, have had the fortune of having your social security number chosen at random by a fiscally responsible undocumented immigrant who has, through regular car and credit card payments improved your serendipitously shared credit score. Increasing their debt load is precisely what many Americans have done since the inflationary wave began in the early 2020s. Prior to the pandemic, credit card debt had already climbed to historic levels, surpassing those of the credit boom prior to the Great Recession. The payout of emergency unemployment benefits and stimulus checks saw the figure drop slightly, but as these resources dried up and rents continued to skyrocket, US households were forced to continue spending and ended up accumulated historically unprecedented levels of credit card debt, topping 1 trillion dollars in total by 2023.²² Adjusted to per capita levels (see Figure 1), the figure now exceeds the peak of the consumer debt bubble in the late 2000s. Not coincidentally, per capita credit card debt is also well above the national average in states with the highest house values and highest shares of cost-burdened renters, such as California and Florida. And it is lower than average in areas with the lower rent burdens, such as Kentucky and Mississippi.

But, if the interest piles up and the monthly payments climb too high, you now effectively have a second rent on top of the first and, eventually, one or the other lord will come to collect. If the lords of finance come for you first, they will pare down your possessions and find a local judge to order that your pay be docked of its hamburgers directly. After this happens, you will most certainly fall short on rent. When the landlord then comes to collect and finds you lacking, the sheriff will be sent to your house and you will be forced to go live outside. This is very simply how things work here in America. The result seems, by any reasonable standard, paradoxical: nationwide, the number of vacant houses and homeless people have each been rising at similar rates. By early 2023, homelessness rose to an all-time high of 653,100 people (using extremely conservative measures, widely acknowledged to undercount the true figure by at least half), a rate that also tended to track the trends in housing costs, such that the most rent-burdened areas also saw some of the highest shares of people living outside. In cities across the country, entire villages have arisen under bridges, on the periphery of parks and forests, in flood-prone gullies and tunnel systems, or on other abandoned plots of land. Though periodically razed by police, a lack of shelters means that most of those displaced after each raid will simply reconvene elsewhere to reconstruct the villages that were destroyed.

At first, it appears as if these villages operate entirely outside the formal economy, specializing in black and grey market commerce. But they are, in fact, thoroughly integrated into it. After all, the economy is no longer a thing that can be escaped. Even within the black market, for example, the currency of choice is name-brand laundry detergent, especially Tide Pods, which are portable, do not spoil, and are also an expensive essential that can be resold for a discount or easily traded with no paper trail. Often, however, the integration is more explicit. In 2021, a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that roughly half of the population in these outdoor villages and in the spare few available shelters was formally employed. There is not much reliable data for recent years on the average incomes for homeless workers but, using numbers from the 2000s and 2010s, researchers found that pre-tax individual incomes in 2015 for the sheltered homeless population of working age (18–64 years old), was some 8,169 dollars per year prior to taxes and, for the unsheltered, some 6,934 dollars. In 2024 dollars, that would be equivalent to 11,003 dollars and 9,340 dollars, respectively. Since most “median income” measures in the US are household measures, and the average household is 2.5 people, we can then double those numbers to get an approximation of a “household” rate: 22,006 dollars for the sheltered and 18,680 dollars for those living in the villages.²³

In the warehousing sector, it is something of an open secret that at least some of your co-workers are often living in tents or in cars, passing their off-shift hours drifting through the ocean of parking lots in the industrial suburbs outside, showering at Love’s or 24-hour Fitness, trying to plug an air-fryer bought at Big Lots into a salvaged car battery, and shivering their way to some Starbucks when the full dark of winter drapes its gloom over the rain-soaked marshes.²⁴ Often, these conditions are even glamorized, as in the “van life” phenomenon, or in Amazon’s use of “nomadic” workers via its “CamperForce” program—as documented in the film Nomadland, based on Jessica Bruder’s book of the same name (and, not coincidentally, carefully cutting out many of Bruder’s more critical stances toward the company).²⁵ In another industrial valley just north of my own warehouse, an Amazon fulfillment center sits across from a KOA campground, with workers filtering across from tents and RVs every morning like a pantomime of the brutal mill towns and logging camps that once housed the itinerant dregs of a nascent working class. In other words, nearly half a million Americans might be homeless, but they are not necessarily jobless. Their lives, like yours or mine, remain ruled by work measured in units of burger-time.

Midway through our story, what are we left with? A bleak world populated by bleak people fighting bleak daily battles that they invariably lose. And beyond or above this world, in the glowing skyline of the “Emerald City” on the horizon, we glimpse the glimmering empyrean of a ruling class so distant as to be nearly alien. In fact, behind the glow, we find that even the flesh of our profane dynasties—the Musks and Mellons, Buffets and Brins—burns away in the light of a truer lord: the purest money rendered in digital flickers, pulsing over the planet like an electrical storm. Such a grim divinity is almost entirely indifferent to our world of meat. Is it really so strange, then, that even the profane rulers ensconced in their billions offer no salve? That the priesthood of politicians in their congressional vestments conduct the business of government in the fashion that they always have: as a church built for the worship of property? Of course we are made to participate in the rituals: to worship in our daily work the being called capital that abides in the emerald glow—to feed it our bodies, the endless flow of meat—and on every electoral sabbath to choose a new priest to speak for it, offering homilies of solace or hellfire.

So, is it really a surprise that we find in the political establishment either a Bidenite blindness to the reality of our daily lives or a Trumpist spite that seems almost to revel in our miseries? Is it any wonder that, offering nothing and refusing even to condemn an active genocide, the Democratic base briefly shored up around a senile emperor collapsed in on its rotten foundations? That so few people even vote in the first place? This fact is alone a resounding referendum. Fires wrack the land, floodwaters rise, the hurricanes wash houses into the darkest depth of the holler where the old bones lie. The politicians barely even pretend at a program. There are no policies anymore, just a series of makeshift measures. Even the progressives and self-avowed socialists—those who think of themselves as good, honest priests within the corrupted church of government—seem able to offer nothing more than lofty moral platitudes, baroque bureaucracies of identity, and, when it comes down to it, a base nationalism that pits “working people” against our brethren across the border. Few solutions are even offered anymore, whether “from the left” or elsewhere. The socialist parties have no program aside from a vague gesture in the direction of postwar liberalism. The progressives now seek to turn the clock back to the grand compromise of the Bush years, when burgers were cheap and mortgages fat while bombs dropped white as falling snow on Baghdad. The centrist is hoarse from a long decade screaming that everything is fine or, in fact, better than it has ever been (if you’d just consult the numbers). In the end, even our budding fascists seem able to offer only more of the same, at a greater intensity: they promise madness and at least deliver. In all cases, we find a unilateral refusal to face reality, to embrace the bleakness and to build the army necessary to break it—afraid, perhaps, to grapple with the hamburger, that glistening god of meat that pulses in the grid above. What can be done?

Part Two will appear in the February 2025 issue.