Jared Winslow

Prototype

My Calculator

A tool for thinking quantitatively about questions that resist easy intuition.

Begin ↓

A burger, taken apart

What is one burger, really?

Scroll down. A single burger comes apart, then becomes the animals it actually represents. Numbers here are illustrative — the point is the chain.

A burger has parts.
Bun (top)
Lettuce
Tomato
Cheese
Patty
Bun (bottom)
The patty is the part that came from an animal.
The patty was a cow.
cow
fish fish fish
The cow ate fishmeal. Three fish per patty (illustrative).

The chain

One burger ≈ one cow's worth of patty + fish in feed.

Scaled to a single meal, the picture is small. Scaled to a year, a cafeteria, or a city, the same chain stretches into thousands of animals. The next page applies it to a university.

1 burger
≈ 1 cow + 3 fish
illustrative; not literal per-burger

→ Try the university version