On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

In the 1980s, archaeologist David Madsen was excavating a site in Utah when he noticed that all the ancient poop in the latrine area was full of grasshopper bits. Curious about the energy efficiency of catching and eating bugs, he set his team to catching the area’s omnipresent Mormon crickets, a traditional food of native people in the area. After an hour of picking crickets off bushes and from the grass, each person had collected an average of two and one-third pounds of bugs—nearly three thousand calories.* In areas where the crickets clustered, such as the cave Madsen was excavating, you could do much, much better. “One person collecting crickets from the water margin for one hour, yielding eighteen and one-half pounds, accomplishes as much as one collecting 87 chili dogs, 49 slices of pizza, or 43 Big Macs,” Madsen wrote.