Humans Are Shmoo's to Bacteria

Remember the shmoo? The shmoo w^as invented by Al Capp in the comic strip "Li'l Abner": a wobbly, tenpin-with legs sort of creature with the misfortune (or good fortune) of being almost totally consumable. Broiled shmoo tasted like steak; fried, like chicken. Shmoos gave eggs, butter, and Grade A milk. The shmoo's skin was a versatile fabric, the eyes made perfect buttons, and even the whiskers served as toothpicks. Most important, shmoos reproduced in prodigious numbers and delivered themselves willingly to human appetites. If you looked hungrily at a shmoo, it dropped dead of happiness. Shmoos w^ere cute, shmoos were adorable. Shmoos were also irresistible blobs of protein. Their happy destiny w^as to be someone else's dinner.

Now, think about it another way. Humans reproduce with shmoolike abandon. Never in the history of the planet has a single species multiplied with so few constraints. There are at present nearly six billion of us, and our numbers are soaring. We level forests, fill bays, drain wetlands. and pave over prairies to provide living space for our burgeoning progeny. We have made ourselves the shmoos of the planet—irresistible foodstuffs. Zoologist Mark Ridley writes: "Just as we consume resources, so we are ourselves a resource to be consumed. So far, we merely happen to be extraordinarily underexploited.... There is no ecological opportunity on the earth to compare with the gigacaloric potential of human flesh." In other words, we are a bounteous meal waiting to happen.

But who will eat us? We are at the top of the food chain, more or less. The few man-eating predators on the planet can be held at bay with weapons; indeed, as our ow^n numbers increase, sharks, lions, and tigers are pushed toward extinction. In developed parts of the world, biting insects are a mere nuisance, held in temporary check by a host of chemical pesticides. What about extraterrestrials? Might we become the grub of a more advanced galactic race? Maybe, but the possibility is too remote to bear worrying about. No, the real eaters who are waiting to consume us are closer to home, and poised to escalate their terrible assault. I speak, of course, of the vast invisible communities of viruses and bacteria. With every bite of food we eat, we convert more of the available planetary resources into human flesh. Increasingly, we must look like shmoos to the microbes: plump, available, irresistible. There is a huge Darwinian pressure on microbes to make their diet out of us. So far, they have made only limited evolutionary progress tow^ard over'whelming our defenses, but the dynamic of evolution is on their side.

Just trying to figure out a way to devour us.