The result is that “anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million birds a year are still conscious when they are scalded to death in the scalder”.Ĭyanobacteria or ‘blue-green’ algae, which develop at the surface of a slow-flowing river in France. She didn’t disappoint: in a gruesome paragraph on poultry processing plants, she provides the detail that chickens are often not mounted properly on the slaughter line before they are immersed in boiling water.

By the time I got to the meat slaughter and processed food section (one of our “biological blind spots”), I was so sure Tong was going to hit me with something unfamiliar and horrific that I wasn’t sure I could proceed. The density and frequency of the details showing the scale of life around us almost inspires a feeling of vertigo, so rapidly does Tong make the reader zoom in. Bacterial cells make up 0.2kg of your body weight one handful of soil contains more microbes than there are people on Earth the tiny particles called neutrinos generated by the sun’s nuclear fusion are so small that they can penetrate the Earth, enabling a subterranean observatory to come up with an image of the sun. The matter and life we cannot see are demonstrated with stunning effect. “To us,” she writes, “reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95% of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.” After a few pages of porridge eating, some tasty morsels appear, as Tong starts to use ever more gripping examples to make her point about how much we do not see.

Ziya tong the reality bubble