Betty the Bacterium’s Bad Minute

Once upon a time, in a gut far, far away, a little bacterium was just trying to make her way in the world. Betty was a happy young bacterium. Like her friends, she enjoyed metabolizing organic molecules and looked forward to someday doubling in size and replicating, just like her parent, and her parent’s parent, and her parent’s parent’s parent, and all the parents before that for hundreds of thousands of generations. She fondly remembered her own childhood as a newly replicated bacterium, although childhood had taken place a couple hours ago, and that felt like forever.

Betty was lucky to live in a boom time. Her species, B. macaronialis, could metabolize various substances, but they especially thrived on macaroni n’ cheese. In recent months there’d been a lot of macaroni n’ cheese, so everyone was growing and replicating, and it felt generally like a time when nothing could go wrong.

Of course, since a bacterium’s lifespan is only around twelve hours, no one could remember a time when there hadn’t been macaroni n’ cheese. Historians and scientists reported that such a time had existed, years earlier, when the main resources had instead been things like brown rice and beans and oatmeal. Those had been harder for B. macaronialis to metabolize, so the species hadn’t proliferated so much as it was doing now.