Good Eating

Technical review and endorsement from Dr. Stephen Nichol, adjunct professor at the University of Tasmania and author of The Curious Life of Krill.The Good Eating manuscript won an honorable mention in Minnesota’s McKnight Artist Fellowships for Writers.The playful text is engagingly complemented by Dan Tavis’s emotive illustrations: As in The Whale Fall Café, Tavis’s illustrations are a hybrid of scientific accuracy with Nemo liveliness and humor.The unidentified narrator calls out a play-by-play of our krill’s struggles and hurls questions and advice at the krill to which the krill never responds—because, after all, krill can’t talk and this is nonfiction: “Hi. What are you? You appear to be an egg. You are an egg sinking. For many days, you sink. You sink a mile down, and you keep sinking down… down… until…”Follows one krill among billions as it completes the stages of a short, eventful life in which it eats and eats while metamorphosing from one thing into another and trying to avoid being eaten.A fun exploration of a tiny animal at the base of the ocean food chain: Of all the life forms in Arctic seas and the ocean around Antarctica, krill are the most important. Krill are the largest animals able to catch and eat phytoplankton, and they in turn are eaten by the largest animals ever to live on earth—blue whales—as well as by seals, penguins, and a host of others. In other words, krill are really good at eating, and krill are really good eatin’.