What the World Eats

by D'Aluisio, Faith

• ISBN13: 9781582462462
• ISBN10: 1582462461
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-01
• Publisher: Tricycle Pr

Summary

Sitting down to a daily family meal has long been a tradition for billions of people. But in every corner of the world this age-old custom is rapidly changing. From increased trade between countries to the expansion of global food corporations like Kraft and Nestlz, current events are having a tremendous impact on our eating habits. Chances are your supermarket is stocking a variety of international foods, and American fast food chains like McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken are popping up all over the planet. For the first time in history, more people are overfed than underfed. And while some people still have barely enough to eat, others overeat to the point of illness. To find out how mealtime is changing in real homes, authors Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio visited families around the world to observe and photograph what they eat during the course of one week. They joined parents while they shopped at mega grocery stores and outdoor markets, and participated in a feast where a single goat was shared among many families. They watched moms making dinner in kitchens and over cooking fires, and they sat down to eat with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries--if you're keeping track, that's about 525 meals! The foods dished up ranged from hunted seal and spit-roasted guinea pig to U.N.-rationed grains and gallons of Coca-Cola. As Peter and Faith ate and talked with families, they learned firsthand about food consumption around the world and its corresponding causes and effects. The resulting family portraits offer a fascinating glimpse into the cultural similarities and differences served on dinner plates around the globe.

Author Biography

Peter Menzel is a photographer known for his coverage of international feature stories on science and the environment. His award-winning photographs have been published in Life, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Time, Stern, GEO, and the New York Times Magazine. He has received a number of World Press Photo and Picture of the Year awards.

Faith D’Aluisio is the editor and lead writer for the Material World book series. She received the James Beard Foundation Award in 1999 for Best Book, Reference and Writing on Food for Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects. She is a former television news producer whose work received awards from the Radio-Television News Directors Association and the Headliners Foundation of Texas.

Peter and Faith are the co-creators of the books Material World: A Global Family Portrait, Women in the Material World, and Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, winner of the James Beard Foundation Award in 2005 for Book of the Year. They are also the co-authors of Man Eating Bugs and Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. Peter and Faith live in Napa, California.

Excerpts

World on a Plate

Imagine for a moment that it is early Saturday morning in the United States. You have just awakened and it’s time for breakfast. If yours is like the majority of American families, your meal might consist of one or more of the following: boxed, sweetened cereal with milk; bacon and eggs; pancakes; breakfast bars; and toaster pastries. Your food probably has been purchased by your parents in a nearby supermarket. You might have an idea of the basic ingredients of the food you’re going to eat, but probably not. You move from your bed to the breakfast table and eat until you’re full.

If, instead, you wake up in a village in the east African country of Chad, like Amna Mustapha, twelve (page 38), there are no boxes of ready-to-eat cereal, no cartons of milk, and no pastries from a supermarket bakery (in fact, there is no supermarket). You and your parents grow and raise the family’s food. Your meal is always the same--puddinglike porridge called aiysh and a thin okra soup with maybe a bit of dried goat meat for added flavor. But before you can eat it, the sorghum or millet grain for the porridge must be pounded by hand or machine milled, the water for it pulled from a distant hand-dug well, the vegetables picked fresh or gathered from the drying shed, and the wood or dried cattle dung collected to fuel the cooking fire. Children do almost all of this work for the family, although the mother usually does the cooking. Everyone gathers around to dip pieces of aiysh into the soup and eat them with their hands. Then the children leave for the day to water and tend the animals.

Amna’s family is just one that we profiled, in twenty-one different countries, to explore humankind’s oldest social activity: eating. How would one week’s worth of food in Chad or India stack up against one week’s worth in Greenland, Mexico, the United States, Egypt, or France? We decided to find out. At the end of each visit, we created a portrait of each family surrounded by a week’s worth of groceries.

The global marketplace has changed the way people eat. In the suburbs of Paris, French teenagers stop at McDonald’s for a quick bite and their parents shop at modern supermarkets. France’s own brands of giant supermarkets, like the American Wal-Mart, are sprouting up across the planet. In urban China, such megamarkets are replacing the bustling farmers’ markets and home gardens that for hundreds of years have provided the essentials of the Chinese diet. Traditional food and centuries-old eating habits are being replaced by "modern" energy-dense foods (like those modern breakfast foods you’re eating this Saturday morning). As societies modernize and become wealthier, people become less physically active and actually need less food. Instead, people are eating more--and getting fat.

Even without reading the mountains of research that bear this out, the effects are easy to spot. Just look around. Many affluent countries are overfed. And, unfortunately, it seems that in developing countries, even before people attain a level of prosperity that helps ensure their adequate nutrition, they are eating in ways almost guaranteed to make them less healthy. Alma Casales, thirty-four (page 114), a young mother living in Mexico, is surprised to learn that the six gallons of Coca-Cola she, her husband, and her young children are drinking in the course of one week at all their meals and throughout the day is basically sugar water. In fewer than twenty years Mexico’s population has moved from a rate of less than 10 percent overweight to over 65 percent.

As charitable organizations continue their campaigns against world hunger, others have started campaigns against world obesity. In the year 2000, the World Watch Institute reported that for the first time in human history there were just as many overfed people on the planet

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Excerpted from What the World Eats by Faith D'Aluisio, Peter Menzel
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.