What the World Eats

(Emily's Voice)

A very wise woman recommended that I check out a book called "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats." It is a photographic journey around the world, looking at what an average family eats in one week. There are also photos of typical grocery stores/markets that these people shop at. I went online to see if I could find this book somewhere and I found that some of the photos have been published on the TIME website (www.time.com).

Check it out, you will be amazed (just click on the link below)!

What the World Eats, Part I

These pictures really illustrate the cultural food differences of people on the planet. Not only is the food different but the cost is incredibly revealing of the economic times that we live in. The cost of a week's worth of food for a family living in a refugee camp in Chad costs $1.23 and looks like it mostly consists of grains. Meanwhile, a family living in North Carolina spends $342 on a week's worth of food, which looks like it mostly consists of junk. I really enjoyed looking at these pictures and comparing the amount of fresh food that people either choose to buy (or not buy) or have available to them. In a place like North Carolina, people have access to a wide range of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, grains, etc. And yet the only fresh foods (and by fresh I mean not processed beyond recognition - like the mushrooms on the pizza don't count) we see displayed for the North Carolinian family's week are grapes, tomatoes, salad in a bag, vacuum-sealed meat, and milk in a jug. Ugh. How can a family stay healthy eating so much trash?

Now, from these pictures, it looks as though the North Carolinians aren't the only ones who buy a lot of processed food and drink a lot of pop. Look at the picture of the family from Mexico, where 12 Coca Cola bottles are on display for 4 people's consumption (that is assuming the small child in the arms of his Dad doesn't drink it yet) for one week. And we wonder why Type 2 Diabetes is rampant!

On a different note - I told my coworkers today about this book and how incredible it is. I made the statement that it was so interesting to look at how different cultures eat different foods (something that we've all known but is so poignant to see in a visual comparison between nations). My supervisor, who always has an opinion and has the uncanny ability to retain random knowledge, agreed that food is a cultural vehicle. He told me a story about a place where all the people were starving and the aid organizations sent them huge quantities of wheat. These people lived in an area where they didn't grow wheat or know how to process it. So, they had a giant warehouse filled with food and yet they were starving. He continued to say that it would be like if there was some disaster here and we were all left for starving and the UN World Food Programme sent us truckloads of jellyfish. Do you know how to eat a jellyfish? And it is so true! What would we do? But, if those trucks were sent to a community in, say, northern Japan, they would be whipping up some fried jellyfish served over rice!