What the World Eats- I

On one of my book shelves sits a photo-journalistic, coffee-table type of book titled Material World in which a photographer visited countries around the world and took photos of typical families with all of their worldly possessions laid out in front of their home dwellings. I've used that book for teaching classes on simplicity and I look at it often.

Shortly after my $1 a day experiment was finished I bought a similar book called What the World Eats. The same photographer traveled to over 20 countries and found a family that represented the average income for each particular country. He took a photo of each family in the place where they prepare and eat food, surrounded by a typical week’s worth of groceries.

Here is one of the families from the United States:


Here is the family from Chad:


Here is the family from Mexico.


I could sanctimoniously say that this book made me want to immediately get online and buy stock in Coca Cola (check out the back row of the photo above), but there is much more to this book than gawking at the photos and judging what the families eat. The book is a fascinating study of food, economics, cooking, survival, globalization, culture, tradition, health, and so much more.

With each photo of the family and their food, the author records how much money the family spends on food in one week (converted into U.S. dollars). I won’t list all 20-something of the countries, but here are some highlights:

o The French family (2 adults, 2 teens) spends $419.95 per week on food (with all of their sublime cheeses, mousses, cafés, and pastries I’m pretty sure that I’ve spent close to that in one week for myself in Paris)

o The family from Japan (2 adults, 2 teens) spends $317.25 a week on food.

o The large family from Mali (8 adults, 5 kids, 2 babies) spends $26.39 a week on food (if you want two wives you gotta be ready to feed more mouths).

o The Sudanese refugee family (1 adult, 5 kids) living in Chad spends $1.22 per week on food. Nope, that is not a typo. ONE DOLLAR AND TWENTY TWO CENTS!

For some reason, the authors photographed 3 families from the USA.
o The California family (2 adults, 2 kids) spends $159.18 per week on food.

o The North Carolina family spends double that at $341.98, but to be fair they have 2 teenage boys in the photo.

o The Texan family (3 adults, 2 kids) spends $242.48 per week on food.

I've got much more to say about this book, but for now I am wondering how many of us would enjoy putting a week's worth of our eating habits on photo display? For the photo in my kitchen, I imagine a small castle made out of stacked pints of Ben & Jerry's icecream.