Hungry Planet: What the World Eats - Hardcover

Faith D'Aluisio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1580086810 ISBN 13: 9781580086813

Publisher: Ten Speed Press,U.S., 2005

Synopsis

On the banks of Mali's Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice. In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad and in the UK the Baintons are eating bacon and eggs and chocolate fudge cake with cream. This age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform diets worldwide. In HUNGRY PLANET, the creative team behind the best-selling Material World, Women in the Material World, and MAN EATING BUGS presents a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week. Each family s profile includes a detailed description of their weekly food purchases; photographs of the family at home, at market, and in their communities; and a portrait of the entire family surrounded by a week s worth of groceries. To assemble this remarkable comparison, photojournalist ! Peter Menzel and writer Faith D Aluisio traveled to 24 countries and visited 30 families from Bhutan and Bosnia to Mexico and Mongolia. The resulting series of photographs and facts is a 30-course feast of visual and quantitative information. Featuring essays on the politics of food by Marion Nestle, Charles C. Mann, and Alfred W. Crosby, and photo-essays on international street food, meat markets, fast food, and cookery, this captivating chronicle offers a riveting look at what the world really eats.

About this title

Review:

It's an inspired idea--to better understand the human diet, explore what culturally diverse families eat for a week. That's what photographer Peter Menzel and author-journalist Faith D'Alusio, authors of the equally ambitious Material World, do in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, a comparative photo-chronicle of their visits to 30 families in 24 countries for 600 meals in all. Their personal-is-political portraits feature pictures of each family with a week's worth of food purchases; weekly food-intake lists with costs noted; typical family recipes; and illuminating essays, such as "Diabesity," on the growing threat of obesity and diabetes. Among the families, we meet the Mellanders, a German household of five who enjoy cinnamon rolls, chocolate croissants, and beef roulades, and whose weekly food expenses amount to $500. We also encounter the Natomos of Mali, a family of one husband, his two wives, and their nine children, whose corn and millet-based diet costs $26.39 weekly. We soon learn that diet is determined by largely uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization, which can bring change with startling speed. Thus cultures can move--sometimes in a single jump--from traditional diets to the vexed plenty of global-food production. People have more to eat and, too often, eat more of nutritionally questionable food. Their health suffers. Because the book makes many of its points through the eye, we see--and feel--more than we might otherwise. Issues that influence how the families are nourished (or not) are made more immediate. Quietly, the book reveals the intersection of nutrition and politics, of the particular and universal. It's a wonderful and worthy feat. --Arthur Boehm --From Amazon.com

Starred Review. For their enormously successful Material World, photojournalist Menzel and writer D'Aluisio traveled the world photographing average people's worldly possessions. In 2000, they began research for this book on the world's eating habits, visiting some 30 families in 24 countries. Each family was asked to purchase at the authors' expense a typical week's groceries, which were artfully arrayed whether sacks of grain and potatoes and overripe bananas, or rows of packaged cereals, sodas and take-out pizzas for a full-page family portrait. This is followed by a detailed listing of the goods, broken down by food groups and expenditures, then a more general discussion of how the food is raised and used, illustrated with a variety of photos and a family recipe. A sidebar of facts relevant to each country's eating habits (e.g., the cost of Big Macs, average cigarette use, obesity rates) invites armchair theorizing. While the photos are extraordinary fine enough for a stand-alone volume it's the questions these photos ask that make this volume so gripping. After considering the Darfur mother with five children living on $1.44 a week in a refugee camp in Chad, then the German family of four spending $494.19, and a host of families in between, we may think about food in a whole new light. This is a beautiful, quietly provocative volume. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --From Publishers Weekly

For those with children - or childhood memories of having to clean your plate - hunt out the fascinating Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio (Ten Speed Press, £28) which looks at what the world eats by following 30 families in 24 countries through 600 meals. It's a lavish production mixing anecdote, diary, recipes and food bills that deserves a large readership - definitely one to order for your local library or donate to a school. --Friends of the Earth's supporter magazine

About the Author:

PETER MENZEL is a freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared nationally and internationally in National Geographic, Forbes, Fortune, Time, and other publications. FAITH D ALUISIO is a former award-winning television news producer. The team has also published MAN EATING BUGS, Women in the Material World , and Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. Faith and Peter live in Napa, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ten Speed Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1580086810
• ISBN 13: 9781580086813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288