Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
by Peter Menzel

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
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Book Summary Information

Author: Peter Menzel
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-01
ISBN: 1580088694
Number of pages: 287
Publisher: Material World

Book Reviews of Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

Book Review: a book to share....
Summary: 5 Stars

The Hungry Planet is most familiar for the photos of some thirty families from very different cultural traditions, each posed with a display of their week's supply of food. The book elaborates on this with many photos of the families at home, at work, at play, in the kitchen, at the market, in the garden. The accompanying reading enhances the experience but is not so extensive as to interrupt the pictures which are the main attraction. It's a wonderful book to share with anyone but especially with youngsters who are old enough to appreciate the variety of human tastes and experiences.

Summary of Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

The 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 eating habits worldwide. HUNGRY PLANET profiles 30 families from around the world--including Bosnia, Chad, Egypt, Greenland, Japan, the United States, and France--and offers detailed descriptions of weekly food purchases; photographs of the families at home, at market, and in their communities; and a portrait of each family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries. Featuring 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.
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

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