Author: Faith D'Aluisio;
photographer: Peter Menzel
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. 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 team behind 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.
From Publishers Weekly
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.
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