Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio
Ten Speed Press, 287 pp., $40
Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio have produced what can only be called an extraordinary book. They “started out to explore humankind’s oldest social activity: eating” by examining 30 families in 24 different countries worldwide. Menzel contributes the striking photography and wife D’Aluisio the captivating writing.The U.S. diet has been morphing and rapidly evolving, but few of us realize to what extent it’s affecting foods around the globe through the effects of global capitalism, growing affluence and consumerism, and migration. Our American fast-food companies export blandness, saturated fats, and sugar to the foreign lands starved for Western culture and modernity.
“The global marketplace has changed the way people are eating. Societies that are becoming less physically active are also increasing their consumption of energy-dense foods,” D’Aluisio writes. Charitable organizations that used to deal exclusively with world hunger now have to simultaneously deal with the threat of world obesity and diabetes. As D’Aluisio puts it: “We felt a book that would examine nutrition and food around the world was exactly what the world needed, especially now that the problem of obesity is finally being recognized as a ‘big’ issue.”
A typical chapter opens with a shot of a representative family from a particular country gathered in their kitchen. On the table is a pile of what the family typically consumes in a given week, with a breakdown of the family members and their ages. The cooking and food preservation methods they use in their native kitchen are noted, and there is a complete list of the foods, broken down by category, and their costs in both native and American currency. Listed also is a tally of interesting food facts and demographics for each country, including stats on obesity ratios; average individual daily caloric intake; the number of McDonald’s, KFCs, and Burger Kings; favorite family recipes; and extensive field notes that function as personal travel memoir sidebars.
It’s startling to see what families from all around the world consume in a week, and the contrasts between the well-off and the families of the Third World are enough to induce societal shame at our comparative Western gluttony: a German family of four that spends $500 U.S. a week vs. a family of nine from Bhutan that spends $5 U.S. a week. The German food is mostly packaged and processed, while the Bhutanese food is almost exclusively fresh.
Hungry Planet is a graphic example of what fast-food globalization, mass tourism, and giant agribusiness have done to the authentic foods and flavor profiles of the entire world. The authors, with amazing photography and provocative and entertaining prose, slam home the premise: The affluent of the world are overfed on the wrong things, and we are seducing the rest of the world, especially those who can least afford it from a material and a health point of view, into wallowing in our culinary rut.
This article appears in January 20 • 2006.
