It's a McWorld after all

A writer and a photographer visit 30 families around the world to show us what the world eats -- and how industrial food is creeping into every corner of the globe.

By Ira Boudway

Dec 10, 2005 | Twelve 2-liter bottles of Coca-Cola line the back of the table in the Casales family portrait that appears in "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats." The Casaleses are a mother, father and three young sons living in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and the six gallons of Coke are part of their weekly diet. They drink it with nearly every meal. The oldest son, 7-year-old Emmanuel, is already overweight. Like his parents, he has come to resemble the squat, narrowed-at-the-neck bottles that are slowly killing him. And the Casales family is not alone; 65 percent of the Mexican population, the world leader in per-person consumption of Coca-Cola, is now obese or overweight.

But "Hungry Planet" is not a book about obesity or corporate villains; it's something much grander. Its premise is simple to the point of obvious and powerful to the point of art. Peter Menzel has photographed 30 families in 24 countries along with the food they will consume in the course of a week, while his partner, Faith D'Aluisio, has written a brief profile of the eating habits of each. Menzel and D'Aluisio are the same pair that produced the 1995 bestseller "Material World," a collection of portraits of "statistically average" families, and their worldly possessions, in 30 different countries. "Hungry Planet" follows the basic pattern of the earlier book. Each family's food for the week is cataloged and priced, and each profile is accompanied by a statistical breakdown of their country and a family recipe. Alongside all this are hundreds of richly colored and quietly composed photographs and six short essays from food-writing luminaries. The cumulative effect is that of being welcomed into the homes of 30 working families around the world.

Meet the Browns of Riverview, Australia, a three-generation family of seven that eats 60 pounds of meat in a week; the Madsens of Cape Hope, Greenland, whose diet is built around hunted musk ox, walrus, geese and polar bear; the Manzos of Sicily, who are surprised to discover that, as a couple, they smoke 20 packs of cigarettes per week; the Natomos of Kouakourou in Mali, a Muslim family of 15 in which the two wives take turns cooking millet porridge each morning; the Melanders of Bargteheide, Germany, whose $500 worth of groceries -- spread before the four of them in neat rows of cartons and bottles -- includes $90 in vitamins and supplements; and the Aboubakars, six Sudanese refugees encamped in Chad who subsist primarily on a 40-pound ration of unmilled sorghum.

That the Melanders can spend 400 times more money on food than the Aboubakars are able to earn in a week suggests that the distribution of resources worldwide remains distressingly out of whack. In "Hungry Planet," the difference between the half of the world's population that still lives on less than $2 a day and the rest of us is made visible in the contrast between the families sitting, often on dirt floors, behind sacks of grain or root crops and those standing around tables piled with cellophane-wrapped meats and branded foods. Many readers, I'm guessing, will share in my uneasiness at the thought of the indictments to be found in a picture of one's own family standing next to a week's worth of food. In my case, there would be an alarming number of to-go containers and bottled beverages and too few fruits and vegetables.

The dominant sentiment evoked by "Hungry Planet," however, is not one of shame but one of anxiety. Out of the 30 family portraits emerges a larger picture of a global civilization rushing headlong toward an economy in which food is a thing produced remotely by machine labor and a handful of experts and then sold (or given away) by multinational organizations -- an economy in which we identify a piece of food by its logo rather than by its biology. This is an economy already familiar to many of us in what is called the developed world, and it is growing grab by grab on the international market.

This transition to industrial food is manifest on almost every page of "Hungry Planet," from the Bhutanese monk swigging from a bottle of Pepsi at a celebration of the arrival of electricity in his village to the Polish family navigating the new "hypermarket" built on countryside once given over to collective farms.

The main marker of the jump to an oil-dependent, cash-crop economy is the same as that of the divide between rich and poor -- a diet shift away from cereal grains and fruits toward animal fats and refined sugars. This shift brings increased rates of obesity, which is fast becoming epidemic. As Alfred W. Crosby writes in one of the book's six essays, "The number of us who suffer from the diseases of overeating may be, for the first time in history, approaching that of those suffering from undereating." The problem is particularly acute in the United States. In another of the essays, Francine Kaufman notes that "one in every three children born in the United States in the year 2000 will have diabetes some time in their life." Clearly the main beneficiaries and victims of the new food economy are the generations that grow up within it.

Next Page: Why do kids everywhere crave McDonald's?

• 
• Read all letters on this article (26)
• Read Editor's Choice letters on this article (6)
• View blog reactions