It's a McWorld after all

Over and over again in "Hungry Planet," these massive economic changes are played out in the fears of grandparents, the aspirations of parents and, most of all, in the appetites of children. Kids everywhere, it appears, crave McDonald's. In Riverview, Australia, 5-year-old Sinead Brown charms her grandfather, who grew up rustling porcupine in the bush, into buying Happy Meals for her five or six times a week: "Pop, do you think we could do something about Mackas?" she asks, using the Aussie slang for McDonald's. Her mother repeatedly tries and fails to cook fries to match that unmistakable Macka's taste. In Beijing, a father beams with pride at his teenage son's twice-a-week McDonald's habit, "He's growing up differently than I did." The Cui family in rural China has yet to encounter Western fast food, but attitudes toward it are already divided along generational lines. Six-year-old Cui Yuqi looks forward to trying some. His mother "apprehensively" says she would try it. His grandparents "want no part of it."

Centuries-old traditions and deep reserves of local knowledge are, of course, lost in the transition to a McDonald's economy -- as, often enough, is even a rudimentary knowledge of kitchen work. The 52-year-old grandmother in Riverview, Australia, tells of the time her children and grandchildren were confused at the sight of her boiling tea from loose leaves. "Haven't you been educated in anything?" she asks them. But since the traditions lost usually involved long hours of stooped labor for a meager existence -- such as the reconstruction of earthen watering troughs performed daily by 12-year-old Amna Mustapha and the other daughters of Dar Es Salaam Village in Chad -- the changeover to a cash economy is usually counted as progress. Homegrown is just too much work when you can have store-bought.

Or so the choice is frequently presented. We can lead sedentary lives and grow comfortably fat on uniformly bland food or we can go back to laboring dawn to dusk at the edges of hunger. The mothers in Turkey, Bhutan, Mongolia and the Philippines who do this kind of work -- and it is women who carry the heaviest burdens throughout the book -- are united in a desire to see their children escape it. "I want them to make a good living using their minds, not their bodies," says 33-year-old Melahat Celik of Istanbul of her three children. Melahat, who cooks and cleans for six different families in the city, is expert in the preparation of Turkish pastry and baffled by her children's attraction to fast food. But on the rare occasions when she can spare the money, she takes them to the McDonald's at the local mall.

Perhaps we are simply destined to live in a world where local cultures exist only as residue preserved for the sake of tourists. If our children's children want to know about hand-grinding barley on a stone or spreading manure on fallow fields, they can read about it in "Hungry Planet." A review of the book, really, should be written 50 or 100 years from now. What will they say then about a time when half of China's workers were still agricultural and Kuwaitis ate their pick of the world's bounty in the middle of a barren desert? Will the women of Todos Santos in Guatemala still cook their own tortillas? And on All Saint's Day will a mob of men on horseback still "race back and forth down the main road into town  stopping at each end of the course to take a pull of hard liquor" until the last rider gives up or passes out, as Menzel describes in one of his field notes?

The softly voiced hope of "Hungry Planet" is that the other half of the population can join us in having enough to eat without all of us living in a McWorld. Corby Kummer of the Atlantic Monthly argues in his essay that the best way to fight fast food may be to subvert it: "Those who wish to return to regionalism, to a more equitable farming system, and to a safer environment need to be more inventive than simply deciding to declare war on fast food." Kummer suggests we invent a compromised version of the chain restaurant -- one that treats workers better and that buys a meaningful percentage of its food from local growers. "A serious rival should start," he writes, "with streamlined, bland recipes that make spurious claims of Mexican and Wild West connections. Aim for anonymity and consistency. Spend a fortune promoting an image of young people having fun." This third way may be the best we can hope for until the day when "fast food will be a distant memory."

For the Casales family back in Cuernavaca, a change can't come soon enough. Between the time that Menzel took their portrait and D'Aluisio wrote their profile, Marco Antonio closed the family's convenience store (which he had opened after losing his job at a brewery) and crossed illegally into the U.S. in search of better wages. So far he has only been able to find 20 to 30 hours of work a week, at $5 an hour. The money he sends home is not enough to support the family's old Coke habit so they are down to four quarts a week. The indignities suffered by the Casales family in the churning of the global economy -- the all too common story of a father separated from his family and working for inadequate wages without legal protection -- make the hard of life of the Aymes family in the mountains of Ecuador seem almost ideal. Ermelinda and Orlando Aymes have to work ceaselessly to secure the $35 worth of potatoes, rice, flour and bananas that sustain them and their seven children for the week, but they work together and they own the sources of their livelihood.

It is no accident that Orlando is a voice of reason when it comes to fast food. He tried it once while studying in the nearby city of Ambato. "It was meat on bread," he says. "It was okay, but a bit strange. And I wasn't able to see how it was made."

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