Hungry Planet: What the World Eats | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Menzel
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  39 reviews
Sales Rank: 11303
Media: Paperback
Pages: 287
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8
Dimensions (in): 12 x 8.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 1580088694
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.3
EAN: 9781580088695
ASIN: 1580088694
Publication Date: September 2007
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Amazon.com
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
Book Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...
 interesting read July 4, 2008
Ms. C. A. Sheppard (perth, australia)
this book is facinating if you are at all interested in how the rest of the world lives
Book July 2, 2008
M. Naveira (USA)
Nice wrapping-- great delivery-- Prompt. We received this book in perfect condition as stated.
Thank you.
Very good book. I highly recommend it. June 23, 2008
Katelin J. Roberts
This is a great book to pick up any time you have a minute and just read little pieces that are fascinating... or you can read it cover to cover. the photos are beautiful and it really gives you an incite into how other cultures around the world are living right now. It's inspiring and made me want to inprove my own diet.
Enchanting Book for the Foodie May 31, 2008
Carolyn Smagalski (Philadelphia, PA USA)
At the James Beard Awards in 2006, a huge, on-stage screen supplemented each presentation with images for the audience - images that illustrated themes within restaurants, foods, photos, and books. As a "foodie" who writes about beer, I was enchanted by a number of entries, including Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio.
So intense was this impression, that I was unable to leave the memory of this book at the Awards Ceremony. Two years later, the compulsion overtook me. Hungry Planet: What the World Eats stood on the shelf at my local bookshop, tempting me with what lived within the covers. This masterful display of "what the world eats," is so alive that, as I read, I become a participant in every global society we pass through.
Each chapter (organized by country) begins with a photograph of a "typical" family unit. The families are posed within their living quarters, surrounded by the food consumed in an average week. We feel as if we are peering into their personal lives. We know how much they spend on this food, (converted into US dollars). We see what they wear, how their family unit is structured, and what we would encounter in the marketplace where they shop. We are exposed to the sudden realization that some societies physically work for an entire lifetime at the meager chance for survival, so harsh are their living conditions. In other societies, the threat of obesity and diabetes looms with constancy, despite an affluence that, in theory, should be the key to longevity and health.
The authors give us extraordinary details about foods in each land - how animals are slaughtered and preserved without refrigeration; the method used to patiently separate barley grains from sand; or the necessity of constantly hand-filling an animal trough with water, because the earth and the heat claim its own share. We imagine surviving on skewered scorpions, seahorses, cicadas and silkworm pupae; Spit-roasted cui (Guinea pig), narwhal skin, polar bear, and camel; Khova (partially caramelized condensed milk), mung beans, spiny lobster, and aiysh (porridge); espresso coffee, well water, jasmine tea, cocoa, and Ur-bock beer. We also contemplate the effect of preservatives, prepared foods, and fast-food franchises on our daily lives in the Western world.
So fascinated was I with this voyeur's look into the personal eating habits within our fellow global societies, that I was unable to put this book down. As a documentary on global survival, it is superb. As a catalyst to our own self-examination, it is invaluable. It does not read like a novel, but is a rich tapestry that can be digested in bits and pieces - with leisure, or as an all-consuming, intellectual work.
Haunting, essential and beautiful March 31, 2008
Matthieu P. Raillard (Portland, OR USA)
This book should, in my opinion, be assigned reading for everyone in so-called first world countries. What the author manages to accomplish is nothing short of remarkable- chronicling one week of food consumption in a number of families around the world. The text is well-written and informative, but it's the photographs that speak the loudest. To compare the weekly food consumption of a US or German family with that of a Sudanese or Mongolian family is haunting and recalibrates what we take for granted. Highly recommended.
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