What the World Eats

Check out this wonderful photo essay from Time Magazine showing what one week’s food looks like for families around the world.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519,00.html

A few things that struck me:

• The sheer amount of processed food that all but the world’s very poorest people eat.
• The virtual omnipresence of Coke or Pepsi.
• The popularity of bottled water, even (or especially) in countries that have high standards of water sanitation.
• The relatively large amount of meat and small amount of vegetables in the Chinese family’s diet, contrary to what we’ve been told.
• How come the British family is not smiling?  Could it be all those Mars Bars have rotted their teeth?
• Look at all the beer the German family consumes!  Why don’t we see beer in the American families’ photos?  Do they not drink it, or do they not admit to drinking it?
• I couldn’t help wondering whether this included meals eaten out, or only meals prepared at home.
• The more natural foods, and the fewer industrially processed foods, the more beautiful the photograph.  I am not sure if that is my cognitive bias toward whole foods, or some deeper aesthetic sense.  I think the reason the processed foods mar the beauty of the photographs is that each has a logo that is designed, by itself, to look good and capture our attention.  But when you clump a bunch of them together, their industrially bright, overpigmented, highly geometric designs clash every which way.  To me, the ugliest photograph is of the North Carolina family with the tiny island of fruit in the sea of clashing food logos.
• Speaking of which – the North Carolina folks had one of the largest food bills, larger even than the family in notoriously expensive Japan.  Only the Germans spent more on food (and they, of course, have all that beer).  So much for the idea that eating whole foods costs more than eating processed foods.
• I would love to see food expenditure expressed as percentage of income.

It would be difficult for me to do a photo shoot like this for my family.  Our car-free lifestyle means that we don’t go for a single large grocery run every week.  Instead, we pick up things piecemeal.  Often we go together in a medium-sized, planned Saturday or Sunday run (two healthy humans can actually carry quite a lot of food – four large canvas bags worth – for a distance of half a mile or a mile); this is supplemented by more frequent, smaller trips on our way home from somewhere else.  (I love this because I get to try different stores; there are at least five near my office and three near our home that I use for different things.)  So gathering a week’s worth of food all at once and photographing it would be hard for us.

But here’s what it would look like.  My husband eats a few things that I don’t, though he’s scaled back his carb consumption quite a bit.  So there are a few things in our weekly food supply you wouldn’t expect just from reading my blog.  There would be a lot of eggs, two to three dozen; a half gallon of milk; a pint of heavy cream.  Rather a lot of meat, too, and some fish.  A few potatoes, a little bread, maybe a few other grain products.  Some coconut.  Some dark chocolate.  Some coffee for me and tea for my husband.  Very few bottled beverages except wine and an occasional sip of liqueur and a very rare diet Coke for me (maybe one every two weeks) or beer for my husband (maybe once a week, not sure since we seldom have it in the house).  Lots of non-starchy vegetables.  (From June to November the composition of the produce would vary depending on what our CSA delivers.  From November to June, we avoid buying anything the CSA delivered mountains of in the prior season!  We try to eat seasonally, but it’s a daunting challenge in New England to acquire fresh seasonal produce during the CSA off season.  There’s a reason the CSA doesn’t deliver during the winter.)  Greek yogurt.  A little fruit.  A few frozen meals (my husband’s lunch).  Lots of nuts, including nut butters.  A tiny amount of real sugar.  Butter, lots.  Olive oil, lots.  Mayonnaise, mustard, capers, etc.  Lots of spices.  Cheeses from all over the world.  I’m not totally sure what my husband eats at work.  One donut, every Friday, I’m pretty sure of that.

One advantage of our car-free lifestyle is, without that giant weekly trip to the store that lots of American families make, we don’t have to worry so much about freshness.  Our food is about as fresh as it can be in the modern agricultural system where food is two or three days old before it ever gets to the market.  So it actually makes it a bit easier to rely less on processed foods.

How about you?  What jumped out at you in the Time photo essay?  What’s in your weekly shopping cart?

tip of the hat to Mark’s Daily Apple for pointing out the essay