How does our food define us?
Home » Blog » Lynda Brendish » How does our food define us?Photos of families from around the world and their weekly food consumption tell a more complex story than simply what they like to eat for breakfast.
Image from Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel & Faith D'Alusio
Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition. At a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese—Marion Nestle in the foreword to Hungry Planet
Looking through this Time photo essay of families around the world and their weekly food consumption, I wonder, how are we defined by the food we eat and the choices available?
The pictures are a few years old now, published for a book called Hungry Planet in 2005, but still so relevant. The photos make the point—as New York University professor of nutrition Marion Nestle says in her foreword—that diet is often dictated not just by cultural factors, but by circumstances out of the individual's control: poverty, conflict, globalisation.
The portraits in Hungry Planet provide an interesting look at the phenomenon of the 'nutrition transition': the process by which undernourished, malnutritioned societies transform into the obesity-prone culture so much of Western society is moving towards.
Take a look at the Time photo essay. There are two more sets in the series—Part II, Part III—all drawn from the book.
Even without probing too deeply for meaning, the photos can be enjoyed for what they reveal. It's fascinating just to compare the amount of fresh fruit and veggies between the different families. The family of refugees in Chad predictably have little, but then neither do the North Carolinans or Brits—though presumably they have plenty of access to them. The Mexican (pictured above), Egyptian and Kuwaiti families, however, seem to get plenty of greens.
I'll leave others to draw their own conclusions about what that might mean for health.
Whatever you think about it all, the pictorial provides some—ahem—food for thought.
Tue July 06, 2010 @ 04:32 PM
