What the World Eats

Review of What the World Eats by Peter Menzel, Faith D’Aluisio From Publishers Weekly

Adapted from last year's Hungry Planet, this brilliantly executed work visits 25 families in 21 countries around the world. Each family is photographed surrounded by a week's worth of food and groceries, which Menzel and D'Aluisio use as a way of investigating not only different cultures' diets and standard of living but also the impact of globalization: why doesn't abundance bring better health, instead of increased occurrences of diabetes and similar diseases? These points are made lightly: delivered almost conversationally, the main narrative presents friendly, multigenerational portraits of each family, with meals and food preparation an avenue toward understanding their hopes and struggles. A wealth of supporting information—lush color photographs, family recipes, maps, sidebars, etc.—surrounds the text (superb design accomplishes this job harmoniously) and implies questions about global food supplies. Pictures of subsistence farmers in Ecuador cultivating potatoes from mountainous soil form sharp contrasts with those of supermarkets in a newly Westernized Poland. Fact boxes for each country tabulate revealing statistics, among them the percentage of the population living on less than $2 per day (47% in China, where the average daily caloric intake is nonetheless 2,930 per person); the percentage with diabetes; number of KFC franchises. Engrossing and certain to stimulate. All ages. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

I found this book difficult to read cover to cover, it may be better as a coffee table book. It has A LOT of information along with the personal stories of the families involved. I found the pictures of the families with a weeks worth of groceries and the amount it cost for them to purchase them, most interesting. I think this would be an excellent book to use when dividing into groups for a class project. Each group could then get more information about their part of the world and present it. I would use this mostly at the high school level, but think it would also be appropriate to share in part with elementary of middle school children.