Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

by Peter Menzel, Faith D'Aluisio, Marion Nestle (Foreword by)

Overview

The 2006 James Beard Book of the Year is now available in paperback. Featuring a photojournalistic survey of 30 families from 24 countries and the food they eat during the course of one week, this captivating chronicle offers a riveting look at what the world really eats.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780984074426
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/01/2007
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	292,562
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 11.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

PETER MENZEL and FAITH D'ALUISIO are the co-creators of the books Material World: A Global Family Portrait and Women in the Material World. They are also the co-authors of Man Eating Bugs and Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. They live in Napa, California, and are the parents of Josh, Jack, Adam, and Evan.


PETER MENZEL and FAITH D'ALUISIO are the co-creators of the books Material World: A Global Family Portrait and Women in the Material World. They are also the co-authors of Man Eating Bugs and Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. They live in Napa, California, and are the parents of Josh, Jack, Adam, and Evan.

Editorial Reviews

What does a family of 13 in Bhutan eat? How does a family in Greenland shop for the week? These questions and more are answered in The Hungry Planet, a riveting book that examines the dietary habits of 30 families from 24 countries. Filled with compelling photos and insightful essays, this provocative, often humbling book will give you pause at the supermarket, the dinner table, the candy machine -- or the next time you get a charity solicitation in the mail.

bn.com

For their enormously successful Material World, photojournalist Menzel and writer D'Aluisio traveled the world photographing average people's worldly possessions. In 2000, they began research for this book on the world's eating habits, visiting some 30 families in 24 countries. Each family was asked to purchase-at the authors' expense-a typical week's groceries, which were artfully arrayed-whether sacks of grain and potatoes and overripe bananas, or rows of packaged cereals, sodas and take-out pizzas-for a full-page family portrait. This is followed by a detailed listing of the goods, broken down by food groups and expenditures, then a more general discussion of how the food is raised and used, illustrated with a variety of photos and a family recipe. A sidebar of facts relevant to each country's eating habits (e.g., the cost of Big Macs, average cigarette use, obesity rates) invites armchair theorizing. While the photos are extraordinary-fine enough for a stand-alone volume-it's the questions these photos ask that make this volume so gripping. After considering the Darfur mother with five children living on $1.44 a week in a refugee camp in Chad, then the German family of four spending $494.19, and a host of families in between, we may think about food in a whole new light. This is a beautiful, quietly provocative volume. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly