Our Weekly Bread

In 2000, photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio read a fact that changed their lives: the same number of people in the world were overfed as underfed. Over the next five years, the couple visited families in twenty-four countries, investigating what kind of food, and how much, a typical clan consumes. They photographed each family with an entire week’s supply, collecting the images in their book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. “The way we eat is based on culture, access, and wealth,” D’Aluisio says. “What we call food doesn’t always resemble anything that our great-grandmothers would recognize. It’s highly processed.” The couple also noticed that as a society’s wealth grows, its citizens do too, thanks to diets higher in protein, sugar, and fat. China is on the cusp of this phenomenon. “Societies like China have to realize that it’s possible to eat themselves to death,” D’Aluisio says. She also singles out Mexico, which she says has all the bad eating habits of the United States, “without access to the good ones,” and Kuwait, which has higher obesity and diabetes rates than any Western country. The couple also stresses that eating habits are formed at an early age, so “you eat what your parents eat.” Menzel notes that today, more people on the planet are overfed than underfed. “The scale has tipped,” he says. “And it all starts at the family dinner table.”