Healthy Changes—Hungry Planet

I recently spotted some interesting images on Food Matters.  They are from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluision. This is what Food Matters writes about the project:

“It's an inspired idea, to better understand the human diet, explore what culturally diverse families eat for a week. Their portraits feature pictures of each family with a week's worth of food purchases. We soon learn that diet is determined by largely uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization, which can bring change with startling speed. Thus cultures can move, sometimes in a single jump, from traditional diets to the vexed plenty of global-food production. People have more to eat and, too often, eat more of nutritionally questionable food. And their health suffers.”

 

Mexico

 

North Carolina, USA

 

Italy

 

What do you think?  Does more to eat lead to less healthy food choices?  I have often been overwhelmed by the variety of food choices and the amount of time it takes to assimilate which are the healthiest.  Maybe food is another case where less = more.

Make sure you view all of the images here and notice the differences between countries.

(I’m not sure how I would feel about everything our family eats in a week on display for the whole world.  I guess I would like a little bit of advance notice…and that would be our healthiest eating week ever!  We are continuing to make healthy changes, so I guess it might not be too embarrassing?  Maybe in a few weeks.)