Gastronomique Reads Hungry Planet

Hungry Planet, the latest book by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, visits 30 families in 24 countries to take a look at what they eat. The book's subtitle is What the World Eats but the authors are a couple from Napa, the publisher from Berkeley: this is a local effort, and we can chauvinistically be proud of the James Beard Foundation award it just received. Each family in the book is photographed with all the food they would eat in one week displayed on the dining room table, or whatever substitutes for a dining room or a table. The effect is striking as one can see at a glance how much, or how little one family eats in different countries.

They visit a struggling Sicilian family, who, when they do the accounting for the picture with a week's worth of food, is shocked to discover they spend more than $2,000 on cigarettes every year, as they purchase the packs one by one: by consuming products, be it cigarettes or food, in small quantities every day, one is immersed in the particular, and loses the sense of the big picture. Little streams, bad rivers, you know. One has little idea how much of this or that the rations of every meal eventually add up to. Cigarette is one bad habit, but on that dining room table, even in the developing world, many others find their way: processed food, junk food, bottles of soda, fast food. One week is enough to bring out some perspective into the consumption habits of a family and to draw some lessons already.

The pictures, by Peter Menzel, make the point very effectively. The week-in-review picture opens a short chapter for each family, and is complemented with a photo-documentary mostly focused on how the family will gather the food, and prepare or enjoy the meals. One thus follows a seal hunt from a dogsled in Greenland, or a celebration in Bhutan, or a trip at a French Safeway, or a trek down the mountain to the market in Ecuador.

It is a photography book about food, but don't expect the food porn of Gourmet magazine: what matters here is the relationship of the person to its alimentation. Only a few pictures, a bento box here or a market stand there, won't have a person in the picture: it is the human aspect which drew them in the project. Menzel catches people in movement, who never looks camera-conscious or stilted. A picture of a French teenager stretching evokes the artistry of Degas, while a man walking away from a Soviet-style housing project in Mongolia captures in a shadow the alienation and sterility of the environment. The exception of the weekly food picture, obviously staged, still captures the personality of the participants. Plus, one can get lost in the Richard Scarry level of detail of these portraits, so rich these compositions are.

In a first layer of reading, the lessons are about diet: look how much the civilized world eats, how much processed food we ingest, as opposed to the scarcity of the developing world. Looking at the food of one week for these diverse families, we have no choice but to question our own diet. The first question which hits us is: How much food would be on our table? This is the When Harry meet Sally effect, which rules that one cannot look at the food other consume without imagining the effect it would have on us.

While each chapter is a peek in the singularity of a family, some demographics data are provided for the corresponding country: population, urban density, obesity rate, daily calories intake, or the number of McDonalds (trivia: there is no Mickey Ds in Bosnia), making the book an atlas of food cultures. Most families seem pretty representative of their culture, and instead of making them alien to our own culture, the common link of the meal and of the rituals of dining draw us to understand them. Through the lens of food, we connect to these different people in a very primitive way, through the desire to share food.

But food is only the foot in the door of ethnology. Sociological structures also appear, with different familial nucleus: the poorer the country, the larger the tribe, from the single-child family in China to the nine children and two wives of Mali. Genocide in Darfur, illegal immigration, and so on, creep in as well, as so many issues intersect with that of malnutrition.

In the book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond postulates that the food crops available to populations, either natively or by commerce, prompted differentiations in development: the Euro-Asian landmass, with the most nutritious and easy-to-store cereals and convenient East-West routes to share these, facilitated the shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture and on to civilization.

While Diamond talks about a phenomenon in different time scales, Hungry Planet shows that the diets in developed countries are still largely influenced by these native crops: corn in Guatemala, millet in Mali, potatoes in Ecuador. And one can still see the correlation between economical development and the exchange of food, not only in the form of processed products of globalization, but also in the form of cross-pollination of one's diet by other cultures (sushi and pad thai in Paris for instance). That is the irony of the book: the Western world eats so much in one week that the food seems to push the people out of the picture. What was a critical key to its success now hangs as a threat to its well being.