What the World Eats by Faith D'Aluisio

Sitting down to a daily family meal has long been a tradition for billions of people. But in every corner of the world this age-old custom is rapidly changing. From increased trade between countries to the expansion of global food corporations like Kraft and Nestl, current events are having a tremendous impact on our eating habits. Chances are your supermarket is stocking a variety of international foods, and American fast food chains like McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken are popping up all over the planet. For the first time in history, more people are overfed than underfed. And while some people still have barely enough to eat, others overeat to the point of illness. To find out how mealtime is changing in real homes, authors Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio visited families around the world to observe and photograph what they eat during the course of one week. They joined parents while they shopped at mega grocery stores and outdoor markets, and participated in a feast where a single goat was shared among many families. They watched moms making dinner in kitchens and over cooking fires, and they sat down to eat with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries-if you're keeping track, that's about 525 meals! The foods dished up ranged from hunted seal and spit-roasted guinea pig to U.N.-rationed grains and gallons of Coca-Cola. As Peter and Faith ate and talked with families, they learned firsthand about food consumption around the world and its corresponding causes and effects. The resulting family portraits offer a fascinating glimpse into the cultural similarities and differences served on dinner plates around the globe. This book has been selected as a Common Core State Standards Text Exemplar (Grades 2-3, Read-Aloud Informational Texts) in Appendix B. Editorial Reviews 2008 IRA Notable Book for a Global Society 2009 Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People, NCSS-CBC Editors' Choice, Booklist 2008 Best Book of the Year, School Library Journal 2008 Best Book of the Year, Children's Nonfiction, Publishers Weekly Review, Publishers Weekly: Brilliantly executed. . . . Engrossing and certain to stimulate. Review, School Library Journal: A fascinating volume for browsing. . . . Visually stunning. Review, Booklist: [This] is a fascinating, sobering, and instructive look at daily life around the world, and it will draw readers of a wide range to its beautifully composed pages. Review, Book Links: Best new book for the classroom. Review, Kirkus Reviews: The plentiful photos are fascinating, offering both intimate glimpses of family life and panoramic views of other lands. Whether used for research or received as a gift from socially conscious adults, this [book] offers children plenty to chew over. - From the Publisher This amazing volume is a young adult version of their book Hungry Planet...D'Aluisio and Menzel traveled the globe, interviewing families and photographing them with one week's worth of food. From the desert village of Kouakourou in Mali, where Soumana Natomo's two wives trade off breakfast duties on alternating days, to the frozen town of Ittoqqortoormiit in Greenland, where the only fresh food is swimming under nearby ice, the images and essays in What the World Eats are completely captivating ...A colorful primer on the global marketplace and cultural change, What the World Eats sparks an intellectual appetite that no amount of narwhal skin can fill. -The New York Times - Regina Marler 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. (Sept.)Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. - Publishers Weekly Gr 6 Up- D'Aluisio and Menzel have adapted their Hungry Planet (Ten Speed, 2005) for younger readers in this visually stunning photographic collection that portrays families from 21 countries, each surrounded by a week's worth of food. Each entry includes a detailed list of the groceries with the equivalent cost in U.S. dollars, notes on methods of food preparation and preservation, fast facts about the country, and an engaging article discussing the family members, their lifestyles and employment, health issues, and food traditions and sources, enhanced by Photographer's Field Note and Family Recipe sidebars. Bright color photographs in varying sizes depict the wide array of kitchens, markets, and homes found in the cross-section of countries. The juxtaposition of the Aboubakar family of six, living in a refugee camp in Chad on $1.22 a week, and the Revis family of four in North Carolina, spending $341.98 a week on groceries, is jaw-dropping, although the author carefully avoids drawing any judgments about the subjects' choices or circumstances. Additional chapters, scattered through the alphabetical-by-country arrangement, include statistics on population, life expectancy, literacy and fertility rates, access to safe water, and obesity. A fascinating volume for browsing, What the World Eats will be useful for students in classes ranging from world cultures to economics to math to geography to current events.-Joyce Adams Burner, Hillcrest Library, Prairie Village, KS - School Library Journal Can too much information give readers intellectual indigestion? When is it better to graze through a book rather than consuming it in one sitting? Is it possible to make good-for-you information as delicious as (guilty) pleasure reading? The adapted version of Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (2005) raises all of these questions. Intended to inform middle-schoolers of the wide variety of food traditions as well as discrepancies in access to adequate nutrition, this collection of photos, essays and statistics will require thoughtful concentration. Adapted and abridged text, a larger font size, the addition of small maps and basic facts about each country and the deletion of some photos that might have been judged inappropriate or disturbing help to make the wealth of information accessible to this audience. The plentiful photos are fascinating, offering both intimate glimpses of family life and panoramic views of other lands. Whether used for research or received as a gift from socially conscious adults, this version offers children plenty to chew over-but it'll take them some time to truly digest. (Nonfiction. 11-14) - Kirkus Reviews