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Peter Menzel’s “What the World Eats”
We’ve spent the last hour poring over a fascinating series on Time’s website by the California photojournalist Peter Menzel. In 2005 Menzel took a photographic survey of the diets of families around the world, documenting what they purchased and ate in the course of a week. The results are visually striking – Menzel has cleverly remade the classic family portrait as an intimate archive of consumption and metabolism – and they also reveal a remarkable range in the quantity, quality, and variety of foods that families across the world take as quotidian.
A quick scan reveals, unsurprisingly, that Americans, Europeans, and the Japanese prefer a lot of highly processed and heavily packaged stuff (frozen pizzas are popular, as are bags of potato chips piled literally ceiling high), while families from Bhutan, Egypt, and elsewhere have assembled colorful piles of fresh fruit and vegetables. Menzel has also included brief notes on families’ favorite dishes: narwhal is a favorite in northern Canada, while the English participants mention a truly objectionable mayonnaise sandwich.
Written by robin on 02/11/2010 in Blog | Food | Gardening | News | Politics | Theory/Criticism
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