I’ve been dipping into Mel’s Christmas book, Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel and Faith d’Aluisio. A couple of years ago Mel brought home from the shop a book of postcards, People and Possessions, where Menzel and collaborators had photographed 30 families from around the world. Each postcard showed one family standing in front of their home surrounded by all their possessions. It’s a fascinating collection – we mounted our favourite postcards in a picture frame and it hangs in our dining room. It never fails to generate comments from visitors.

Hungry Planet repeats the concept, but this time in a no-holds-barred coffee table format. Menzel and d’Aluisio present photographs of 30 families from 24 countries alongside what they eat in a week, from a refugee family of five in Darfur living off USD 1.23 a week to a family of four in North Carolina eating their way through USD 341.98. What’s equally fascinating is the spread from people eating much the same as their great-great-grandparents did, to those living exclusively from processed foods.

Somewhere along the line, the world has lost the plot. The earth is capable of feeding the likely population of humans for the forseeable future. Instead, while nearly a billion people starve, hundreds of millions over-eat and are shortening their lives through obesity. Food marketing is creating what Kalle Lasn calls a toxic mental environment – just the same as unregulated industry created toxic physical environments.

But is it inevitable? will we all wake up some day eating the same Egg McMuffin breakfast washed down with Nescafe while watching Sky Breakfast News on our Windows Leisure Edition home media centers (sic)? Or will the slow food, FairTrade, and open-source movements win the day?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.