One Week of Food

At the Bismarck public library, there is a fantastic book called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. The basic concept of the book is to take portraits of families around the world, each family with one week's worth of food. It is simply fascinating to see how much geography, culture, and economic prosperity affects our diets. Some examples from the book:

Chad

Germany

USA

Looking through this book with my friend Jenny at the library, we started discussing how interesting it would be to track food intake for a week ourselves, put all that food on a table, and take a picture. Surprising even myself, I actually did this and I'm showing you the results here. However, before I post the picture, a few lessons learned:

1. It's tough writing down everything you eat. I made a sincere effort to include everything that both K and I consumed, right down to those numerous handfuls of peanut M&Ms, but I'm sure I missed some items.

2. We ate three chicken curry wraps at Mr. Delicious this week. Instead of going back and purchasing three more wraps for the pic, I tried to account for them in other ways (note tortillas, roasted chicken, and rice). Also, there was no way to include all the wonderful Indian food I ate at the Gandhi Peace dinner last night, but again, I tried to include other representations of those foods.

3. Missing from the picture are condiments, spices, and Cash's dog food, even though he is most certainly part of the family.

Drum roll, please....


My thoughts? We're pretty heavy on white flour products and sweets, and we could definitely eat more vegetables, but frankly, I think it looks pretty good. In case you are wondering the meaty stuff up front is venison sausage and grouse, the rest should be fairly easy to identify. Thankfully, we eat a little differently than the pizza-chips-soda family portrayed as the typical Americans. Not that we never eat those things; it just happened that we didn't have that last week.

If nothing else, it was an interesting little experiment. For more pictures and details on Hungry Planet, check out NPR's article here.