New Book: What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets

Need a new coffee table book? Here you go. Photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Aluisio, a husband-wife duo that's apparently made some really great life decisions, have a new, very interesting-sounding book that debuted yesterday: What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets, a photographic collection featuring portraits of 80 people from 30 countries and the food they eat in one day.

"Courtesy" of Amazon.com

From the product description:

In this fascinating study of people and their diets, 80 profiles are organized by the total number of calories each person puts away in a day. Featuring a Japanese sumo wrestler, a Massai herdswoman, world-renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria, an American competitive eater, and more, these compulsively readable personal stories also include demographic particulars, including age, activity level, height, and weight. Essays from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, journalist Michael Pollan, and others discuss the implications of our modern diets for our health and for the planet.

Camel broker from Egypt, 3,200 calories/day

Indeed, D'Aluisio tells NPR she hopes the book gets people to compare and contrast their own diets with others around the world; Menzel hopes it helps people to understand their diets better and make better food choices. 

The NPR article offers a taste of some of the books insights. For instance, though a Brazilian fisherman and an American truck driver consume roughly the same number of calories a day (5,200-5,400...in other words, a lot), one is healthy and fit while the other is not (take a wild guess which is which).  Yes, the fisherman leads an active lifestyle and gets lots of fiber through foods like fish and beans, while the truck driver...well...drives all day and eats fast food hamburgers.  Maybe this doesn't seem that surprising on the surface, but it certainly underscores the importance of what constitutes our food, and not necessarily how many calories our food constitutes--something that, in this calorie-obsessive age of Lean Cuisine and mandated calorie-postings, we in the U.S. can easily forget.

Buddhist Monk, 4,900 calories/day

Other interesting tidbits include a Buddhist monk who gets a staggering number of calories through butter tea (that's water, butter, salt...and I suppose a few tea leaves), a woman in India who drinks her own pee as a cleansing ritual, and a woman in the U.K. who binges on 12,300 calories A DAY. (Ok, this is someone who could maybe benefit from some calorie-counting.)

Latvian music teacher, 3,600 calories a day

The couple also covered eating habits in their 2005 book Hungry Planet, in which they photographed 30 families in 24 countries surrounded by their typical week's worth of groceries.  (Also noteworthy is Menzel's Material World, in which he and 16 of the world's leading photographers captured an "average family" from 30 different countries, surrounded by their material goods arranged outside of their dwellings. I remember looking through this book as a kid--when you assume everyone else lives like you--and thinking it was the most eye-opening thing; I'm so happy to be reminded of it now.)

Photos from NPR.com (C) Peter Menzel