You Are What You Eat

Over at the World's Fair, David has a post with pictures showing a week's worth of food for families in various countries. It's pretty eye-opening-- the total volume of food (less packaging) for a family of four in the US or England exceeds that eaten by fifteen people in Mali.

Damn, but we're gluttons.

Tags

More like this

"Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree." -Terry Pratchett With a high unemployment rate and many people having stopped looking for work, it's pretty hard to live in the United States and not be aware of the struggles many people are facing. Here's a song by Loudon…
The genre of "environmental documentary" or "environmental film" is large enough now that it can suitably hold sub-sets. Here is a start to a filmography of agro-environmental documentaries and films. Since it is by no means exhaustive, I welcome all additions. I should say too that although many…
Since a Wall Street Journal editorialist has denounced secularism as the source of all of society's ills, it's only fair to get another opinion. Like, say, of a social scientist who has actually done a comparative study of different nations, looking for correlations between religiosity and superior…
This article by David Ewing Duncan, "The Pollution Within," is in the new issue of National Geographic. (He was also on NPR this morning.) So, while we're on the subject of consumption her at The World's Fair, I think we need to get far past very narrow senses of what consumption means. So,…

FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) has a baseline minimum diet which they use for things like post-nuclear war planning. It's the minimum to keep an average sedentary person alive and more-or-less functional for a year. It's something like 120 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of corn, 60 pounds of soybeans, a pound of salt and a handful of vitamin C. The farmer's cut for the wheat, corn and soybeans is around $24.00.

Now think how much you spend on food in a year. That's how far you live above subsistence.

By Bob Hawkins (not verified) on 30 Nov 2006 #permalink