Tell me what you eat and....

Time magazine online has a series of pictures on “What the World Eats” – on 'family dinner tables in fifteen different homes around the globe'. The photographs were taken from the book "Hungry Planet". There is little information: just what part of the world each family is from, their favorite food, and how much each family (of 4 people) spends on food per week. Expenditure per week ranges from $500 (Germany) to $1.23 (Chad).

There is no French family in the listbut there are two American families. I’d like to focus of the picture of one of the American families. The Revis family of North Carolina. Look at it and see if anything strikes you (to be honest, if nothing does, you’re a lost cause):

Personally, even though this is something to expect anyway, I am still puzzled by the quantity of food (compared to most other families in the list of pictures) and even more so by the fact that it is almost all processed food. It may be cliché but it illustrates what you find in many American homes: all sorts of junk-food and hardly any fruit and veggies. (and the picture may not even include all the dressings, and other condiments you usually find in the American fridge.)

In this day and age, when information on health is available to just about everyone (thanks to the internet) when everybody’s been complaining about the obesity rate for years (granted the Revis family does not fit the cliché there… not yet anyway), why do people continue to eat so poorly? Do they really like that sort of food or is it some death wish by proxy?

Bill Bryson says it best:

I longed for artificial bacon bits, melted cheese in a shade of yellow unknown to nature, and creamy chocolate fillings, sometimes all in the same product. I wanted food that squirts when you bite into it or plops onto your shirt front in such gross quantities that you have to rise very, very carefully from the table and sort of limbo over to the sink to clean yourself up.

(…./…)

Everywhere I turned I was confronted with foods guaranteed to make you waddle -- moon pies, pecan spinwheels, peach mellos, root beer buttons, chocolate fudge devil dogs, and a whipped marshmallow sandwich spread called Fluff, which came in a tub large enough to bathe a baby in. You really cannot believe the bounteous variety of nonnutritious foods available to the supermarket shopper these days or the quantities in which they are consumed.

So what’s in YOUR fridge?