Jun

12

These photos of representative food per week around the world indicate the puissance of the American palate. See how many of these families chow down on Coke and soft drinks, and how popular relatively useless cereal appears to be. Kellogg's and Coke — our cultural exports — seem to make friends everywhere.

It was also interested to see the Beijing family eats enough sushi to include it as a regular food. They overtly hate the Japanese and love their own cuisine, so seeing Japanese food there was a big clue to a softening of attitudes. For some of the first-worlders, much of their intake seems to be what I call expendable foodstuffs — junk food. ''Correct food choices,'' as the nutritionists are wont to say, are missing in sophistication.

Also, the family sizes varied so drastically and in some photos you cannot tell if it is an extended family or one couple with offspring. The African family clearly had no male; if it had a male adult, would the expenditure have been different? Would the food have been other than what they had? There were no vegetables and fruits there — but of course, their expenditure was under two dollars.

Adi Schnytzer remarks:

What was particularly interesting about the Beijing family was that their expenditure was around double the average worker's income! Do these sushi and junk-food eating Chinese really represent anything?

Marion Dreyfus replies:

From my on the ground experience in the real China (not Beijing or Shanghai), this family is atypical. They spend an outsized amount of their income on food. Also, food in Beijing is outlandishly more costly than in the four cities in which I resided. The average worker in the country makes $80-$90 a month. Prof. Schnytzer is correct that such a tab for food is bizarrely irregular. I wonder if all the families were similarly unrepresentative in terms of their averageness.

 


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