Sitting down to a daily family meal has long been a tradition for billions of people. But in every corner of the world this age-old custom is rapidly changing. From increased trade between countries to the expansion of global food corporations like Kraft and Nestlé, current events are having a tremendous impact on our eating habits. Chances are your supermarket is stocking a variety of international foods, and American fast food chains like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken are popping up all over the planet. For the first time in history, more people are overfed than underfed. And while some people still have barely enough to eat, others overeat to the point of illness. To find out how mealtime is changing in real homes, authors Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio visited families around the world to observe and photograph what they eat during the course of one week. They joined parents while they shopped at mega grocery stores and outdoor markets, and participated in a feast where a single goat was shared among many families. They watched moms making dinner in kitchens and over cooking fires, and they sat down to eat with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries--if you’re keeping track, that’s about 525 meals! The foods dished up ranged from hunted seal and spit-roasted guinea pig to U.N.-rationed grains and gallons of Coca-Cola. As Peter and Faith ate and talked with families, they learned firsthand about food consumption around the world and its corresponding causes and effects. The resulting family portraits offer a fascinating glimpse into the cultural similarities and differences served on dinner plates around the globe. This book has been selected as a Common Core State Standards Text Exemplar (Grades 2-3, Read-Aloud Informational Texts) in Appendix B. Book Description Every day, millions of families around the world gather--at the table or on the floor, in a house or outdoors--to eat together. Ever wondered what a typical meal is like on the other side of the world? Or next door? Cultural geographers Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio visited twenty-five families in twenty-one countries to create this fascinating look at what people around the world eat in a week. Meet a family that spends long hours hunting for seal and fish together; a family that raises and eats guinea pigs; a family that drinks six gallons of Coca-Cola a week. In addition to profiles of each family, What the World Eats includes photo galleries and illustrated charts about fast food, safe water, life expectancy, literacy rates, and more! Each family's profile features: * Full-color photographs, including each family posing with the food consumed in a week. * Information about each family's food, including cost and quantity. * A world map showing where each family lives. * Facts about that country, including population, currency, average income, and more. This enthralling glimpse into cultural similarities and differences is at once a striking photographic essay and an essential study in nutrition and the global marketplace. A Letter From the Authors Traveling to a country to research what people eat is a fabulous way to understand it. Even better is traveling to a lot of countries to compare and contrast what people eat and why. That's what we did in What the World Eats . The centerpiece of our coverage in each of 21 countries is a photographic portrait of a family with one week's worth of food. One of the best parts of the book are the grocery lists that we compiled to show exactly what each of our families were buying. We list brand names and food amounts as well, as it's interesting to see how certain brands are incredibly well-traveled. In some countries we covered more than one family. In China, for instance, we included both a rural farming family, the Cuis, and an urban one, the Dongs, who live in Bejing. The two families' eating habits are very different. The Dongs shop in a modern supermarket for the same types of foods that one might find in the United States, and use convenience foods. The Dongs eat in restaurants occasionally and their son loves KFC. The Cuis, conversely, have never tasted fast food, and always eat at home. They buy their food from small shops and outdoor markets as the Dongs used to before China began to modernize. If you look at both of their photographs, both have fresh foods in abundance, but there are many branded items on the Dong's table, and only one in the Cui's week's worth of food. The Dong's table looks more like that of one of our three American families covered in the book. In every chapter we include details of our discussions with the families about their lives and circumstances. We traveled to a refugee camp in Chad to spend time with sixteen-year-old Abdel Karim Aboubakar and his mother and siblings.The Aboubakar's are one of thousands of Sudanese families from Darfur displaced by the genocide taking place in their home country. They escaped over the border