Tricycle Offers Food for Thought

By Sally Lodge -- Publishers Weekly, 6/19/2008

During their extensive travels to all corners of the globe, they rode on a dogsled to hunt seal with a family from Greenland, and ate breakfast porridge with a husband, his two co-wives and nine children in Mali. In all, author Faith D’Aluisio and photographer Peter Menzel shared more than 525 meals with 25 families in 21 countries while collaborating on What the World Eats (Tricycle Press, Aug.), which reveals how diet, food preparation and meal rituals vary from country to country. Targeted at readers 11 to 14, the book is adapted from Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, an adult title that received the James Beard Foundation Award in 2005 for Book of the Year.

In these pages, D’Aluisio and Menzel profile the families they visited, presenting a summary of their lifestyle, a photograph of family members surrounded by the food they consume over a course of a week and a shopping list of those items. Among the eye-opening information is the cost of each clan’s weekly food expenditure, ranging from the equivalent of $1.22 spent by a family of six living in a refugee camp in the Darfur province of Sudan to the $341.98 spent by a North Carolina family of four.

The book was inspired by the couple’s longtime interest in nutrition and their love of travel. Menzel recalls visiting a supermarket after returning to their California home from one international trip. “It suddenly struck us that our fellow Americans are getting bigger and bigger, which leads to serious health consequences,” he says. “In 2000 the Center for Disease Control published a study that one in every three American children will at some point in their lives develop diabetes. American kids need to understand about nutrition and about the consequences of what they put in their bodies.”

What the World Eats collaborators Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel at the Jameh Mosque in Yazd, Iran.

Menzel notes that, for the first time in history, “there are more people on our planet who are overfed than underfed. Too many individuals throughout the world are changing their diets to include more sugar fat and animal products. And when you overdo it, you have a problem.”

Among their unexpected findings, D’Aluisio observes, was the large amount of empty calories being consumed throughout the world. One Mexican family they visited imbibes six gallons of Coca Cola every week and was reportedly surprised to hear that the drink is essentially sugar water. “We obviously see many people in the U.S. consuming non-nutritious foods,” she says, “but we were surprised to see this practice becoming increasingly pervasive throughout Europe and the developing world.”

Nicole Geiger, publisher of Tricycle Press and v-p of its parent company, Ten Speed Press (which published the adult edition), addresses the importance of bringing What the World Eats to a young adult audience: “Most people, including young people, do not fully realize the impact their everyday choices have on the global food equation. This book puts choice and effect in living color. The photos are immediately arresting, as are the shopping lists. Being able to compare in a clear visual way, for example, any of the American families with the refugee family in Chad is a show-stopper.” Tricycle Press is creating a teacher’s guide for the institutional market, in hopes that the book’s copious illustrations and comparative charts, as Geiger puts it, “will provide educators with an engaging tool.”

Asked about the task of adapting Hungry Planet for young readers, she recalls that the biggest challenge was figuring out which five families to cut, for space considerations, from the original book. “We ultimately chose to include those families with direct appeal to young people—families with kids of their own.” Additional information, including facts about families that did not make the cut, will be available on a dedicated Web site, www.whattheworldeats.com, which will launch in August.

The book’s creators hope that What the World Eats will, in D’Aluisio’s words, “provide a basis for understanding each other globally, through nutrition. We want to spark young people’s curiosity by giving them a chance to compare themselves with others.” Menzel shares that aspiration, adding, “Change is most effective if it is based in self-awareness. Instead of preaching in the book, we show examples of food choices—good and bad—that people make around the world. Most intelligent people will come away with good ideas for helping themselves to make better choices.”

What the World Eats by Faith D’Aluisio, photos by Peter Menzel. Tricycle Press, $22.99, 978-1-58246-246-2

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