I was forwarded this email by a friend. It’s definitely something to think about:
What does a week’s worth of food look like around the world?
Food expenditure for one week: 37,699 Yen or $317.25
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07
Food expenditure for one week: $341.98
Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09
Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
[...] My Introduction to Instruction Technology is learning about United Streaming (http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/index.cfm) and Quia (http://www.quia.com/) and is just finishing up making games in PowerPoint.  It is always nice to take them beyond using PowerPoint for just little slide presentations. They don’t know it yet, but I am planning them taking their PowerPoint Games and putting them online using Google Presentation. I hope it works so I can link them off my website. If you have any advice on that, I would appreciate hearing from you. A few resources to check out: Something to think about: What does a week’s worth of food look like around the world? http://www.technolote.com/?p=161 [...]
Wow
These pictures and information are incredible and tell a powerful story of many narratives — finances, culture, eating habits, etc.
I will share this with my sixth graders in Massachusetts.
How did you get all of these families involved?
Thanks so much for sharing
Kevin
Wow, that’s amazing. As Kevin observed, it’s a real statement on so many aspects of the world… At first I was struck by the wide variation in pricing for the week worth of food, but I guess that’s just an obvious sort of thing. The comparison of cultures and the types of foods being eaten was really interesting. So much fish in the Japanese diet, pasta and bread in the Italian diet, so much fruit and veg in the Bhutan, Ecuador and Egyptian diets, and so much over-processed junk in the American diet. It was also interesting to see how neatly lined up the German family’s food was.
I think this would be a great series of photos to start conversations with kids.
Thanks for sharing.
Chris
The photos come from Peter Menzel’s book, Hungry Planet. See his website:
http://www.menzelphoto.com/hungryplanet.html
Time magazine published 16 of his photos. See:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_1373664,00.html
Perhaps those are the origin of the e-mail you received.
See also Menzel’s book Material World. I developed some lessons on it based on after reading this sample lesson: http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/TLresources/units/byrnes-africa/davhun/index.html.
See this interview with Menzel to read how he came to take all these photographs:
http://photomediamagazineonline.com/?p=268
Oops, that link on the sample lesson didn’t seem to work for some reason.
Try this one:
http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/TLresources/units/byrnes-africa/aindex.htm
then select the lesson on “Material World”