What the world eats…

Looking at what “typical families around the world eat in one week” (Part I and Part II), a few very interesting observations can be made:

1. Money spent on food varies widely across the world.  A family in Chad spends less than $2 while a German family spends 250 times that amount, for food that looks average (ie non-exotic, therefore affordable prices) for their respective countries.
2. The cheaper the food, the healthier it seems to be!  People who spend a high amount of money (in the US, Europe and Japan) eat a lot of ready-made, processed foods.  As expected, American families are ahead (!) of the Europeans and the Japanese on that front.  The Europeans and the Japanese can be seen to eat at least some portions of fresh veggies and fruit (and fish, dozens of them for the Japanese!).  On the other hand, the families from poor countries rely more on fruit, veggies, grains, cereals and locally available meats (polar bears anyone?!).  The Bhutanese family picture shows a single packaged food(!) product: looks like tea!
3. The stereotypical families lived up to their national reputations.  So the Italians are unmistakably gorging on a tableful of bread.  The Germans had a big section stocked with beer.  The american family from NC had teenagers holding a humongous pizza each, the size of a flying saucer!
4. The nutritional values of these foods are not known but none of the families appeared malnourished, even in low-food-cost countries such as Chad ($2), Bhutan ($5) or India ($36).  In fact, the Indians (Patkars from Ujjain) looked very happy eating the mother’s Pohe!
5. What was also striking was the joyous and beautiful smiles on the families’ faces.  And I don’t know if it was just my imagination but the poor-country-big-family pictures seemed to have more genuine smiles than the rich-country-nuclear-families whose smiles looked photo-oppish.  It may just be the measured smiles of the polished cultures, who knows?
6. Japanese are gluttons.  Even the guy in the TV is salivating looking at the fish on the family table

Just look over the pictures and see what else you can glean from them.