Quote: (05-19-2013 11:31 PM)BLarsen Wrote:
Funny this gets posted because I actually own one of the books the photographers published that has most of the pics on this website.
It needs to be mentioned, for all the talk about paleo and vegetarian the deciding factor seems to be portion size. Take a look at Palermo (Italy) in particular. Look at all that fucking bread they eat! They are all skinny and look like they have the AIDS or are meth addicts.
The Egyptians, yeah they have a lot of veggies and fruit, but they're faces look bloated and they have double chins.
I also took notice that multi-generational households (e.g., grandparents, parents, kids) had healthier food than modern traditional household (parents & kids)
The black family's food was a fucking disgrace. High blood pressure and diabetes??? Check...
That also ties into recent discussions we've been having lately about households in which both parents work, and where the quality of nutrition is one of the first casualties. You think the black Carolina wife is stay-at-home? Guarantee she isn't.
The Italian family don't look like AIDS patients and/or meth-heads to me. Don't think they would to most of the world either. You're probably speaking from an American perspective where people think bigger = better (up to a point). They are from Palermo, Sicily, which is very poor (on average). I am actually very impressed that the chick is slim. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the % of Sicilian chicks her age who are slim is extremely small.
Yes, the Black family from North Carolina do have a crappy table. But the photographer wanted what people actually ate, and got it. I doubt this family's table is all that different to millions of Americans, and others. Also, none of the four look obese, which is a plus.
The Chad pic was the most interesting to me. Not the items themselves. it is a diet I would not like (Too boring. No variation), but they all look healthy and non-fat. Good for them for arranging their lives that they can feed a large family on $30 and a couple of basic foods.
I would be interested in seeing these kind of pics for different African countries, and different tribes/regions within countries. Especially the table for the average Black South African family. One thing that strikes you in South Africa is that in the Black working class the women are very overweight or obese and the men are skinny. It's too weird. I've tried to figure this out by tactfully making inquiries, but as a White guy maybe people don't want to explain it to me. Who knows. The best I've heard is that some Black women here associate being overweight with being "strong" - physically and mentally (this is changing as Western/Modern norms become standard). To me this is ridiculous. How strong can percieve yourself to be when you cant make it up a flight of stairs without weezing, and nearly pass out several times a day because of diabetes related issues. If you're interested the main item on the table of such a family would be "mielie meal", which is essentially a highly refined and vitamin/mineral enriched thick maize porridge which is the de-facto staple starch in Southern Africa. A bit like US Grits I think. Anyway, it packs mega-calories for very little $$$ per serving. It;s essentially pure carbohydrate.