Comparing food choices from around the world

 After looking at the pictures provided from the book Food Matters  by Holly Bauer I further understood the different foods people eat around the world and even the different uses for cooking and storing the food. In the first photo there is a picture of the Mendozas from Guatemala. In the photo you can see a lot of vegetables and home grown food. I don't notice anything processed or unnatural. This is interesting compared to the next photo of a family from India. They have a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables and different homemade foods, yet they still have little to no processed foods. They do have soda and possibly chips, but other than that the food looks all natural. The next picture shows a family from Mali shows very few completely prepared "meals" instead showing more bags of seeds and other things used to possibly make their meals. It appears that they have bags of seeds and wheat products and a container possibly for water. All of the other families so far have shown full meals so it's interesting to see a family with no pictures of the complete meals they would eat in a week. The final picture shows a family from the United States. The first thing I notice is all of the processed and prepackaged food they have. All the way in the back of the photo there appears to be a bundle of bananas and some other fruit or vegetable products but other than that everything is prepackaged, precooked, and seemingly unhealthy compared to the other families. The other interesting thing is the size of the family in each picture in comparison to the amount of food they have. The largest family is the family from Mali, yet they have the least amount of food. Considering this is the amount of food consumed in a week by this family it makes you wonder how they do it and what nutritious things that could be  missing from their diet. The smallest family with the most amount of food comes from the United States. Not only does it show all of the processed food you can also see all of the junk they consume in a week. Seeing these pictures makes you truly realize how different cultures eat and view food and family time. Besides the type of food the families eat in a week and the size of the family in the caption you can see how the family cooks and the different technological advances some cultures have over others. For example the family from Mali use natural resources like a wood fire and natural drying to cook compared to the family from India that use a gas stove and a refrigerator freezer combo.Americans know, as a whole, they have a bad reputation for their food choices and these photographs further prove that. Sometimes you have to wonder what happened that made the United States take such a different and unhealthy approach to the food they eat.