Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell

A few weeks ago, I overheard an eight-year-old girl say to an adult in all seriousness, “I’m so hungry, I’m going to die!”

I couldn’t help thinking to myself that she had no idea what true hunger was; nor do I. In Hunger: An Unnatural History, Sharman Apt Russell details what it means, physiologically, to be hungry. Then she goes beyond the science of hunger and into the social aspects by reviewing the history of how we learned to help starving people recover and the various current worldwide issues surrounding hunger, from Anorexia Nervosa to refugees. It is an intriguing look into a social problem that everyone experiences, even to a small extent, every day. Continue reading »

Material World by Peter Menzel

In a similar manner to What the World Eats (reviewed here), Material World by Peter Menzel attempts to illustrate the material wealth (or material poverty) of various families around the globe by photographing a family’s household belongings and illustrating the family’s daily life in photographs.

Using full-color photography, each country is highlighted first with a two-page photograph of an “average” family in the street (or a field) with their possessions and a listing of those basic possessions. Then, there is a summary of the country’s history and the family’s statistics, such as house size, family size, and income (which are average for the country). There is also an information bar with statistics relating to the country, such as fertility rate and country population. Text and photographs illustrate the daily life of the chosen families. Continue reading »

What the World Eats by Peter Menzel

What do you eat in one week? What does a typical American eat? What does a typical Brit eat? What does a family in the Darfur Refugee Camp in Chad eat? What do the people of the world eat?

These are the questions that photographer Peter Menzel seeks to answer through his coffee table book of pictures and information: What the World Eats.

The pictures of families from around the world with their week’s worth of food and the short accounts of their eating habits were interesting. In the end, however, I felt Menzel’s book was forcing a social problem on the reader, and it seemed to further contribute to stereotypes of eating habits around the world. Continue reading »