What A Week’s Worth of Food Looks Like
Nov.15, 2007 in
Food
Imagine if you took all of the food you eat in a week and spread it out on a table. What would that look like, and how much would all of that food cost?
Check out the Everybody to Go blog to see what it looks like for families around the world.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Hi Ed,
Interesting pictures on the cost of food around the world. Thanks for sharing! What is even more amazing to me is the hundreds of dollars families spend on food per week. Contrastly, some families only get approximately 15 lbs. of food each month per individual from a food shelf. This is only enough to last about three days! Even more so, struggling families are only able to visit food shelves once a month.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I heard a feature about freeganism on NPR last week which dropped the following horrifying statistic: on average, every American throws out a pound of food every day. And businesses are throwing out much, much more, which is appalling when you think that the food is still completely edible and there are plenty of people who would happily eat it.
November 17th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
To follow-up on the comment about food waste–I did a stint working for a local catering group run out of a Twin Cities metro hotel. As you would expect, it was mostly weddings and business events. We handled large banquet meals, both plated and buffet style. We were always expected to have more than enough food, and for various reasons (non-attendees, small eaters, mis-matched selection, etc) estimating close to correct amounts is virtually impossible and sometimes we missed by incredible amounts and returned with vast quantities of food.
Almost all of which we were forced to throw away due to either food handling safety regulations or because of company policies to try to reduce employee ‘theft’.
Well, right or wrong, most of the employees would still try to take home some of this excess food.
If you’ve never thought about it, and admit it, virtually no one does–weekend catering is not a job you do because you like to dress up on your weekends serving others fancified food, you do it because you need the money. It is also bruising work that is done almost completely by hand–it is a pure labor job, often short-staffed requiring long or rigorous work from set-up prep, food service, and cleanup afterwards.
Which I only state for background understanding for why people wanted some of that food–in addition to outright gasping at the waste of pounds and pounds of tasty food each night–these service people were all living paycheck to paycheck doing this tough labor job for basically minimum wage and zero benefits (unless you consider the catering apron and cheap black tie).
But, while we might save off a piece of cake, some beans, a chicken breast or leftover container of potatoes for a couple servers, we still barely made a dent in the trays of food wasted. But, you just do it that way because management rules.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
[...] Photos of a week’s worth of food for a family of four in different countries, spread out on a table. Most interesting to me is 1) the cost comparison between developed nations (obviously folks in poorer countries spend far less), and 2) which countries have more packaged food, and which have more fresh food. (via) [...]