What the World Eats

Charming and fascinating. A brief but vivid window into a dozen or so families' lives in very different circumstances - a refugee camp in Chad, the mountains of Bhutan, an apartment in Mongolia, and so on. We get a portrait of each family with one week's worth of food, followed by an itemized “receipt” of the food (including how much was paid) and a few pages describing their daily life. Every so often, there are interjections of data visualizations and stats - as a data person, I found these sometimes left me wanting more. But that's fine! As a piece of qualitative research, this was wonderful. I felt myself transported, reminded again that there's a whole wide world out there beyond my narrow perspective of American politics, covid, and my specific daily life. Really great.

Oh yeah, and the authors really despair over McDonald's.