An interesting photo essay from Time that shows you the food eaten by families all over the world along with the grocery bill for one week and their favorite foods. It’s pretty interesting and would make a good way to expose students to other cultures, explore geography, talk about economics and even get into some health related concerns.
It worries me how much Coke the family in the picture above is drinking in a week and the amount of processed food some of the families eat is kind of scary as well. I’m not a health food nut so I imagine my own groceries would look as bad all piled up.
That might make for an interesting project. Have your students bring the receipt from a weekly grocery trip in and compile a digital image full of all the food their family bought. It’d make for an interesting conversation starter.
You could also graph the results, total how many bags of potato chips, how many gallons of Coke were bought. It’d be a great project to do collaboratively in Google Spreadsheets and then export to Swivel for graphing and manipulation
If you wanted to go the extra yard it’d be fun to calculate the total calories and the amount of exercise needed to burn them- how many miles of running, stairs climbed etc.
Beth and I spent a half an hour analyzing each photo. The differences are amazing, but the similarities are sometimes shocking (like, as you pointed out, the Coke, and KFC?)
The produce (fruits and vegetables) are the only healthy food I can make out in this picture. This is pretty typical for today’s society on the go. When people start figuring out that their health is a direct result of what they eat, their diets will change.
Hopefully the diet / health relationship is figured out before major health concerns appear. Processed foods white bread, white sugar, high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, flavor enhancers and fake sugars are all destroying our health. Rule of thumb for healthy eating should be “as close to nature” as possible.