A great collection of pics, from the book Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio
UK – $253 a week. (lovely fireplace don’t you think?)
Ecuador. $31.55 a week
Darfur -$1.23 a week
The complete collection can be found after the jump…
Germany – $500 a week for food
North Carolina – $341.98 a week for food
Japan – $317.25 a week for food
Italy – $260 a week for food
Great Britain – $253 a week for food
Kuwait – $221.45 a week for food
Mexico – $189.09 a week for food
California – $160 a week for food
Beijing, China – $155.06 a week for food
Poland – $151 a week for food
Egypt – $68.53 a week for food
Mongolia – $40 a week for food
Ecuador – $31.55 a week for food
Bhutan – $5 a week for food
Breidjing Camp – $1.23 a week
You can find the flickr photoset here.
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I’m very hungry after seeing this. All of the different offerings looked good. Does the alcohol in the German picture count as food? If that’s the case, I’m kind of amazed they got all that in for $500.
thats so depressing. Germans eat five-hundred times as much as a poor darfur family in a week.
nice collection, interesting to see how much people around the world spend per week. americans/uk seem to eat a lot of junk lol.
ps-u repeated some picts???
Is is just me or is it truly scary how the people (who can) have tons of fruits and veggies and the Americans pictured have so few. Maybe there is a reason for the obesity in this country.
*After looking at North Carolina and Great Brit pictures…
My god how can anyone survive on all that junk food?
Price of food must be a lot cheaper where I live because the average amount that most of those families pay is the same amount we pay for a month.
Wow. Looks like I need to move to Mongolia- meat and apples: $5.
I don’t believe that the Japanese family understood the idea- no 4 people could eat all of that in a week. A single bottle of mirin lasts me much longer than 1 week, not to mention all the packages of soup shown.
One world family sitting down to dinner, makes you think what humanity could be.
I wonder if these are average values?
I´m from Germany, and I don´t know any person or family personally who could spent 500 Dollar a week for food!! Would be 2000 Dollar a month, I hardly know anybody who earns that much a month all in all.
My husband and I need maybe 60 Euros a week for food and drinks – don´t know what it is in Dollar exactly – and we get everything we need for that.
I´m really surprised.
Why was my comment deleted? Just because I asked if these are average values?
I´m just very surprised by it, because:
Again, I´m from Germany and I don´t know any person or family personally who could spend 500 Dollar a week for food. This would be 2000 Dollar a month, and I know hardly anyone who earns that much all in all a month.
Of course there are people who have that much money, but believe me, not an average german worker nowadays.
Hi Tanja,
Sorry, your comment wasnt deleted. All first time commenters have their comments moderated first and ive only just jumped back on the computer and found your comments.
Thanks for your feedback. It does sound a little excessive. The cost for the UK i feel is a little inflated. Quite a bit actually. Maybe they shop at Waitrose!
obviously each of these families has different amounts they can spend on food a week. the german family could be a wealthy “organic” whole foods shooper where i live in colorado. there are affluent people out here who will happily spend $500 a week shopping there, they can afford it.
i think it’s more impressive to see what the cost of buying junk vs. real food is. some of these families spend the equivalent of $30 on what looks like hella good food. while others spend ten times that amount on processed junk food. the diet of the two american familes and the uk family seem very processed. while the bhutan and ecuador families are large families that spend little to nothing. the saddest are the refugees…
i give dollars to bums on the street so they can buy a pack of smokes, and i think nothing of it. i should be sending those dollars to africa so they can buy protien. too bad warlords and missionaries will just gobble up any help i might send. too bad no one will help africa, ’cause to them it doesn’t matter. i’m sorry africans. you live in the most beautiful continent on this planet, and we fuel your wars and diseases to benefit our needs and consumption rates. really, i’m sorry. i’ll help the best i can, and i’ll encourage others to do so.
my roommate and i have started a change jar called the africa fund. do it yourself!
Well the people who get less food are used to it so its a lot of food for them.
If you have the money you can buy whatever food you want tbh.
People should manage it so they have balanced meals this would probly make it cheaper aswell.
And you feeling sorry for someone is you thinking your better than them so stop acting all benevolent.
As for the uk i think youd be able to get all that rubbish for cheaper at asda aka waitrose or whoever its owned by.
I dont see why people dont work out what they actually need each month and buy it from cheaper places.
I could go to tescos and get a full shop for like £300 which is like $600 or something but if i went to somewhere cheaper like netto id be able to get it all for much less probly less than half the price.
My wife and I eat for less than $50 a week in Detroit … week in and week out. Plenty of fresh fruits & veggies from a local market, plenty of home-cooked legumes, soups and even, occasionally, home-made bread. Next to no sodas, she sometimes has a beer, I drink no alcohol at all. Snacks? We might share a package of cookies or pork rinds. Oh … and at least once a week we slip down to a local “Coney Island” restaurant to get some spinach pie for me and chicken dumpling soup for her.
That American table with all those boxes of cereals and bags of snack foods explains why affluence can’t buy good health.
Is there any information about the percentage of this spending on food/week or month compare with the average monthly income?
At all who complain about Geman it so much – you are right and the irony is that in Germany everyone is crying, that the food is soooo expensive and that they dont earn enough money.
hi
Haha, I’m a German girl and the amount stated for Germany is definitely too excessive (as well as the misexposition of alcohol). All foreigners could suppose that we Germans are rich alcoholics :)) No family I know drinks 4 bottles of wine and countless bottles of beer in a week! For my person we are twosome in a household and spend not more than approx. EUR 60 (=75 US Dollar) every week for food and beverages. Otherwise we would spend about EUR 2,000 every month and thats an amount not everyone earns in a month 😉 Who did research that?
So you guys went visiting rich families in some countries and refugee camps in others!! Beside the war tormented Darfur you should have gave us a shot of what Europian and American homeless and unemployed people eat in a week!!!! Or else go to a peaceful average Sudanese city and share some honesty with us!!
And more than 30,000 Japanese Yen a week on food!!! I live in Japan and we are a family of five, a Japanese family will eat all that in at least two weeks!!!
Why is it taking my comment more than three days awaiting moderation? Does it offend ayone?
Sorry Strawberry…im getting lazy in my old age and forgot to check the comments!
I don’t know about other nations, but the entry on China is far fetched. Weekly per capita is $62. Assuming both the parents are working and earn, it is $124 for a family per week. They do not have $155.06 a week to spend on food! Whatever sample set of population they used, it does not represent the average native.
we are like apples and the poor countries r like trees they give we just take and never return until they lose everything.help them not laugh at them.anyway can i know singapore’s amount please ?
I received some of these pictures in an e-mail over a year ago. I teach the 5th and 6th grade Sunday School class at my church. We participate in the 30 Hour Famine each year. This is a program by World Vision which raises money to feed hungry people around the world. I just use the pictures to show my students the difference in the amount and type of food people eat in different parts of the world. I know some of the dollar amounts seem unreal, but the pictures really hit home with the kids. For more info on the Famine go to http://www.30hourfamine.org.
Peace and Love to all.
How could the family in Mexico go through 12 bottles (2-liter bottles at that!) of Coke in one week? That seems crazy to me!
I don’t think these pictures are meant to show an average family in each country (after all, most countries have such a gap between rich and poor that even an average would be mis-leading). It’s just a sampling, so you can pick out some of the differences. Not really an accurate enough educational tool, though.
oh my god u dumass ur missing the point