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btw--hungry planet is a strange book--it appears to tell you more than it in fact tells you. i taught it last year in globalization and food courses you see.
anyway, the way they did the photos was to buy the families a week's worth of groceries and get them to do the spreads for the photos. it's hard to say how representative of anything each photo is with reference to the family in it---there were no controls to speak of, no attempt to work out what a "typical" week was---and in alot of cases, the idea of buying a week's worth of groceries all at once was understood as quite a bizarre thing to do.
where the book's probably most interesting as a document is across the images, which taken together function as a kind of index of the spread of the super/hypermarket model, so as a function of the rural/town-urban split(s).
that said, as photos i kinda like them in a series. there's something curious about the sameness of the poses, the spreads of food more or less the same in their organization.
one thing is *real* obvious, though--particularly if you read the essays in the book (not to mention if you've looked into this at all)---processed food may be cheaper, but that's a function of economies of scale and not in any way an indicator that they're at all good for anyone as food. and the processed foods are indicators of the extent of the supermarket system. and the supermarket system is about profit, not feeding people well.
you could make the argument that people don't choose well--personally, i think that most folk want what they're told they want, what's presented to them as the range of things they want. people are adaptive like that. the irony is that in nutritional terms, many of the families outside the reach of capitalist food relations probably eat better than those who are sucked into them. in an american city, obviously, you are entirely inside that system unless you do considerable work to get out of it. and if you are in a poor neighborhood without supermarkets at all, without bodegas, without public transit, without much time, you are still inside that system. which feeds you shit. which you eat, being adaptive like that.
because it is possible to opt out of the capitalist food system--by which i mean processed foods and the conventional supermarkets that present them to you instead of actual food---you can argue that there are bad choices. and you're right--but it's not right to stop there.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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