A Full Plate Today, Uncertainty Tomorrow

The grocery lists of the two families we covered in China for "Hungry Planet" couldn't be more different. The Cuis, who live in the countryside about two hours outside Beijing, eat largely unbranded traditional foods cooked at home, much as we had seen before in our years of covering China. The Dongs, who live in Beijing proper, eat food from the global marketplace -- shopping at supersized international markets such as Ito-Yokado (Japanese) and Carrefour (French), which are quickly replacing the city's traditional mom-and-pop market stalls.

The Dongs' one-stop shopping cart overflows with traditional basics -- rice, eggs and fresh vegetables -- but it also holds the new essentials: three flavors of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, fresh whole milk, beef flank, prepared sushi, baguettes and Great Wall red wine. Though both families, urban and rural, have added a lot more meat to their diets in recent years, only the Dongs' includes American fast food. Dong Yan, 13, eats with friends at McDonald's or KFC two or three times a week, one hungry teenager in a country where appetites are shifting toward an increasingly complex -- and energy intensive -- palate.

The menu that people hit by this immediate crisis are using is fairly simple: flour and rice, even as these staples double or quadruple in price; cakes in Haiti made largely of mud, choked down in a desperate attempt to fill one's belly; bread baked by the military in Egypt. But from our travels, it seems that the menu items that helped create the current crisis are more complex, processed and partially hydrogenated than these modest items.

Food corporations have learned how to enter the developing world. Few of the families we met could afford a week's worth of a processed food item at one time, so the global food companies make their wares more affordable by offering them in single-serving packets. In Manila, individual portions of "foods" such as imitation-cheese spreads, chips and spiced rice dishes are much like the convenience packs sold in the United States. Highly processed foods are making inroads into the diets of the developing world, and with that comes dependence.

Consider Alma Casales, who lives with her family outside Cuernavaca, Mexico. She was surprised to learn that the six gallons of Coca-Cola that she was buying for her family consist mostly of sugar water. Over time, the Casales family came to drink Coke at every meal, and in between. Casales's grocery list included a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as a lot of branded, packaged convenience foods. She could still quickly calculate the number of tortillas her family eats in a week (22 pounds' worth), but when it came time to tally up the snack foods and peripheral purchases, the numbers got fuzzier.

We have visited hundreds of families in their kitchens and homes around the world over the last 15 years, and both here and abroad, we have seen a grand march toward unsustainability as some of us play catch up and the rest of us play keep up. Nearly everyone would love to have the wealth and choices that we enjoy in the United States. But that aspiration toward overflowing grocery aisles, with gas-guzzling trucks feeding a new appetite for imitation cheese spread, seems impossible to sustain. And it could lead to flour sacks full of nothing.

talktous@menzelphoto.com

Faith D'Aluisio and Peter Menzel are the authors of "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats" and a forthcoming book on nutrition around the world.