a week of groceries in different countries

[Hot Flatus]

http://realitypod.com/2013/05/a-week-of-groceries-in-different-countries-pictures/

[Cudzoziemiec]

Interesting, not just for the groceries but for the different furnishings and homes. Did the Japanese and Turkish families turn their TVs on specially or are they just on all the time? Have the Kuwaitis had the cleaners in or is it always that spotlessly sparse? Do the Chinese not have any furniture? Clearly the concepts of "kitchen" and "dining room" are culturally specific, almost odd (why do we have them?). You've got to wonder how typical they all are though, and whether they altered their habits because they knew they were going to be photographed. That doesn't look like a representative Polish diet to me - too many exotic fruits, not enough bread and way too little canned meats - but the Indians look pretty average. Interesting also that one of the biggest variables between Western countries is in bottled drinks.

[Hot Flatus]

Quite a few East Asian urbanites don't really have kitchens as the street food is so good

[Oscar's dad]

I thought it was fascinating too.  The family from Chad look like life is grim for them.  Or perhaps compared to others in their region they are well off.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Judging from the background, it looks like they are in a refugee camp, but I suppose they might be nomads.

[bumper]

That was enlightening. I think our country was the most dire (health wise ), more so than the USA.

Almost everything in a packet and full of crap but compared to other countries we're even lucky to get junk food. Its terrible that families struggle to survive around the world when other countries are terribly wasteful. What an eye opener!

[Kim]

Interesting also that one of the biggest variables between Western countries is in bottled drinks.

That's what stood out to me.  Especially the relative proportion of milk, soft drinks and alcohol.

[hellymedic]

Interesting also that one of the biggest variables between Western countries is in bottled drinks.

That's what stood out to me.  Especially the relative proportion of milk, soft drinks and alcohol.

Yebbut how typical are these baskets?
I think a weeks shopping from fifty forumengers would vary as much as baskets from many different countries; my basket would contain little bread, no bottled drinks, little no butter/marg loads of fresh fruit & veg & a fair amount of fish& meat. Your basket WILL vary.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Yes, and there's the effect of knowing you're being observed.

[Hot Flatus]

All the same, the Africans sitting by a few bags of grain was thought provoking.

[geraldc]

The Chinese family have a hotpot at the back of the photo. It's like a charcoal fueled fondue type device only with boiling broth, that you dunk meat and veg in. You only dig it out for special occasions in winter. The meat on the same table as the KFC will go on that one meal, you can tell by how it's sliced and packaged.

[Bledlow]

The affluence of the families shown relative to their national averages varies greatly. The Ecuadorians are conspicuously poorer than the Indians, for example, though incomes in Ecuador are higher than in India.

[Gus]

What makes the biggest impact on me, is the the amount of processed food in industrialized countries compared to
low income countries.
Chad is for sure a refugecamp, but it's like that in some African countries. War doesn't only kill people with guns it kills by the lack of possibilities cultivating the land too. It is a pretty grim world many places. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

The Indians look like a fairly typical middle class Indian family to me, albeit perhaps slightly few of them.

But to me the variety of food is at least as interesting as the amount - the proportions of grains, breads, vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, and various packeted stuffs, and of course bottled drinks of differing types. The household in Mali don't look poor but seem to be eating the same kind of stuff as those in Chad - grains and pulses in sacks - just rather more of it.

[Bledlow]

Middle class Indian family - i.e. well above average income, whichever average you use. The Ecuadorians are rural, poor & indigenas, with seven children, in a country where 70% is urban & 30% rural (other way round in India), 90% mixed, white or black, & average family size is 2.5 children.

See what I mean? They've not picked equivalent or typical families from each country.

BTW, if you go back two hundred years a typical family here would have been rural, &  living largely off sacks of stuff, like the Tchadians & Malians. In the Middle Ages, they'd have had mostly grain, & eaten it mostly as pottage, flavoured with whatever vegetables & meat they might have.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Absolutely. They might live on 14th Cross, Indira Nagar, Bangalore - but they don't, because I'd probably recognise them.