What does a weeks worth of food look like around the world? | Curious? Read

What The World Eats - What A Week Worth of Food Looks Like

My 20-something year old daughter works part-time in a grocery store. She likes to tell me about the stories she makes up in her head about the customers that come in. The single guy that just buys frozen dinners & snack cakes. The harried mom with 7 boxes of cereal, 4 gallons of milk and a 6 pack of Heineken. The "high maintenance" woman with a head of lettuce (organic, of course), a bottle of imported bottled water & a gallon of chunky monkey ice cream. But what strikes her the most are the people who come in with shopping carts heaping full of food - fresh & frozen, canned & boxed, most of it "snack size"or "convenience sized", gallons of soda, bags of potato chips & cheese doodles, etc. SO much food. She might strike up a casual conversation with them & find out those people have 2 children, shop like this every week with several extra trips during the week for things they run out of, plus eat out or order pizza twice a week. They tell her how much of the food they have in their cart usually "ends up spoiling before they use it" but how they vow to themselves that this week, they really, really mean it and will use it all.

I've seen this happen myself when I've gone grocery shopping. We have a big family & we've wasted food ourselves from lack of planning or just being too tired to cook. But money is tight now and I am very careful about spending the bare minimum and maximizing every morsel. With proper planning & organizing, it's possible! But one day, I was using StumbleUpon and stumbled across this link: What The World Eats - What A Week Worth of Food Looks Like Around the Worldand it was shocking. Especially when you look at the stark difference, not only in quantity, but in cost between the typical American's weekly grocery haul for an average family and the meager offerings of a slightly larger family in Chad. It really made me think about how fortunate we are in this country. Even if money is tight and every penny counts, most of us have exactly what we need & usually more.