The Thin Red Line

Ron and I went out with a couple of friends to a Chinese buffet last night (I pigged out on the king crab legs among other things) and seeing table after table laid out with all kinds of wonderful food brought to mind Hungry Planet, an over-sized pictorial book that documents what thirty families in twenty-four countries eat in a week.

Each family is photographed with their weeks’ worth of groceries. It is a study in contrasts. From the family in a refugee camp in Chad shown sitting on a blanket with a few small bags of grain that are their ration from a relief organization to the North Carolina family who’s weekly haul includes two large pizzas and lots of fast food containers or the Greenland family who hunt the walrus, duck and polar bear featured prominently on their table. Each family is profiled and you get a real sense of who these people are and why they eat as they do. Interspersed with the family stories are essays by a number of other authors on such topics as “diabeasity” (a newly coined term for the closely related issues of diabetes and obesity that are becoming endemic throughout much of the world) and “nutrition conversion”, a term which refers to people whose health was previously threatened by not having enough to eat who now face the “diabeasity” problem from eating too much of the wrong things. The writing and photography are both excellent and this one is well worth picking up next time you are at the library.

It is only a coincidence that I happened to read Hungry Planet at the same time as Beggars And Choosers, but the themes mesh in an interesting way. A somewhat high brow science fiction novel set in the 2100’s, Beggars And Choosers portrays a United States radically transformed by genetic engineering. Physically striking and remarkably intelligent people, who are called “donkeys” live in high security enclaves where they pursue intellectually challenging occupations and pay heavy taxes, while the un-modified, who are called “Livers” are no longer expected to work at all– they are fed at cafes and obtain clothing and other necessities from warehouses, all of which are operated by robots and provided free of charge by politicians in return for votes. Then a small group of super-enhanced people, called “the sleepless” (they have been modified such that they no longer need to sleep, have very long life-spans and are so highly intelligent they make the donkeys look like livers) concoct an injectable substance that makes humans completely impervious to disease and able to transform sunlight and exposure to soil into glucose, such that they no longer need to eat (although they still can). The political fall out from this extraordinary development is quite surprising. Recommended.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 9:10 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Books, Photography, Science Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.