(no subject)

[arethinn]

(sorry about the formatting, I c/p'd from a chat window)

good god
ok, this is a book called "what the world eats", featuring photographs of families from various places in the world with a week's worth of their groceries
this Australian family of seven, a single mother, her parents, two teenage boys, one teenage girl, and one younger girl, has this:
11 lb smoked ham, 9.9 lb corned beef, 6.6 lb each ground meat, pork chops, sausages, "steakettes", 4.4 lb each chicken, rissoles (?), 2 dozen eggs, 2.2 lb each beef patties and fish fingers
and one week's food in January: at time of publication, USD$376.45 !!
(in 2008)
elsewhere they talk about biweekly trips which would be a little more believable, but still
SIXTY POUNDS of meat products per week?
i do not believe each of these people is eating 8.6 pounds of meat per day
especially a five-year-old girl
so i can only imagine this is "typical grocery trip" and that a number of these things last longer than 1 week
however, there's no note similar to those next to some others that say "amount of dried fish in the photo is approx 3 months' worth"...

Comments

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

I've known of (relatively) families who routinely feed the children of lots of other families on the block in poor neighborhoods. Perhaps this is what they go through for more than seven people? I've had my grocery budget completely skewed when a group dropped in unexpectedly.

But I'm guessing here. I don't know.

[arethinn]

Not as far as I can tell from the few pages of narrative associated with the photo. They do talk about biweekly disability checks and associated trips to the store every two weeks. I hope to $DEITY that despite the lack of a note to the effect, what is pictured (and price-listed) is actually 2 weeks and not 1, but even so, 4.3 lbs of meat per day per person would be a LOT.

[arethinn]

Also, the whole premise of the book is comparing one week's worth of food for one typical family (sizes anywhere from 4-13, at a quick glance) across different countries around the world, so I think running the neighborhood soup kitchen might be a bit out of bounds. (Comparing the Australian and American ones to the ones from Mali and Chad was a little embarrassing!)

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Huh. That makes no damn sense, I agree. I'm thinking (hoping!) there were just severe communication problems between that family and the authors.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Rissoles are essentially individual sized meat-loaves in Australia, so sayeth my friend from Oz.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I don't think we'd eat that much non-fish meat in a year in this house!

Having a little think, I would say the average heavy meat-eating middle-class Australian family would probably have steak, chicken, lamb, mince, pork, fish and random sausages or diced something for stirfry once a week each, plus extra ham and chicken for lunch. So, for a family of four, that would come out at about 2kg (about 4.5lb) chicken a week, maybe 1kg (2.2lb) of steak, 800g (1.7lb) lamb, 800g (1.7lb) mince, 800g-1kg (1.7lb) sausages or diced meat, 800g (1.7lb) ham and 800g (1.7lb) of seafood.

That said, loads of Australians are of Asian descent and would eat perhaps half this amount of meat, though possibly more seafood. Then there are all the vegetarians and mostly vegetarians ...

This family seems very strange! If only because in all the time I have lived here I have only seen corned beef out in the country as an emergency food. Are they all secretly stockmen who get up at 4am to ride out after cattle? Maybe the book was sponsored by the Pork Marketing Board?

Oh, and the rissoles is peculiar, too, as they are meatballs that are usually made up of mince (ground meat) and very much like beef patties, so why they would be counted separately is a mystery.

[arethinn]

That said, loads of Australians are of Asian descent and would eat perhaps half this amount of meat, though possibly more seafood.

This family were at least partly Aboriginal and the grandparents used to be sheep ranchers, apparently (complete with stories about how "in the bush" you used to be able to go out and get a kangaroo to eat if you ran out of other meat).

Oh, and the rissoles is peculiar, too, as they are meatballs that are usually made up of mince (ground meat) and very much like beef patties, so why they would be counted separately is a mystery.

Probably because the way the pictures were taken seems to have been sending the family to the market or whatever they usually do, telling them to buy a week's worth of food, and then spreading out the resultant purchases and photographing them together with the family. So if they were pre-formed/packaged and purchased that way, they'd have been counted separately.