How Globalization is Changing Kids' Diets

Impact of Globalization in Children's Diets

What are kids eating around the world? You might be surprised that photographer Gregg Segal traveled the world to capture the impact of globalization on kids' diets. Childhood obesity on the rise and globalization homogenizing nutrition, photographer Gregg Segal set out to uncover what a week’s worth of food looked like around the world. By focusing on the diets of children, whose lifelong eating habits are created in these formative years, Segal’s stunning photographs speak to themes of nutrition, class, and culture.

The work is also considered an interesting annotation on the global economy and how this effect eating habits. While in the United States lower income families tend to eat more snack foods because of their low cost, in other countries the trend is reversed. In fact, some of the healthiest diets in the world come from low-income cultures where the focus is on fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, and meat where processed junk foods are luxury items. The world is at a tipping point where the balance of what kids are eating is shifting away from wholesome homemade foods to packaged processed foods and snack foods and junk food all over the world.

Segal had the kids keep food journals of everything they ate for one week. He photographed 60 kids from a variety of countries. While lower-income families in the U.S. tend to eat more junk food because of its lower cost —he ways it's the opposite in other countries. The portraits are featured in his new book The Daily Bread. Segal encourages kids to keep track of meals and reflect on their diets. His book, Daily Bread, spreads across 120 pages and details the stories behind the portraits. These foods were then prepared and laid out around them while Segal captured their image from above. From Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur, the cultures depicted are a fascinating look at how different we are—yet how similar we’re becoming.

Brut.