Majority Plate

While shopping at my local Salvation Army, I came across this plate, I thought about what food I might eat off of it, pancakes with fresh, seasonal berries and dripping syrup for breakfast, my lunch-time grilled organic vegetable sandwiches with whole-wheat bread, or my dinner, of wild salmon with russet potatoes and broccoli rabe from the local green market. These are foods I might have eaten, but not now with the current economic crisis, I find it more inspiring to look at the couple who went a month eating on a dollar a day and see how close I can get to that. Oatmeal, peanut butter on homemade bread, rice and beans, eaten everyday for a month sounds boring, if not borderline malnutrition.

Variations in our diet help to build antibodies against disease and metabolize for proper absorption of nutrients.

In striking contrast to what I have available to me, is the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, whom live on the equivalent of a US dollar a day, or less, for all of basic life essentials: food, clothing and shelter. In countries, such as Ethiopia an entire five or six person family can eat for just over a dollar for an entire week. Much of the world’s population does not have proper access to grains other than corn or rice, and even when they do they are often rat infested. Proteins like fish and poultry are almost non-existent, leading to malnutrition; women cannot produce enough milk to feed their children which dominoes into stunted growth in nearly 50% of the children in third-world countries.

The design on this plate represents the diet of the majority.

Design by Kathleen Scully
www.scullynewyork.com