Publicity Contact: Kara Van de Water — 510-285-2966 • kara.vandewater@tenspeed.com

On-Sale Date: August 10, 2010

WHAT I EAT

Around the World in 80 Diets

Peter Menzel & Faith D’Aluisio

This book provides an incomparable documentary record of the stunning diversity of foods, diets, and occupations that sustain life in today’s world. …Together, these 80 diets have more to tell us about the human condition in this century than any textbook or statistical table ever could. —from the foreword by Marion Nestle

Eighty people, 30 countries, one day’s food, and another extraordinary book. From the same dynamic husband-and-wife team that brought us Material World, Man Eating Bugs, and the 2006 James Beard Book of the Year, Hungry Planet, comes the much anticipated What I Eat. In vivid photographs and thought-provoking text, this remarkable book chronicles a three-year around-the-world journey and delivers a fascinating portrait of what individuals eat over the course of one day.

With camera and notebooks in hand, Peter and Faith visited thirty countries and a dozen U.S. states to interview, shop, cook, and eat with a wide variety of individuals—from a bike messenger in Japan and a Maasai herdswoman in Kenya to a traditional baker in Iran, a model in the U.S., and a bullfighter in Spain. They even traveled out of this world to interview a former NFL player turned astronaut, who was photographed while orbiting the Earth with his daily meal floating around him.

“You are what you eat” has never been as fully visualized as it is in What I Eat’s eighty photographic portraits, which feature the food and beverages (including vitamins, supplements, and cigarettes) that each person consumes in a day, plus demographic particulars such as age, occupation, activity level, height, and weight. The food is the focal point of each profile, which details every item consumed and the total resulting calorie count. The numbers are at times expected, at other times surprising, and always fascinating.

Adding controversy and context to the profiles are compelling essays that approach food politics and our endless obsession with diet from fresh new angles. Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham; journalists Michael Pollan, Bijal Trivedi, and Ellen Rupel Shell; nutrition consultant and NYU professor Lisa Young, and others examine such topics as portion size, the science behind calories, food taboos, and how cooking makes us human. Also included is the collective wisdom of such luminaries as Ferran Adrià, Francis Coppola, Jack LaLanne, Dr. Dean Ornish, and more who briefly describe their own relationship to food and eating habits.

The comparative nature of this project reveals the similarities as well as the extreme differences in the ways in which people approach and consume food around the world. From Australia to Ecuador, Greenland to Israel, and Kenya to Yemen, Peter and Faith have literally traveled to the ends of the earth to amass this collection of beautiful photography and sensitive reportage. What I Eat offers a look at the compelling implications of the modern diet on our health and planet while expanding our understanding of the complex relationships among individuals, culture, and food.

PETER MENZEL is an award-winning photojournalist who has been published in Time, National Geographic, and Smithsonian, among others.

FAITH D’ALUISIO is a former television news producer and the writer for their Material World books, which include Material World: A Global Family Portrait, Women in the Material World, the James Beard Award-winning Man Eating Bugs and Hungry Planet, and What the World Eats.

Peter and Faith live in Napa, California, and are available for interviews. Their Web site, www.aroundtheworldin80diets.com, will go live in August.

What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets

by Peter Menzel & Faith D’Aluisio 

$40.00 hardcover, 340 pages, 9 x 12 inches, ISBN: 978-0-9840744-0-2

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group