T.T.: For Friday Food Fans

This year one of my duties at the school is taking care of the library. Our school is too small to have a real library and a real librarian. My only professional experience in libraries was as a page at the public library in high school, but I have been an avid library user my entire life, and I really, really love books.

So imagine my excitement when I was told that we had some money on hand for new library books. And I got to make the list of what to order.

Buy books? And not even with my own money? OKAY!

I pulled many of the titles I ended up ordering from the Common Core list of recommended supplementary titles. The new books came in over the Thanksgiving break, and when I went back to work yesterday, I had several boxes and envelopes to open, all full of new books. It was like Christmas came early.

I figured one of the perks of my job is that I get to read some of the new books myself, right? Right.

Although I was tempted to bring the entire box of new books home and read them all right away, I limited myself to just a few. And the very first one I read is the one I'm going to recommend right now. This one:

It's like this book was written just for me.

This is an extraordinary book. The majority of the book is a collection of profiles of families all over the world. Each family was photographed with all the food they eat in a week.

Say hello to the Aymes family in Ecuador.

The photograph is followed by a detailed breakdown of each food, its quantity and its cost. And following that is a two-page narrative about each family's life and food situation. 

In addition to the family profiles, there are many charts and graphs that show things like percentage of urban population for each country, the number of McDonald's restaurants in each one, average meat consumption, and on and on.

It is an extraordinary book. Despite the Common Core recommendation, I'm not sure it's really for kids. It's pretty long and detailed.

I'm sure enjoying it, though. And if you come here for the Friday Food posts, you probably will, too.

It's a relatively old book--published in 2008--so it might be at your public library. And if it's not, you can find it used at various online sellers for about seven dollars.