Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio

Bringing a Hungry Planet to Light

Even if you’re eating bugs, when you have a meal together, preconceptions and cultural filters start falling away. Food is close to everybody’s heart.

For the past 17 years, the husband and wife photojournalism team of Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio has been collaborating to produce stunning books of photography with significant humanitarian and international appeal.

They say they complement one another. He is very “big picture”; she is the in-depth detail woman. “A simultaneous front and rear assault,” he calls it. He was at Woodstock. She earned her stripes in broadcast news. He used to be a “one-man band”; now they work together as “two people who totally understand the project.” She says he is “kind of amazing” in the way he deals with people. She deepens the experience by drawing out the people they encounter: “People like to talk to me because I like to listen. Women, especially don’t get listened to in the developing world.”

They say the collaboration has its challenges, but that the “end result is successful.”

Their first project, Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) examined the lives and material goods of a “statistically average” family in each of 30 different nations. Since then, they have gravitated towards telling the human story through food, most notably in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, which chronicles the weekly diets of families in 24 countries. This year, Menzel and D’Aluisio debut their new book, What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets, which will showcase one day’s worth of food for a culturally diverse set of individuals from around the globe.

Menzel and D’Aluisio put everything on the line for these labors of love. Nobody funds them. They borrow against everything they own to produce books that they hope will touch people. The goal is always to make back the investment within a few years of publication, but they’re never quite sure what will happen at the culmination of any project. The gambles are huge, they say.

And like any other business, new technology is changing the way they work. “We love it and we hate it,” Menzel says of the digital turn. Some changes are good. They travel with much less lighting equipment than they used to, and very small digital storage devices. The fear of losing negatives, film or video in transit is almost negligible.

But on the down side, the production end has shifted so heavily in their direction that they feel as if they are working all the time. Menzel says, “Before digital, we used to be able to go out to eat when we were done shooting for the day. Now, when we’re done, we get take-out food and download in our hotel room.”

Menzel also says the success of digital cameras has contributed to the “Walmartization” of stock photography, which drives down prices and floods the field with free images.

But they trudge on.

They say they do it to bring the world a little bit closer, to allow people a glimpse of someone else’s dinner table so that our own lives will be revealed in some way.

It is a lesson they might have learned from Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 muckraking novel, The Jungle, was intended to expose industrial labor abuses at the turn-of-the-century. Instead, the novel’s descriptions of sordid meat packing practices nauseated the American people and led to sanitary reforms in the industry.

Sinclair famously declared, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Menzel and D’Aluisio are taking a more effective—and more aesthetically pleasing— route than Sinclair in their efforts to generate awareness about enlightened stewardship of the earth’s resources: they are aiming straight for the stomach.

They say that sharing a meal with a subject, especially in the home, reveals that person’s inner nature. “Even if you’re eating bugs,” D’Aluisio says, “when you have a meal together, preconceptions and cultural filters start falling away. Food is close to everybody’s heart.”

Menzel and D’Aluisio note that each photograph in their books is intentionally laden with detail, a “deep contextualization” of the subject’s life that will, hopefully, provide many points of connection for the viewer. “We’re interested in taking our ideas and illustrating them with real people and letting the essence of the truth come out so that people can understand it,” Menzel says. “Pretty pictures will sell well, but very ephemerally, and they’re gone in a flash. If you give people a lot more information, they’re going to compare it to themselves.”

D’Aluisio notes that the contextualizing also prevents them from filtering what they photograph through their own Western eyes. Seeing the subject clearly is sometimes a very complicated task, she explains. She interviewed a woman from Yemen whose husband, a bank driver, was one of the very few Yemeni men to allow his wife to talk to the two American journalists. Their female translator dropped out at the last moment so they used a male translator who was not permitted, by reason of culture, to speak directly to the woman, only to her husband.

“It can be really difficult to hear regular people in some societies,” D’Aluisio explains. “Saada’s story had to be filtered through two men in order for me to get answers. It was really difficult to hear her voice through them."

Regular people form the lens through which Menzel and D’Aluisio show how other cultures solve problems. Their hope is that such a perspective will give Americans and those in the so-called developed world a more realistic—even sobering— assessment of our own solutions to these same problems.

The answers are not obvious, either. Menzel and D’Aluisio notice that people who have not been “consumed” by the global market generally eat healthier. And a healthy national diet is often considered to be the mark of a somewhat nobler culture—a sign that one group of people has discovered an essential truth about living. But Menzel says he hasn’t seen clear evidence to support this hypothesis.

“There’s no place that is Shangri-La or perfect,” he says. “The Japanese figured out how to eat healthy and live longer and they still have a very chaotic, work-driven lifestyle.”

The Menzel-D’Aluisio photography books are not necessarily about offering solutions, but about bringing things to light. To this end, sensing what will make an effective photograph is a matter of “serendipity, experience, and hard work,” according to Menzel: “The resulting photo transcends language. It goes immediately to instinct—to what is aesthetically pleasing and what’s interesting.”

While they enjoy their extensive and always unique travel across six continents, Menzel and D’Aluisio say they love to return to their home and their garden in Napa, California. But even at home, the nature of their work has its own ineffable rewards. D’Aluisio aptly sums up the beauty of a life devoted to photography since the writer began working with her photographer husband, for whom so much depends on the perfect ray of light:

“In 17 years,” she says, “I’ve seen every sunrise and every sunset.”