Hungry Planet - Guatemala

The Mendoza family living in Todos Santos Cuchumatan, Guatemala, and their one week worth of food (from the book Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio).

Their PICTURE is here.

Their diet looks like this (11.4 kg of food per person, per week):

• 44% starches
•   0.6% sweet foods (very little sugar and hand-pressed chocolate)
•   0.4% dairy (in the form of powdered milk)
• 3% meat (chicken), eggs
• 15% fruits
• 37% vegetables

Beverages. They mainly drink water and some of the following:

• powdered milk (see above)
• instant coffee
• wheat drink

These wonderful people are eating their traditional diet with very little added sugar and packaged food. The amount of sugar per person, per week is less than one tablespoon. When they have cravings for desserts, they eat a banana. They do not drink soft drinks even though it is available in their village.

They eat meat less than once a week. Usually they eat: rice, beans, potatoes, eggs, tortillas in different combination, three times a week.

The villagers are hard-working farmers. Many of them are the descendants of the Maya people and still speak the Maya language, called Mam.

This is a very high-grain diet. But again, there are several things to consider:

• The grains are grown locally and they are not consumed in their highly processed flours.
• They work very hard every day.
• Very little sugar and processed foods are consumed.

I am sure they do very well on this diet. The point is to go back to their own traditional diet they are best adapted to, whatever the proportions are. The common points in these traditional diets are always the same: no sugar, no processed foods, no vegetable oils, animal food is included.