Chad Refugee Camp is One Stop in New Book Exploring Global Diets

Posted: 29 December 2005

What are they eating in Chad this holiday season? For the Aboubakar family, it is the same gooey porridge that they have survived on since first arriving in a dry, crowded refugee camp more than a year and a half ago after fleeing the violence in Darfur, Sudan.

Details of the family’s diet—and those of 29 other families in rich and poor countries around the world—are the subject of a recently released photographic study called “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.” In the 287-page book filled with family portraits and graphic examples of where the food they eat comes from, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio explore the impacts that globalization, mass tourism, and giant agribusiness are having on world diets.

Part of the team’s research took them to the Breidjing Refugee Camp in Chad, where they stayed with Oxfam aid workers in the agency’s compound while getting to know and photograph the Aboubakar family. The family—a widow and her five children—live mostly on the food rations supplied by international aid groups and on water provided by Oxfam.

“It’s an outdoor prison,” said Menzel of the daily life thousands of refugees endure in the camp. “They’re isolated in a desolate place with nothing to do.”

And they have only just enough to eat.

“They’re not necessarily hungry, but they’re not gaining weight,” added Menzel. “Most everyone looks like they’re on the minimum amount of calories needed.”

For a sampling of photographs from “Hungry Planet,” and to learn what the Aboubakars eat in a week, click here.