The diets of children all over the world are changing dramatically. Fast food becomes the wide spread norm for daily food. American Photographer Gregg Segal produced an aesthetic and at the same time very informative project about the food we eat. Daily Bread shows children from all over the world lying on a coloured cloth surrounded by the foods they eat in a week’s time. This well-conceived project merges documentary and art photography. "The blend of both I find the most interesting", Segal says.

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Segal conceived the project Daily Bread as a logical sequence of an earlier project called Seven Days of Garbage. "That was shot from the same perspective. I asked people to save their garbage. I photographed it as a way to raise awareness about consumption and waste. While shooting the garbage, I noticed that there was an awful lot of packaging and in particular packaging that comes with the food that we eat." For Daily Bread, he chose to use children because eating habits start at a young age and last a lifetime. Segal started with his own son and other kids in Los Angeles, but soon realized that the story of diet was a global one. "It is about the Western diet being exported to the world. Fast food is ubiquitous.”

Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, he set off to other countries around the world, starting in India and Malaysia. As it is quite complicated to find subjects himself, he hired local producers, who found the children of different social classes. First, Segal had to ask the children to write down the food they ate during a week. Then he would rent a studio and hire cooks who prepared all the meals that had to be photographed. "We had two or three people working in the kitchen for each day of shooting, and they usually worked twelve hours or more in a day. We had to prepare the food to replicate the menu of each kid, and I photographed up to five kids a day, so it was an immense job."

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Studio on the roof

Segal took all the photos in different local studios he rented. "I wanted the pictures to be consistent from one country to the next. And so you have to shoot with the same focal distance of the lens, the same height of the camera, the same dimensions of the set, and so forth. In Senegal, the studio ceilings were too low because the camera had to be twelve feet above the set. So, we had to improvise and shoot on the roof. And of course, then you have the sun shining on the set and in the kids’ eyes. So there are a lot of technical challenges. The strobe lights in Senegal fired inconsistently - only in about one out of every four pictures I took."
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Even though Gregg Segal had a variety of assistants working in the studio, he enjoyed shopping for backdrops himself. "When I shopped for fabrics, I choose something that was either typical of the country or the culture or that reflected the kids' interests. For instance, Andrea, one of the kids in Sicily, loved to swim, so I found a sea-themed background with shells and crabs for his portrait."

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Expensive pizza

The shoots had to reflect the statistics of the country that Segal was shooting in. "For instance, if I was shooting in a country that had an obesity rate of 50 per cent, half the kids I photographed should be obese."

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Segal discovered that in India, the situation of obese children was the opposite of that of the USA. "Here in the U.S., the biggest consumers of fast food are poor people, because it's cheap and convenient. A McDonald's burger is about a dollar. So if you're poor and you're working, and you don't have time to cook, it’s an attractive option. But in India, a medium Domino's Pizza costs about $13. Outside Mumbai, I photographed a girl, Anchal, whose father works in construction and earns about five dollars a day. He'd have to work three days just to buy one Domino's Pizza! Of course, they don't eat pizza. Anchal’s mother prepares okra and cauliflower curry, lentils, and roti from scratch on the floor of their shack, with a single kerosene burner. So Anchal eats a pretty nutritious diet, more nutritious than some of the middle-class kids who can afford Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino’s Pizza. I found this inverse of the American diet remarkable.”

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Junk food

How did Gregg Segal select the countries to get a balanced survey? "I chose countries for many different reasons. One was to try to geographically cover the world as much as I could. I mean, obviously, I couldn't afford to travel everywhere. The project was costly to produce. I spent well over eighty-five thousand dollars. Nonetheless, I wanted to represent the whole world as much as I could: Europe, Africa, Asia, South America. And I wanted to go to countries that have had some challenges and major changes in terms of diet. That’s why I chose India, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates. In the UAE, diabetes really didn't even exist a couple of generations ago. Now, over 50 percent of the population is either overweight or obese. And diabetes is a huge problem there now."

One of the charming and revealing photographs shot in Brazil is of Kawakanih, a nine-year-old native Indian girl. She shows the most natural way to live and feed yourself, a lifestyle that has been entirely forgotten in our post-industrial era. Kawakanih lives in Xingu National Park, a preserve in the Amazonian Basin of Brazil that can be seen from space. Segal remarks: "Given the political changes in Brazil since then, with the right-wing Trump clone President Bolsonaro, who is deliberately burning the rainforest, I'm sure that her lifestyle is in jeopardy. Soy fields are covering the whole area now."

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Slow food

Segal did not only show this native girl, he also pointed his lens at other social classes emerging in Brazil. The antithesis is Henrico photographed with a Star Wars background. "Urban, middle-class kids in Brazil and India are eating the same junk that we’re eating in America. The Western diet has been exported to the world with great success, for the fast food industry."

Daily Bread is not only an indictment of junk food. The project also features children with healthy diets, like Rosalie in Nice, France. "I wanted to visit places which have a long-standing food culture -places like Italy and France. Even though there is a lot of fast food, there's also a great emphasis on slow food and the family meal. I’d seen an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” which featured a school lunchroom in Nice, France. It was remarkable to see how well the kids in this small school were eating. The school chef prepared a delicious three-course meal. It was like eating in a restaurant. By and large, at public schools here in the U.S., kids are served absolute garbage."

In a study done by Cambridge University which ranked the quality of diets around the world from most to least nutritious, nine of the ten countries with the best diets are in Africa. "They're not eating a lot of meat and processed, packaged foods, whereas here in the U.S., the fast-food industry and the beef industry are heavily subsidized. The reason that McDonald's hamburgers cost a dollar is because the cows are fed corn that’s paid for by the government. The industry is heavily subsidized by the US government which reinforces a very unhealthy diet. In turn, our unhealthy diets result in numerous health problems which drives the cost of healthcare through the roof. There’s so much talk about who’s going to pay for health care in the United States. What they should be looking at is why we’re sick to begin with. They’d find the answer is staring us in the face three times a day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner!
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Little stories

In many documentary projects, the use of text is important. In Daily Bread, texts are added in the form of information about the diet and general circumstances of the child giving more insight into the very different lives of the kids in the represented countries. The accompanying texts are little stories of the children’s lives. We read that Kawakanih speaks Arawaki, an almost extinct language and surprisingly she likes to read books about the Egyptians. She and her mother travelled 31 hours to reach to the studio where the photo was taken. Kawakanih's diet is very simple, consisting mainly of fish, cassava, porridge, fruit and nuts. The most remarkable part of the text is when she explains how easy it is to make dinner: "It takes five minutes to catch dinner. When you're hungry, you just go to the river with your net."

Henrico, who lives in the capital Brasilia, plays video games and listens to Justin Bieber and is perfectly content. His favourite dish is Feijoada, a Brazilian stew of black beans and pork served with a side of white rice, fried cassava flour, and collard greens. In one country, the diets could not be more different.

Gregg explains: "I wanted to personalize the pictures to help people identify with the subjects. And so I thought it would be helpful to have a little bit of their story to go along with the photographs. It helps to have a little context. Each kid has their own story, interests, and personality, and yet they're often eating in very similar ways. A generation ago if you were to go to Catania in Sicily, the kids there would be eating very differently from their counterparts in Los Angeles, and now they're all eating hamburgers, French fries, pasta, pizza, ice-cream, candies and packaged snacks. It looks as if their parents are shopping in the same global supermarket."

Gregg Segal studied photography and film at California Institute of the Arts (BFA) dramatic writing at New York University (MFA) and education at The University of Southern California (M.A.).
Segal approaches his work with the sensibility of a sociologist – using the medium to explore culture. His photography utilizes stark contrast and juxtaposition to engage viewers and provoke reflection.
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Daily Bread, published by Powerhouse Books

www.greggsegal.com

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