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How the World Eats Its Vitamins

The culture that led to the creation of our favorite nutritious meals says a lot about who we are.

Alessandra Rizzotti
By Alessandra RizzottiMar 19, 2015
Alessandra Rizzotti
Alessandra Rizzotti has written for GOOD, Little Darling, Idealist, Takepart, Heeb, Smith, Hello Giggles, Reimagine, and has been featured on The White House blog for her work on the editorial series “Women Working to Do Good.” The editorial series she created for GOOD, “Push for Good,” helped raise over one million dollars for crowdfunding projects in social impact, and she helped launch impact campaigns with GOOD for Purina, GAP, Focus Features, Google, Apollo, and National MS Society. She’s also been published in three Harper Perrennial books with her six word memoirs, as well as four monologue books for Hal Leonard/Applause in collaboration with Grammy winner and GOOD member Alisha Gaddis. Her video art has been featured in Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s “Learning to Love You More” Gallery at the Baltic Contemporary Art Museum. In her free time, she beekeeps, volunteers with nonprofit organization Honeylove, and edits children’s chapbooks for 826 LA. At nonprofit The Trevor Project, Alessandra writes about their suicide prevention and crisis intervention programs for LGBTQ youth, helping forward their mission to save young lives.
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It was French philosopher and epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who said in 1826, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Not to be taken too literally, Brillat-Savarin simply meant that food has a mind-body influence. This age-old adage didn’t really become integrated into English and American food culture until nutritionist Victor Lindlahr’s catabolic diet demonstrated that certain foods like fish, berries, and greens could burn more calories than they contained, proving the correlation between food and health.

Though such a discovery may inspire many of us to reduce calories at all costs, it is actually vitamin and nutritional content that determines how energy supplied by calories can most efficiently be used. And cultures around the world have been finding delicious ways to pack nutrition into their meals for centuries. If we are indeed what we eat, the culture that led to the creation of our favorite meals says a lot about who we are. So let’s take a look at how people around the world get their vitamins.

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