Something meaningful to share - What is eaten in one week!

This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting e-mails I've ever received.
Take a good look at the family size & diet of each country,
and the availability & cost of what is eaten in one week.

Italy: The Manzo family of Sicily
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11
Kurus-kurus belaka , slim-mlim... (muka ala-ala mafia, tapi interior of the house, tak de elements rumah mafia pun... )
Banyak makan bijirin, tak nampak pun sayur membukit.
Patutnya mesti mention umur, baru tau pemakanan dia buat awet muda ker apa...

Aku rasa the head of the family dalam 42 years old, the wife around 35 years old.


Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07
Hairan aku, kenapa dalam gambar ni nak nampak orang yang over-weight susah?
Ker sebab derang pakai baju hitam gelap?

Ada ambik alcohol.
Mungkin derang dah balance up dengan leafy vegetables & fruits.
Mewah jugaklah orang German nih, seswai dengan taraf hidup mereka.


United States: The Revis family of North Carolina
(Sure hope most American families eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and less junk food than this family.)
Food expenditure for one week $341.98
Humanggg aiiii, banyak betul makanan merapu diaorang ambik.
Muka macam nak endorse iklan junk food jer...
Kenyang ker? Naik muak aderlah...
Tersengih bangga bagai menatang pizza yang penuh...
Amboi, amboi, amboi....

Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca
Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09
Kurang makan cereals & whole meal grains.
Pokok bunga dalam pasu pun barang makan meh?

Yang ini sahih gemuk sebab minum carbonated drinks...
Bapak gemuk, mak tembam, anak debab, baby chubby...
Belum sengih nampak gigi lagi...


Poland: The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna
Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27
Species makan rooted vege & legums
Makan energy bar kot, sebab tuh tak nampak banyak lagi makanan yang besar-besar saiznya...
Tengok tuh, makanan kucing pun se-kufu dengan makanan tuan dia...
kiranya food expenditure lah jugak.


Ahmed & his family from Cairo, Egypt
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Teringat aku Asian Food Channel - "A Cook's Tour"...
bila nengok ingredients kat dalam gambar nih...

Ni semua masak nasi ala-ala nasi Arab lah tuh...



From Ecuador, family Ayme of Tingo
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
Basic living, nak jumpa red meats, poultry & fishes susah,
mungkin jauh dari sungai, laut atau tasik.

Paling aku suka ialah senyuman keikhlasan, keriangan sejati dari wajah-wajah mereka...
Tengok si bapa & deretan askar-askarnya...


Family Namgay from Bhutan
live in Shingkhey Village
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03
Ni mesti tanam sendiri nih, 90% semua berpunca dari tumbuh-tumbuhan.
Makan brown rice.
Number of person = 13
Very cost saving


Ni, family Abu Bakar Country: Republic Chad, Afrika
Stay at Breidjing Refugee Camp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
Aduh, sayu betul aku, bergenang air mata melihat keadaan mereka..
kalau nak dibandingkan dengan aku yg begini, sungguh jauh berbeza, aku patut terlebih bersyukur dgn keadaan aku di sini...


Pretty dramatic, eh !

Don't know about you, but right about now, I'm counting my blessings
Count your blessings. Once you realize how valuable you are and how much you have going for you,
the smiles will return, the sun will break out, the music will play,
and you will finally be able to move forward the life
that God intended for you with grace, strength, courage, and confidence.


Originally from Peter Menzel's book Hungry Planet.
On his website you can find out more about how he gathered this data.
The following snippet describes the contents of the book
and how he was able to amass such a breadth of information:

Each family's profile includes a detailed description of their weekly food purchases; photographs of the family at home, at market, and in their community; and a portrait of the entire family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries.

To assemble this remarkable comparison, Menzel and D'Aluisio traveled to twenty-four countries and visited thirty families from Bhutan and Bosnia to Mexico and Mongolia.

Tangkap Kepah Lagik - Awal Pagi Ahad 15.06.08

ENTRY TANGKAP KEPAH Di Waktu Senja 14.06.08 >>>>
Sila Click Sini ... KUALA MUDA



*** Keadaan beting pasir kala air laut semakin pasang pada puku 8 pagi itu...
air takat lutut***

Pagi Ahad, selepas menghantar Asyraf Daniel Imran ke PASTI...
kitaorang pegi lagik ke Kuala Muda...

*** Gambor ni aku penah buat screen saver, nyaman & tenang***

mind heart body soul
** Ni bukan mandi laut weih... ni tengah kutip kepah nih... tak caya?***


*** Pengutip kepah bersama bekas tangki air yang terapung di atas permukaan laut, senang nak isi muatan hasil tangkapannya... ini dapat banyak sekali kaut dengan pencakar besi***

Inilah rupa kepah yang dikaut
mengunakan pencakar @tau nama glamournya 'rake'...
Kira macam membajak di paras air laut setinggi ketiak...
tarik pencakar tuh... kaut segala pasir...
then, pasir keluar ikut lubang jaring-jaring besi, yang tinggal hanyalah kepah
yang lazat lagi enak... nyum-nyum...

*** Segar dari persisiran pantai***

*** Buat cekodok pun sedap, kira macam jemput-jemput udang,
cicah sama kuah kacang... wowww! ***

lupa bila mention pasal jemput-jemput, bukan bermakna masuk sekali dengan cengkerang2nya...

*** Kalu beli, seplastik yang masih bercengkerang lima hengget jer... expressway ***

Mengutip Kepah Di Kuala Muda - Sabtu 14.06.08

Petang itu jam 6.15pm bertolak dari daerah Tikam Batu, Sungai Petani Kedah menuju Kuala Muda, Seberang Perai Utara, Penang.

ENTRY TANGKAP KEPAH 15.06.08 >>> Sila Click Sini PAGI AHAD Kuala Muda

*** Ada 2 beting pasir, satu yang kecil memanjang...
satu lagik yang seluas separuh padang bola sepak***

Ingat saja nak jalan-jalan makan angin. Dah lewat petang sangat,nak masuk Maghrib.
Aku tengok Mr. Anuar bawak keta slow ajer takat 40km/jam.


Sungai Muda di sepanjang jalan kiri dan kanan, paras ayernya surut. Surut banyak.
Menonjolkan akar-akar pokok bakau & nipah.
Bila lihat akar nipah yang terserlah lumpur-lumpur kuning mengering, hati aku melonjak girang, ni petanda baik...
Aku sudah tidak sabar-sabar nak mengulangi episod mengutip kepah di laut sana.
Kali terakhir tahun 2001.
Mr. Anuar hanya pernah mendengar cerita
'konon'nya aku berjaya mengutip seguni beras saiz 20kg... 'Konon'nya... tapi tak pernah terbukti.
Kira serupa macam cerita dongeng.


Tiba di tepi pantai Kuala Muda, air surut, ramai orang di tengah air chetek,
sedang giat mencari kepah. Weiyh... seronoknya...

***Atiqah Jasmine Balqis
berdiri berlatar-belakangkan beting pasir yang timbul kala air surut***

Beting pasir ini tak tetap wujudnya...
Bak kata pepatah, 'Sekali air pasang, sekali pantai berubah'
atau ' Sekali air bah, sekali pantai berubah'.


*Sekelompok anak Cina sedang mengais pasir, mana tau kot-kot ada kepah*

Di Kuala Muda, jarang kita nampak orang suka-suka bermandi-manda.
Ayernya tak berapa sihat untuk mandi-manda, takut gatal-gatal pulak kang.

*** Permandangan di atas beting pasir yang bersaiz seluas separuh padang bola sepak***


*** Di atas beting pasir... ibarat pulau kecik...
Teringat aku kat pendatang tanpa izin Indonesia naik bot menyeberang Selat Melaka...
gara-gara nak menyusup masuk ke Malaysia, tekong turunkan mereka di atas beting pasir tatkala air surut di tengah samudera Selat Melaka,
bila air pasang, tragedi pendatang tanpa izin lemas berlaku... zalim***

Lautan adalah kehidupan
Sebiru laut, setenang air tanpa gelora


***Kalau berdiri di atas beting pasir, menghadap ke daratan tanah besar,
inilah pemandangannya... menara Masjid jelas kelihatan.***


*** Di atas beting pasir, penghujung beting pasir menghadap ke arah tenggara,
Pulau Pinang berbalam-balam menjadi latar-belakang gambar ini***


*** Manis sungguh si gadis ayu...
Sambil mengalai kepah sempat menyedeqahkan sekuntum senyuman kepadaku
terus aku teringat kat Mahsuri,
kalau bukan Mahsuri, Rita Rudaini kot***


*** Matahari terbenam diufuk barat... ada lagi yang dok mengutip kepah di jauh sana...
Aku phobia .. takut ada sotong kurita ker, jerung ker, buaya ker dok attack tetiba..
tak nakkkkk ***

Amy's Mute Secret ( An Australian Film Released in 1998)

Has any of you watched this film?
I watched from TV2 RTM, year 2001 which I could not memorised the slot.
Released in 1998.
It's a touching, amazingly beautiful,... an artful film all I remembered.


Well, I don't know to elaborate more in good structured sentences.
Let me do cut and paste here and gift credits to original websites where I dig for sources of information for this film. After all, I manage to order this film from Music Valley CD and DVD store.



Critical Review of 'Amy' by Natalie-Ann De Gruchy.

'Amy' is the story of a girl traumatised
by witnessing the tragic death of her rock star father.
Emotionally she withdraws into a silent existence.



Amy's mother is desperate to find her daughter a cure yet is constantly hindered by education and welfare departments. Through the intolerance and misinterpretations of experts, Amy is erroneously classified as needing "special education" and Tanya falsely labelled an unfit mother. Tanya is forced to flee to the city with Amy away from outback Australia in an attempt to escape the authorities that plan to take her daughter into custody.


After arriving in unfriendly, lower class inner city Melbourne, eventually, an unemployed musician from across the street discovers Amy's secret, ultimately providing the key to infiltrate her created world of isolation. Through Robert's music and friendship, Amy rediscovers communication and simultaneously begins touching the lives of the people around her in Mercer Street and the local community.



'Amy' boasts several merits
as the narrative is intelligent, poignant, heart-warming, humorous, innovative and quirky.

The film, although an unusual reality stretch,
was authentic as people do not recover from grief and trauma and move on immediately like in countless media texts.

The grieving process can take many years before normal life is resumed.
Emotions of grief were sensitively dealt with as was the portrayal of mental illness.
'Amy' was a fairly accurate illustration
of selective mutism despite it encompassing a rare twist.
From personal experience, my selective mutism was less severe than Amy's as I could still hear but refused to talk.

Like Amy, excluding my silence, I was a normal child. I could read, write and produce artwork that was advanced for my age.
I also enjoyed music and would sing in a group situation.

Many have criticised the use of music as unrealistic
but I think it is feasible as Amy is grieving for her musician father who sang with her when he was alive and these are the principal memories she retains of him.
An explanation for Amy's skilled vocals is she learnt
by attempting to mimic his style from his CDs
and also obtained a natural flair through genetics.


The lead performances were admirable, manufacturing the situations as believable and avoiding delving into the ridiculous
which could have easily occurred with this type of subject matter.
The text highlights the intolerance towards psychological disorders and to any perceived difference from the norm.
A lack of understanding by authorities added to Tanya's turmoil rather than easing or supporting her concerns for her child and Robert's sister, Anny was mocked for her obsession for revenge on her hairdresser rather than assisted.

Society desires searching for someone to blame or ridicule
instead of uncovering the true origin and meanings behind circumstances.
Due to this persecution, people conceal their problems due to their fear and embarrassment and families, like Zac's and Amy's, feel isolated as their problems give the impression of being unique as silence exists in the community.

The movie demonstrates this point by portraying problems such as domestic violence being operated by the characters as normal, everyday life and, thus accepted and unchanged by the victims or, on the other hand like Tanya, individuals are desperately seeking assistance although are unable to discover it owing to lack of publicity. One of the film's major themes is communication breakdown. Both Tanya and Amy mourn separately rather than sharing their grief between them and Amy burdens herself with the blame for the tragedy unbeknown to Tanya who was oblivious due to difficulty coping with her own emotions.

The motivation of music and hazy, grainy flashbacks of the concert death is to delve into the psychological anguish of both mother and daughter and identifies inner healing as the other central plot theme. The film is intelligent in its examination of the human emotions associated with death.

The cinematography contains beautiful aesthetic filmmaking cleverly connoting both tragedy and lighter, happier moments.
At the beginning of the film, panoramic outback scenes display the texture and vibrant colours of the Australian landscape, establishing it as a blissful, free place for Amy. Flashbacks are utilised of her frolicking in the fields with her father and, later, alone reminiscing about her joy in this place where her father still exists.
Later, as the peril of welfare workers brings Amy back to her actual reality,
Parker makes the same outback landscape and its physical remoteness appear isolating and miserable particularly during the scene where mother and daughter are waiting for the bus to Melbourne, while the wind is wildly blowing their skirts.
The pair remain still, like surreal statues, not acknowledging each other and standing unclose. These images helped by the landscape, signify the emotional distance between mother and child and their detachment from normal life preferring to withdraw into their separate private inner worlds.

Once in Melbourne, misery and isolation are again encountered. The city landscape shots appearing greater than their world and they enter Mercer Street where their neighbours are mainly unwelcoming and the pair labelled "aliens". The city suburb film set vividly displays the poverty, dysfunction, mundaneness, despair and decay within the homes of Mercer Street. This is the working class environment where Tass spent her childhood and her direction brings out a humourous exaggeration of the everyday pleasures utilised to combat the despair of disadvantage and dysfunction like Zac's stolen hub cap collection and Mrs Mullin's obsession with keeping her front garden and footpath tidy.

This helps explain the neighbour's eventual motivation in supporting Amy as they similarly find an escape from the mundane through song. Tass explains why the musical comedy in the film such as the singing police search party are believable despite the characters; "doing the absolutely unthinkable, which is singing to find her. I mean, how ridiculous is that? In my way of thinking, it's totally ridiculous, yet these people are out there doing it, which is what I'd be doing if a little girl down the street was lost. So it's the very condition that touched people and opened them up as human beings which created the musical aspect of the movie." (Malone, 2001, p.146) As a multicultural director, Tass's 'Amy' reminds me of European filmmaking as it does not follow Hollywood genre conventions. To an extent, 'Amy' could draw comparisons with Italian film 'Life is Beautiful'. This film, like 'Amy' was a mixture of comedy and tragedy drama. I found it a brilliant, heartwarming film yet rather bizarre as the father was pretending for his young son that the Nazi death camp they were prisoners in was a game to aid his son's survival and prevent his fear. Society has a fondness for children and are willing to behave in unusual ways to playfully interact with them and this grounds the concept of policemen singing to relocate the missing Amy as the obvious procedure to undertake.

Again, like European cinema,
Amy has a reality based ending as regardless of a happy resolution to the main conflict, Mercer Street remains with its imperfections.
The street's residents remain socioeconomically disadvantaged, Zac is illiterate, Anny mentally unstable, Mrs Mullins remains disagreeable and grumpy and Robert and the car fixing brothers continue to be unemployed.
This is realistic as life rarely changes dramatically and by no means into an utopian state.
Any transition into happiness is a gradual process and the movie reflects this.

Regardless of my love of the film, I did discern a few minor faults.
The film was a little too hectic with numerous character's lives packed into the plot and left underdeveloped or unresolved.
I particularly found it perplexing that Anny was not receiving help and compassion particularly when she appeared possibly dangerous with a homemade weapon and one of the themes of the film was healing.
There were also too many quirky characters living in the one street and they all knew each others names which is unrealistic in today's culture.
It reminded me too closely of the soap opera Neighbours.
The welfare workers also did not look realistic, they were dressed tackily and comically rather than officially and their bumbling antics made them appear unthreatening.
They also appeared shady and not the type of people to employ to work in the area of protecting children.

Finally, as it was more of a quality, artistic film
I would have preferred Amy's father to be a theatre or orchestra musician or, at least, in a virtually unknown band.
A popular culture famous rock star somehow appeared unbefitting.
Nonetheless, these problems were only slight and did not subtract from the overall beauty of 'Amy' as an outstanding instance of Australian cinema.

Hmmm... actually while I was watching the TV that time (I had no choice to select a better option for better TV programme)... undeliberately I watched this film with absent-minded eyes. Later, I realised, this such a good movie.

I also enjoy to watch great movies like Life Is Beautiful, Children of Heaven - by Majid Majidee and not forgetting 'Escape To Victory' starring by Sylvester Stalone & Football Legend - Pele.