What does a child actually eat in a week? Los Angeles photographer Gregg Segal answered that question visually. For his project Daily Bread, children kept a diary of every meal, snack and drink for seven days. Segal’s team then recreated that food and photographed each child lying among it, shot from above on a backdrop chosen to reflect their home and personality.
Over about three years he worked with roughly 60 children in nine countries: the United States, Brazil, India, Senegal, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Italy and Germany. The portraits became the book Daily Bread: What Kids Eat Around the World, which includes 52 of them.
The pattern that emerges is striking. Children in rural or lower-income homes often eat simple meals cooked from scratch, while many children in wealthier cities eat more packaged snacks, sweets and takeaway. Segal’s stated goal was to encourage home cooking and whole foods before eating habits set for life. Below are 25 of the portraits, grouped by region, with what each child’s week tells us.
How Daily Bread was made
The book cover, above, shows the method at its clearest: plates of the week’s food fanned around a child, every item placed by hand. Segal had already explored consumption in an earlier series, 7 Days of Garbage, in which adults lay in a week’s worth of their own rubbish. Daily Bread turned the same idea toward children and diet.
On his website Segal explains why. He links childhood eating to later diabetes, heart disease and some cancers, notes that fast-food chains are spreading into new markets where they are seen as a status symbol, and points to a University of Cambridge study that found some of the healthiest eating patterns in poorer countries, not rich ones. The World Health Organization’s figures show why the topic matters: about 400 million children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 were overweight in 2024, and the share in that age group has risen from 8% in 1990 to 20%.
A caveat applies to every picture: each records a single week, often an unusual one. Several families said holidays, travel or the shoot itself changed what was eaten. The portraits are snapshots, not dietary verdicts.
Brazil: from the Amazon to Brasília
Kawakanih Yawalapiti, 9, Upper Xingu, Mato Grosso
Kawakanih lives in the Xingu Indigenous Park, a protected area of the Amazon basin now hemmed in by cattle ranches and soy farms. Her week was almost entirely fish she helps catch in the river, cassava made into tapioca, fruit and nuts, with no packaged food at all. Her mother, the Indigenous leader Watatakalu Yawalapiti, raised her to speak the family’s endangered ancestral language, which Segal’s notes say had only a handful of speakers left. To reach the studio in Brasília they travelled about 31 hours by boat, bus and car; the red body paint she wears comes from urucum (annatto) seeds.
Davi Ribeiro de Jesus, 12, Brasília
Davi’s family lives in one room in Santa Luzia, an informal settlement beside the Estrutural landfill outside Brasília, once described as the largest open dump in Latin America. Most days he eats rice and beans, sometimes with a little pork, and he can make himself eggs, porridge and pasta. Segal notes he never goes to bed hungry. In his football shirt, surrounded by simple plates, he looks every inch the kite-flying, dog-adopting boy his story describes.
Ademilson Francisco dos Santos, 11, Vão de Almas, Goiás
Ademilson comes from a remote Kalunga community in the Cerrado savanna, around 200 km of rough road from the nearest town, with no electricity or running water. His family grows rice, cassava, beans, squash, corn, coffee and sugar cane without machines or pesticides, and gathers wild fruits such as buriti, pequi and mangaba. The long branch beside him is a buriti cluster, a palm so useful locals call it a “tree of life”. He had never eaten pizza before the trip to Brasília, and did not like the hot dog he tried in the city.
Henrico Valias Sant’Anna de Souza Dantas, 10, Brasília
Henrico lives in a well-off Brasília suburb, and his week shows it: a wide mix including feijoada, Brazil’s black bean and pork stew, but also chocolate bars, Nutella, brigadeiros and packaged snacks. He enjoys inventing his own dishes, such as steak topped with sliced banana. Seen beside Kawakanih and Ademilson, his portrait shows how much diet in one country can vary with income and city life.
India and Senegal
Anchal Sahani, 10, Chembur, Mumbai
Anchal’s family lives in a tin shelter on a construction site, on her father’s wage of under five dollars a day. Even so, her mother cooks from scratch: okra and cauliflower curry, lentils and roti fill most of the plates. Anchal dreams of returning to the village in Bihar where she was born and of going to school to become a teacher. Her pink party dress was her own choice for the portrait.
Adveeta Venkatesh, 10, Mumbai
Adveeta, the daughter of two government scientists, is vegetarian and loves South Indian food, especially dosas with chutney and yogurt. Her grandmother cooks most meals, and the family eats together without screens. Yet her week also included plenty of sweets and packaged snacks, which surprised her father when he saw the photo come together. Her flat overlooks Deonar, India’s oldest and one of its largest landfills.
Meissa Ndiaye, 11, Dakar
Meissa lives with his parents and brother in a single room in Parcelles Assainies, a sandy district built in the 1970s for Dakar’s growing population. He loves goat meat and sweet porridge, but in his diary week he mostly ate baguettes filled with spaghetti, peas or chips, a very common cheap street meal in Senegal. A Quran school student and football fan, he poses in a blue boubou.
Sira Cissokho, 11, Dakar
Sira, one of nine children, comes from Tambacounda in eastern Senegal. Segal’s notes say she does not always get enough to eat; chicken is a treat for special days. Much of her family’s food, including millet and peanuts, is home grown, and she already knows how to make ngalakh, a sweet millet and peanut dish.
Frank Fadel Agbomenou, 8, Dakar
Frank lives in a wealthy part of Dakar, where a family cook prepares much of his food. He eats almost anything and is especially fond of fish, plus peanuts from a plant on the terrace. His spread is noticeably more varied and more processed than Meissa’s or Sira’s, a reminder that income shapes diet in every country.
Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates
Beryl Oh Jynn, 8, Kuala Lumpur
Beryl attends a Chinese-medium national school near her family’s condominium, wearing its uniform in her portrait. Her favourite dish is spaghetti carbonara, she grows bok choy and spinach on the balcony, and she is not allowed fizzy drinks. Her week mixes rice dishes, fruit and Western food, typical of urban Malaysia.
Tharkish Sri Ganesh, 10, and Mierra Sri Varrsha, 8, Kuala Lumpur
These siblings descend from a great-grandfather who came from South India to work as a rubber tapper and was later forced by the Japanese army to labour on the Thailand–Burma “Death Railway” during the Second World War. Their food sits on banana leaves, as in many South Indian homes: rice, curries, and puttu, steamed rice flour layered with coconut. Weekend takeaways from KFC or Pizza Hut appear too, and Mierra said afterwards she could eat less processed food.
Siti Khaliesah Nataliea Muhamad Khairizal, 9, Kuala Lumpur
Siti, one of five children, wears a pink baju kurung and headscarf. Her mother sets the mealtime rules, including a prayer before eating. Siti loves spaghetti carbonara and fried instant noodles, and her spread shows a lot of fried food and sweets alongside rice dishes. She learns Mandarin at a Chinese school and is saving coins for a tablet.
Yusuf Abdullah Al Muhairi, 9, Dubai
Yusuf’s mother, who came to Dubai from Ireland, is a pastry chef and chocolatier, and he loves her cooking; he can also make his own scrambled eggs on toast. His portrait, in a white kandura on a red Emirati-style rug, mixes home-made dishes with pastries and snacks. He hopes to become a pilot or a police officer.
Europe: France, Germany and Italy
Rosalie Durand, 10, Nice
Rosalie’s father runs a restaurant and taught her to make crêpes, salads and lentils with sausage, her favourite. Her week includes plenty of fish such as sardines, fresh vegetables and bread, close to a classic Mediterranean diet. She trains in Thai boxing, which explains the gloves and shorts in her portrait.
June Grosser, 8, Hamburg
June, the daughter of a fashion photographer, was entirely at ease in front of the camera. Her favourite meal is schnitzel, and her week also shows pretzels, salad, pasta and pizza. Asked about role models, she said she would rather be her own.
Greta Moeller, 7, Hamburg
Greta, holding a doll and wearing headphones, loves fish fingers with mashed potato and apple sauce, a German childhood classic, and cannot stand rice pudding. Her spread is a mix of home cooking, bread and sweets. She spends a lot of time with her grandparents, gathering chestnuts on the way to their house each autumn.
John Hintze, 7, Hamburg
John calls himself an omnivore and eats breakfast of muesli and toast in bed, brought by his parents. He loves his grandmother’s roast and a cashew curry, and fizzy orange is a weekend-only treat; on weekdays he drinks water. He hopes to become an underwater archaeologist, inspired by snorkelling trips with his father.
Andrea Testa, 9, Catania, Sicily
Andrea lives near Mount Etna in a house surrounded by lava stone and a small garden. His mother does the cooking, and his favourite is pasta carbonara with plenty of pancetta; cauliflower is the one thing he refuses. His spread, on a bright coral-patterned cloth, is mostly pasta, fish, fruit and home dishes.
Paolo Mendolaro, 9, Belpasso, Sicily
Paolo lives in Belpasso, a town on the slopes of Etna, where his working mother still makes Sicilian dishes such as pasta alla Norma and cannoli. He can make pizza, pasta and biscuits himself. His family admitted that his diary week fell during beach holidays and included more fast food than usual, which shows why one week is only a snapshot.
United States: Southern California
Hank Segal, 8, Altadena
Hank is the photographer’s son, and the project began at home. The family grows a long list of produce, from tomatoes and artichokes to grapes and pomegranates, and Hank is an adventurous eater who once ate the eye of a grilled fish at a Lebanese restaurant. He wants to be a NASA engineer.
Leona “Nona” Del Grosso Sands, 6, Glendale
Nona lives with her mother and her cat. Her mother insists on vegetables, so her week is genuinely colourful, but Nona admits to a strong sweet tooth. Oatmeal and pancakes are within her cooking skills, and she once looked after her mother through an illness.
Isaiah Dedrick, Long Beach
Isaiah, who was 16 at the time of the shoot, grew up with his mother and grandmother; his grandmother is the main cook. His favourite food is orange chicken with fried rice. Seeing his week of food laid out persuaded him to cut out snacks. His wish is that no one in the world goes hungry.
Cooper Norman, 10, Altadena
Cooper, photographed in his recital suit and bow tie, studies classical guitar and karate. His mother is from Thailand, and Thai food is his favourite; at school he helps grow fruit and vegetables. He says he will try almost anything.
Alexandra, 9, and Jessica Lewis, 8, Altadena
The sisters live with their two fathers, both engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a garden full of fruit trees, with chickens supplying eggs almost daily. Alex makes her own quick meals like quesadillas and loves macaroni cheese; Jessica favours sweets and ham pizza. They arrived on roller skates, and took leftover food home for their hens.
Daria Joy Cullen, 6, Pasadena
Daria’s week was bacon, pasta, buttered popcorn and sweets; she has refused fruit and vegetables since she was a toddler. Her parents and paediatrician were concerned about her limited diet, a reminder that very selective eating in young children is worth discussing with a doctor rather than treating as simple fussiness.
What the portraits add up to
Seen together, the photographs make Segal’s point without a single chart. The children with the least money, such as Kawakanih, Ademilson and Anchal, often ate the simplest, least processed food, while many children in comfortable city homes ate a week heavy with packets, sweets and takeaway. That is not a rule: Rosalie, Beryl and the Lewis sisters show how home cooking and gardens shape diet anywhere.
For parents, the practical lesson is simple and backed by the WHO: cook at home when you can, keep fruit, vegetables and water easy to reach, limit sugary drinks and snacks, and involve children in growing or preparing food. Several children in this series changed their own habits just by seeing a week of eating laid out in front of them. Keeping a simple food diary for a week can do the same at home.
Sources: Photographs © Gregg Segal, Daily Bread project, greggsegal.com (also on Instagram); World Health Organization: Obesity and overweight fact sheet; first shared via Bored Panda.
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