The authors used a typical recent day as a starting point for their interviews with 80 people in 30 countries. They specifically chose not to cover daily caloric averages, as they wanted to include some extreme examples of eating, like one woman's diet on a bingeing day or the small number of calories a herder in Kenya ate during extreme drought. The texts in the book provide the context for the photographs, detailing each person's diet, culture, and circumstance at the moment they were photographed: a snapshot in time. A complete methodology is available in the book.