How much food does your household go through in a week? What are your go-to family meals? And how much do you spend on food? You can get a glimpse of how others answered these questions in Oxfam’s new photo series, which depicts people from around the globe with one week’s food supply for their families.

Building on an idea that originated with 2005′s  Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, the new images feel especially timely now, when reports about half of the world’s food going to waste vie for space with news about rising global food prices. According to a recent article accompanying some of the photos in the UK Independent, “There is deep injustice in the way food is grown and distributed … the world’s poorest people spend 50-90 percent of their income on food, compared with just 10-15 percent in developed countries.”

As you can probably guess, the families’ diets differ depending on where they live. But if if there’s one common thread that links these images, it’s that we all have to eat. We all face challenges and successes when it comes to feeding our families. And we can all help to make the food system fairer for everyone.

So check out seven highlights below. Then tell us in the comments: What does your week’s food supply look like? How does your family measure up?

Shahveller, Azerbaijan

Photo: David Levene/Oxfam

Mirza Bakhishov, 47, his wife, Zarkhara, 37, and two sons, Khasay, 18 and Elchin, 15, own a small plot of land where they grow cotton and wheat as well as animal feed. “Our small cattle and poultry [are] everything for us. All our income and livelihood is dependent on them,” said Bakhishov.

Vavuniya, Sri Lanka

Photo: Abir Abdullah/Oxfam

Selvern, 70, far right, and her daughters have been members of Oxfam’s local dairy cooperative for four years. Her youngest daughter Sukitha, second from right, works at the cooperative and is also trained as a vet. Selvern gets up at 5:30 every morning to help her daughters milk their cows; she sends most of the milk to the co-op with Sukitha and uses the remainder to make cream and ghee for the family.

Mecha, Ethiopia

Photo: Tom Pietrasik/Oxfam

A week’s food supply for Wubalem Shiferaw, her husband Tsega, and 4-year-old daughter Rekebki includes flour, vegetable oil, and a paste of spices called berbere. Tsega works as a tailor, while Wubalem follows a long local tradition and supplements her income with honey production. An Oxfam-supported cooperative helped Wubalem make the transition to modern beekeeping methods, which produce greater yields.

Yegeghus, Armenia

Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith/Panos

The Josephyan family from with their weekly food supply, which includes wheat flour, dried split peas, sugar, and cooking oil. The family supplements their diet with eggs laid by their chickens and wild greens from the fields.

London, UK

Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith/Oxfam

Ian Kerr, 30, with his family and a week’s food supplied by a charity food bank. Ian left his job to become a full-time carer to his disabled son Jay-J, 12. Also pictured are his daughter Lillian, 5, and mother-in-law Linda, 61. Kerr says the family’s favorite food is spaghetti Bolognese, but Lillian says her favorite is Jaffa Cakes.

Kaftarkhana, Tajikistan

Photo: Andy Hall/Oxfam

BiBi-Faiz Miralieba and her family, from left to right: son Siyoushi, 11, niece Gulnoya Shdova, 14, and children Jomakhon, 6, Shodmon, 9, and Jamila,13. Like many women in rural areas of Tajikistan, Miralieba is now the head of her household as her husband has migrated to Russia to find work.

Gutu, Zimbabwe

Photo: Annie Bungeroth/Oxfam

Ipaishe Masvingise and her family with their food for the week, which includes grains and groundnuts as well as fruits like pawpaw and oranges. Masvingise, a farmer, said she sells extra grain from her harvests to pay for school fees and medical costs, and to support members of her extended family who don’t own their own land.

Sarah Peck is Oxfam’s email advocacy writer (and occasional photographer).

Not long ago I attended an Oxfam America Hunger Banquet® in Des Moines, Iowa, with over 200 people, most of them high school students from the World Food Prize Global Youth Institute. This was just one of hundreds of Hunger Banquets taking place around the country this Thanksgiving season.

To get a glimpse into what a Hunger Banquet looks like, check out some of my photos below, and hear from a few people who attended the event:

Photo: Sarah Peck / Oxfam America

“It’s one thing to talk about hunger, or to read about it. It’s another thing to actually experience it.”  – Event participant Read the rest of this entry »

Malian rice farmer Moussa Ag Demba visited an Iowa organic farm last week. Photo: Sarah Peck / Oxfam America

I admit it: I’ve taken rice for granted. I’ve let it languish, starchy and plain, in neglected cardboard take-out containers. I’ve pushed it to the side of my plate in order to get to the good stuff.

But over the last few days, I’ve come to see this humble grain in a whole new light.

It all started during lunch last Friday at a brick-walled Vietnamese restaurant on the outskirts of Des Moines. With me were Minh Le, Oxfam America country representative in Vietnam; assorted staffers and translators; Moussa Ag Demba, a farmer from Douékiré, Mali; and Duddeda Sugunavva, a farmer from Andhra Pradesh, India.

Oxfam America, Africare, and WWF-International had invited these farmers to the US—along with a Vietnamese farmer, Le Ngoc Thach—to talk about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). This innovative approach to growing rice produces higher yields using less water and fewer pesticides. All three farmers led their communities in introducing SRI, and were here to share their success stories with everyone from US government officials to agriculture experts at the World Food Prize Symposium.

But that day at the restaurant, the farmers were hungry. And they craved something more familiar than the meat-and-potatoes Iowa cuisine.

Then rice arrived, white and gleaming, each serving molded into a perfect dome.

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Jacqueline Morette during a visit to an Iowa farm, where she talked about the common challenges faced by farmers worldwide. Photo: Sarah Peck / Oxfam America

Jacqueline Morette almost didn’t make it to Des Moines, Iowa, last Friday morning. She’d just arrived from the airport with moments to spare, though you’d never know it from her calm smile as she took her place onstage, facing an audience of hundreds of food and agriculture experts.

A farmer from central Haiti, Morette was part of a panel on tackling malnutrition—an issue she knew intimately.

“In Haiti … infrastructure in rural areas is in bad shape, or nonexistent. Much of the country is mountainous. We farmers depend on rainfall: too much rain, you lose. Too little rain, you lose,” Morette explained through a translator. “Despite our efforts, most Haitians are food insecure. A lot of our kids are malnourished.”

The panel marked the final day of the World Food Prize Symposium, an annual conference that brings together leaders from the sciences, academia, corporations, and governments. The theme of this year’s symposium was “Take It to the Farmer”, referring to the importance of supporting subsistence farmers worldwide. Though about 60 international farmers attended the conference, only a few took the stage as panelists.

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Did you know that women produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in developing countries, but own just 2 percent of the land? That water shortages and drought affect women first? Or that women farmers have fewer opportunities than men to start businesses or reach new markets where they can sell their crops?

Emelina Dominguez is a farmer and agricultural technician from La Paz, Honduras, who trains other women in farming techniques. Photo: Gilvan Barreto / Oxfam

I didn’t know any of this myself until I started writing Oxfam America’s latest fact sheet, Fight hunger: Invest in women farmers. As I gathered the facts from Oxfam research and outside sources like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, I began to get a clearer picture of the connection between women’s efforts and the world’s food supply.

Basically, hunger is not about too many people and not enough food. It’s about power, and inequalities in access to education and resources. If you’ve ever been to an Oxfam America Hunger Banquet, you might remember the MC saying those words… maybe right around the time you realized that not everyone at the banquet would be eating the same meal.

I ended up using those words on the fact sheet, too, because they seemed to sum up the whole problem: Women’s hard work feeds millions, and women produce the world’s staple crops, but they’re often battling against deep-rooted inequalities. Add in the consequences of climate change (droughts, floods, and unpredictable rainy seasons) and you’ve got a true threat to our global food supply.

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Many US farmworkers—like these North Carolina tobacco pickers—face low pay and hazardous working conditions, but a new bill called AgJOBS could help improve their situation. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America

Sarah Zipkin is the project officer for Oxfam’s decent work program in the US. This is the second of two guest posts by Sarah about food, farms, and what it means to support workers’ rights in 2009.

Less than a week after I marched for workers in North Carolina–complete with tobacco leaf sign around my neck–I was back in Boston representing Oxfam at a pre-release screening of Food, Inc, a film opening soon that takes a disturbing look at the mechanized food industry in this country, from field to fork.

As I watched it, I was glad I’d eaten a veggie pizza beforehand, since I learned that a lot of our meat comes from mechanized slaughterhouses–often the site of inhumane conditions and questionable practices. I am already obsessed with looking over labels in the grocery store, but since seeing this film, I’m even more fixated. Now that I’ve actually started thinking about where our food comes from, I can’t help but wonder: what dark secrets hide behind those colorful packages?

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Maleka Khatun sits in the doorway of her home near Kurigam, Bangladesh. Though Khatun said she completed her cooking an hour ago, there was too little left for her after her husband and children had eaten. She feared that this might be her family’s only meal that day. Photo: Oxfam

OK, so you know the global food crisis is affecting millions. But did you know that the crisis affects women even more than men?

That’s the subject of a recent brief by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Helping Women Respond to the Global Food Price Crisis. According to IFPRI,

Higher food prices increase the burden for women, who must stretch the limited food budget even further. Women often end up being the shock absorbers of household food security, reducing their own consumption to leave more food for other household members. In Bangladesh, even before the crisis, almost 60 percent of households reported that women skip meals more often than men.

As food prices rise and staples consume more of the food expenditures, households frequently cut back on both food quantity (caloric intake) and quality (dietary diversity), which provides micronutrients that girls and women particularly need…

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Right on the verge of the holiday gorging season, I’ve gotten a glimpse of what it means to be hungry.

It all began with a knee injury earlier this year. Deprived of my usual stress busters–running and yoga—I took to filling that extra time with food. So a few weeks ago, I decided to embark on a “cleanse.” Based on a book called If the Buddha Came to Dinner, the cleanse prescribed a restricted diet as a means of transformational nourishment: renewed energy; healthy eating; and clarity of mind, body, and spirit.

No matter how much and how often I ate, the first five days—when you can eat only fruit and vegetables—were tough. Caffeine withdrawal gave me headaches and nausea. Instead of my old friends, sugar and wheat, I had to turn to kale and beets. My dreams of chocolate croissants remained unfulfilled. Slowly, I began to get into the groove, but I was always hungry.

One Sunday, on a walk through the vast, tree-filled Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, I came upon a couple sitting on a blanket unwrapping sandwiches. My heart skipped a beat: Was that bread? Indeed, I saw olive bread glistening in the sun. Bits of juicy avocado. Potato chips…

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An improved irrigation system in Shasha Korke is a significant improvement for a modest investment. (Photo by Petterik Wiggers/Oxfam America)

When I visited Shasha Korke in Ethiopia a few months ago, I had what I call a good Oxfam Day. A good Oxfam day is when I get to meet people and organizations that take a little help from Oxfam and achieve something positive. It doesn’t mean that everything is perfect now, but there is a significant improvement and people feel good about what they have done. And they can show that when they work together, they can accomplish something important.

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At a camp for displaced people in Democratic Republic of Congo, sacks of grain and jugs of oil await distribution. Photo by Liz Lucas for Oxfam America

I’m on the road doing some reporting and woke this morning still full from a late supper last night: a hefty hamburger, a heap of greasy fries, and a crisp, green salad. Lord knows how many calories I packed away. That’s not the kind of thing I usually think about. But I did this morning when I opened an e-mail from my colleague Ian Mashingaidze in South Africa.

It included a link to a report just issued by the International Food Policy Research Institute: an index measuring the state of hunger globally. It ranks countries using three indicators. One of them is the proportion of people who are calorie deficient, or undernourished.

Called the 2008 Global Hunger Index, it is not a snapshot of what’s happening this moment because its most recent data is from 2006. It does not reflect the current wild gyration in food prices and what that means for the ability of families to feed themselves. But the index does paint a picture of how bad things were for many people—before they began to get worse.

And this is what got me: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 74 percent of the population is calorie deficient. Basically, that means three-quarters of the Congolese people are undernourished.

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