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.

Women sign their names in support of Oxfam’s food justice campaign, GROW, at a World Food Day event yesterday in Sri Lanka. Photo: Sandun Thudugala/Oxfam

Sri Lanka is the latest country to join Oxfam’s global efforts around World Food Day. Oxfam’s Sandun Thudugala sent us this update about a World Food Day event yesterday in Colombo, which brought together leaders from government and local communities to talk about solutions to hunger:

“This week, we celebrate World Food Day (16^th October) at a time when world is facing one of its biggest food crises in history … [and] around 4 million Sri Lankans are undernourished. This is a great challenge in Sri Lanka where expectant mothers and children [are] the most affected by malnutrition. Almost one in five children has a low birth weight and around 500,000 children under the age of 5 are reported to be underweight. Global food price increases and extreme weather events are already having an impact on vulnerable communities in the country.

In a country like Sri Lanka, this is an unacceptable situation. Being a country blessed with all the natural resources necessary for food production, Sri Lanka has the potential to build a sustainable food system that can be a model for the rest of the world.

Oxfam in Sri Lanka is working with a large number of organizations, from grassroots level to national level, to support small scale food production … [and] the rights of and access of small scale food producers to resources and services.  Oxfam’s GROW campaign will support the efforts of women, men, community groups, and the government of Sri Lanka to build … a country without hunger.”

In Thiraimadu camp, Sri Lanka,Yealini, holds her one-year-old baby, Rohith. They stand outside their post-tsunami transitional shelter. Photo by: Howard Davies/Oxfam.

I’ve been thinking a lot about heritage lately. My husband, John, and I are expecting our first child in about a week. John’s a New Englander, who traces his roots back to various European intersections, but not one that he identifies with in particular. I’m from California, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants.

Everyone we know is fascinated by the sort of child the two of us would produce; the fact that we’ve decided not to find out the gender just makes it all the more intriguing. Will the baby have my South Asian features – big eyes, dark hair, caramel coloring – or will he or she have my mother-in-law’s trademark heart-shaped face, almond eyes, and long lashes. Could it be the “perfect baby” (someone actually said this to me once) and be a lovely cross of both?

And since it will be a biracial child, how will we make sure he or she has some connection to its roots? Read the rest of this entry »

Dabo Huka sits with her daughter, Tume. Photo by Sarah Livingston/Oxfam America

A news story earlier this month reported that women in the US may be about to reach a turning point, thanks to the recession. For the first time in history, more of them will be employed than men. But it’s not because women are suddenly flocking to the job market and landing fabulous opportunities. It’s that men are getting laid off in great numbers—while women hold onto the lower-paying jobs they’ve always had.

When I read that story I thought ah, how like the rest of the world the mighty US is becoming. Here, as in many developing countries I’ve visited with Oxfam, women are shouldering the burden of keeping their families together—both financially and domestically. More than a handful of women I know, myself included, have become the chief bread winners in our households. Read the rest of this entry »

Painted cool aqua blue or turquoise, the walls in some of the houses in coastal southern Sri Lanka are mostly bare. These are new houses—or ones that have been repaired—and belong to families who survived the 2004 tsunami. Uncluttered, the walls serve as simple frames for the photographs of mothers, fathers, and children propped on shelves or dangling from nails behind pieces of dusty glass. Read the rest of this entry »

In the peace of early evening, as the heat ebbed and the dogs curled into the shallow beds they had scratched in the dust, E.T. Sarath sat folded in his sarong on the veranda of the temple near his home on the southern tip of Sri Lanka. A monk at the temple had offered us tea, steaming and electrifyingly sweet in porcelain cups, and we were sipping it quietly, thinking about all that Sarath had told us and worrying that his tsunami tale—blunt and bitter—could be so different from W.H. Priyanka Krishanthi’s.

“Now people have come to a situation that’s worse than the tsunami—and that’s dependency,” Sarath had said. “Most of the NGOs are responsible for this situation.” Read the rest of this entry »

Coir Spinning Wheel

What’s that sound? The crank of a wheel, powered by a young boy, spinning out yard upon yard of filament made of coir—the fiber from coconut husks that forms the basis of a major cottage industry in Sri Lanka. He was hard at work, along with two older women, in the late afternoon recently in the village of Bambaranda where many women help support their families by turning coir into products like rope, door mats, and sacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Before she left on a field visit to India and Sri Lanka, a colleague dropped off a present at my desk: three red-skinned potatoes in a plastic sack—the remains of the stash she keeps handy for lunch. She didn’t want them to rot while she was away, and being a spud fan I was glad to get them, especially now that I’ve learned that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato—so named by the United Nations at the behest of Peru.

In a year that’s experiencing a frightening global food crisis, choosing to promote this stalwart tuber—people in the Peruvian highlands have been eating them for more than 8,000 years—seems more than serendipitous. It’s imperative. There are lots of reasons why. Read the rest of this entry »