These meaningful gifts give back to the people whose countries you pass through and put what the world eats on the coffee table.

Attention, last-minute shoppers! Consider a rooster for that person who has everything. Or two rabbits. Or even a goat, if you're feeling flush.

Like other charities such as Oxfam Canada ( www.oxfam.ca/ ), the Christian charity World Vision has gotten hip to clever marketing with a campaign that lets you "shop" for gifts. At www.worldvision.ca/ , you can browse various items, and while your sister won't ever see the two hens and a rooster you've bought her for $55, you can send her a card explaining that, according to the charity, they can produce up to 150 eggs a year for a family. Two rabbits ($35) can reproduce into a family business; a goat ($100) can yield 250 litres of milk a year; and two mosquito nets ($30) will help protect eight children from malaria. The site lets you shop for gifts by price range ($50 and under, for example) or category (animals, living essentials).

World Vision is but one globally focused charity registered with the Canada Revenue Agency ( www.cra-arc.gc.ca/donors/ ). There are many others to choose from, such as Care Canada ( www.care.ca/ ), the Canadian Red Cross Society ( www.redcross.ca/ ), and Médecins Sans Frontières ( www.msf.ca/ ). Consider donating to your preferred organization, and not just for that year-end tax receipt. When we travel to developing countries, we can't ignore people's day-to-day circumstances, but back home it's easy to forget.

The world between pages

Coffee-table books are often just clutter. One that's worthy of displacing the java is Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (Ten Speed Press, $29.95). Just released in a hefty paperback edition, the book written by Faith D'Aluisio and photographed by Peter Menzel follows a format similar to that of Menzel's excellent 1995 Material World: A Global Family Portrait (Sierra Club Books, $38). The latter is a collection of photographs featuring average families in 30 nations, each shown in their home with all their worldly possessions set out on display.

Hungry Planet focuses solely on food, and sets forth portraits of 30 families in 24 countries surrounded by a week's worth of groceries. Flipping from the Browns in their outback Australian kitchen filled with packaged cereals, fish fingers, and trays of ground beef to the Namgays of Bhutan with their baskets of fresh mustard greens, chilies, and red rice, you're struck by how differently seasonal and regional products factor in their diets. Accompanying stats on the amount families spend on certain categories of food (fast food, for example) and wellness indicators (obesity rates, the percentage of the population that's undernourished) fill out the picture.

The evocative photojournalism really tells the stories. Images of the families visiting local markets, preparing meals, and eating together get to the core of their culture and personalize statistics. An overhead shot in a Somaliland market shows colourfully clad women hunched over rows of raw mutton and camel meat laid bare on wooden slab tables. Vendors in India juggle babies with baskets of okra and tomatoes. A man in North Carolina takes another sanitized package from a supermarket shelf and adds it to those in his cart.

Hungry Planet is a great gift for anyone interested in food, travel, or the global politics of hunger. But if you're looking for something less earnest, The Onion offers relief. Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth (Little, Brown and Company, $32.50) provides "statistics on all of the Earth's 168, 182, or 196 independent nations", and humour anyone can appreciate.