Food System Quotes

#1. A robust regional food system that benefits eaters and farmers cannot be achieved in a marketplace that is controlled, top to bottom, by a few firms and that rewards only scale, not innovation, quality, or sustainability.

Wenonah Hauter

#2. I think there's a lot of work to be done with our societies. My biggest passions are the environment and health. And when I say 'health' I mean the secrets behind health and our food system.

Shailene Woodley

#3. The food system is a very complex beast. There are people who are going to get their food at Wal-Mart or at Safeway; they're not going to the farmers' market. Those people need choices too.

Michael Pollan

#4. The mechanical food system externalizes a lot of costs like obesity or Type 2 diabetes.

Joel Salatin

#5. We need real farmers who grow real food, and the will to reform a broken food system. And for that, we need not only to celebrate farmers, but also to advocate for them.

Mark Bittman

#6. I think the biggest impediment to fixing the food system in the United States is that we expect food to be cheap. We want to by other things with our money. We're so disconnected from agriculture - from the culture in agriculture.

Alice Waters

#7. The food system is not a free market. In this country, we impose reasonably high standards of animal welfare - but we haven't applied the same standards to food we import, so all we're really doing is exporting cruelty from Britain elsewhere, and at the same time undermining our farmers.

Zac Goldsmith

#8. The era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak in 2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events will have enormous implications for America's petroleum-dependent food system

Richard Heinberg

#9. I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.

Michael Pollan

#10. Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.

Joel Salatin

#11. Our food system takes abundant grain,which people can't afford,and shrinks it into meat,which better-off people will pay for.

Frances Moore Lappe

#12. Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

Michael Pollan

#13. By defining the problem as "hunger," the emergency food system is helping to direct our attention away from the more fundamental problem of poverty, and the even more basic problem of inequality.

Janet Poppendieck

#14. We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.

Wenonah Hauter

#15. American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.

Wendell Berry

#16. Voices of Transition educates, opens minds to new possibilities and presents a new vision of how our food system could be. As a historic transition unfolds, this film is a very powerful tool.

Rob Hopkins

#17. I realize that at a certain point if we're going to change our food system, it's going to be the next generation that's going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.

Michael Pollan

#18. A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices.

Barbara Kingsolver

#19. If you send it halfway around the world before it is eaten, an organic food still may be 'good' for the consumer, but is it 'good' for the food system?

Gary Paul Nabhan

#20. What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.

Eric Schlosser

#21. I'm very hopeful that we'll see some change in our food system. I don't know how far we'll go, or how quickly we'll get there, but there is no question that a significant percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with the food system.

Michael Pollan

#22. Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.

Eric Schlosser

#23. As an anti-hunger advocate, I found the perplexity of the obesity problem and the hunger problem existing side-by-side in our increasingly global food system begged further investigation.

Ellen Gustafson

#24. The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: 'Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?'

Joel Salatin

#25. We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.

Joel Salatin

#26. To address our current food system problems, I propose a series of local, regional, national and global conversations - starting around the dinner table - to rethink the food we produce, buy and eat.

Ellen Gustafson

#27. We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.

Vandana Shiva

#28. If you're going to change the food system, there is a lot that you, the consumer, can do on your own; but in the end, it will be very important to make changes at the national level.

Michael Pollan

#29. There is nothing I love more than helping someone realize how corrupt our food system is and them making great changes in their own life because of it.

Kristin Cavallari

#30. Greed is bad because it's like unassimilated food in our system. If we eat more than our body requires, it will lead us to indigestion.

Hina Hashmi

#31. One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.

Thomas Mann

#32. All the food that is put into the stomach that the system cannot derive benefit from, is a burden to nature in her work.

Ellen G. White

#33. Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.

Jack London

#34. I believe we can create a truly humane, sustainable, and health food production system without killing any animals. I imagine a revolution in veganic agriculture in which small farmers grow a variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes, all fertilized with vegetable sources.

Gene Baur

#35. Supporting local farmers is important to me, which is not only good for the local economy and better for the environment, there is evidence that eating locally grown food strengthens your immune system.

Suzanne Whang

#36. I went into raw vegan for a while, but I prefer cooked food, the way it smells, the way it feels going through your system.

John Salley

#37. Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.

Thomas Sankara

#38. The demand for beef in Canada remains strong because I think people in America, in North America, know that we have a very strong food safety system and that our food is safe to eat.

Ann Veneman

#39. We have by far the most expensive health system in the world. We spend 50 percent more per person than the next most costly nation. Americans spend more on health care than housing or food.

Kathleen Sebelius

#40. The linear 'Take - Make - Dispose' system, which depletes natural resources and generates waste, is deeply flawed and can be productively replaced by a restorative model in which waste does not exist as such but is only food for the next cycle

Ellen MacArthur

#41. Even if you don't eat at a fast food restaurant, you're now eating food that's produced by this system.

Joel Salatin

#42. You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money ... It's understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system - not scarcity - creates worldwide hunger for millions of people.

Frances Moore Lappe

#43. If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#44. But Australia faces additional regional and global challenges also crucial to our nation's future - climate change, questions of energy and food security, the rise of China and the rise of India. And we need a strong system of global and regional relationships and institutions to underpin stability.

Kevin Rudd

#45. The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.

Michael Pollan

#46. One thing I'll tell you is the food in Sacramento is off the charts. You've got good Asian food, the farm system where everything is natural, which I believe in. I like organic.

George Karl

#47. The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.

Joel Salatin

#48. The earth is a planet that contains living things; I am a planet that contains living dreams! The earth revolves around the sun; I revolve around my passion!

Israelmore Ayivor

#49. USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don't set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers who failed to meet the standards, something the USDA, incredibly, lacks the authority to do.)

Michael Pollan

#50. War is the extreme edge of capitalism: an economic system so designed that it is always tipped in balance so that the mouth of the few is open
at the exact place where the food will fall from the lips of the hungry onto the tongues of the already satisfied.

Patricia J. McLean

#51. I don't confuse my digestive system, I just season simple food with hunger

Richard Proenneke

#52. Everything is so chaotic. My nervous system can't handle it. I need my peace, so, every once in a while, while the kids are at school, I lie in bed, close the curtains, watch television and eat food.

Leslie Mann

#53. If you're overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you're creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system.

Carl Safina

#54. An awful lot of food is thrown away. This you can call a spillover. It doesn't sort of enter into our economic system because it's a consequence of running things in a highly competitive way: the free market, global pricing and so on.

John Sulston

#55. I love Chinese food, like steamed dim sum, and I can have noodles morning, noon and night, hot or cold. I like food that's very simple on the digestive system - I tend to keep it light. I love Japanese food too - sushi, sashimi and miso soup.

Shilpa Shetty

#56. I have been vegetarian for twelve years. And I have never been seriously ill. Vegetarian food strengthens the immune system. I think that meat makes you sick.

Bryan Adams

#57. Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of food do to the digestive system? I am sure that an unhappy or suspicious stomach, constricted and uneasy with worry, cannot digest properly.

Julia Child

#58. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.

Michael Pollan

#59. Referring to obesity as a "form of malnutrition" comes with no moral judgments attached, no belief system, no veiled insinuations of gluttony and sloth. It merely says that something is wrong with the food supply and it might behoove us to find out what.

Gary Taubes

#60. By giving the FDA adequate resources and authority to both prevent outbreaks and intervene once they appear, we can support the administration's efforts to reassure the parents of America that the food they feed their children is the product of the safest system in the world.

Diana DeGette

#61. Naturally, the system would have to be rigidly closed, recycling all food, air, and other expendables. But, of course, that's just how the Earth operates - on a slightly larger scale.

Arthur C. Clarke

#62. I believe the best way to activate genius within the immune system is by ingesting certain superherbs and superfoods, taking probiotics and cultured foods, minimizing toxic food exposure by eating pure organic raw-living foods, and making appropriate healthy lifestyle improvements.

David Wolfe

#63. Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

Frans De Waal

#64. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism.

Lierre Keith

#65. Yes, people need food and education. But one of the cornerstones of any society is a well-functioning legal system.

Cherie Blair

#66. We don't have a farm-to-table food safety system. I keep saying this. It came as a big surprise to the FDA that tomatoes were being grown in the United States, sent to Mexico for packing, and then sent back. I mean, they had no idea that our food chain worked like this.

Marion Nestle

#67. The moment I walk into a room, I have kind of like the Terminator's tracking system for where the food is, and I can get there immediately.

Mike Birbiglia

#68. I actually start my day with a cup of warm lemon water with cayenne pepper. It jump-starts your detoxifying system in your body, jump-starts your liver, helps you eliminate the food that you ate the day before, and also just gets your body in an alkaline state ready to ward off disease.

Vani Hari

#69. Probably the biggest thing around not training correctly is eating. You've got to fuel your system correctly, and I think what we're very unfortunate with in this country [UK] is the [lack of] education around food and nutrition.

Greg Rutherford

#70. The American political system is like fast food - mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.

P. J. O'Rourke

#71. I get really mean or emotional if I don't have food in my system.

Kendall Jenner

#72. We don't really have any that protect the food supply from farm to table. We have a food safety system that's piecemeal, largely divided between two agencies that don't talk to each other very much. Neither agency can enforce regulations from the farm to the table.

Marion Nestle

#73. All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food panic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for

Kim Stanley Robinson

#74. If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#75. Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.

Michael Pollan

#76. The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.

Vandana Shiva

#77. I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.

Melita Norwood

#78. I was concerned with something like the notion of 'language speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.

Martha Rosler