Food Justice Quotes & Sayings

The food chain has victims at both ends: even rapists and murderers need someone to look down on, and kid killers will do nicely. — Michael Marshall

Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless. — Norman Borlaug

When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Jesus' life and words are a challenge at the same time that they are Good News. They are a challenge to those of us who are poor and oppressed. By His life He is calling us to give ourselves to others, to sacrifice for those who suffer, to share our lives with our brothers and sisters who are also oppressed. He is calling us to "hunger and thirst after justice" in the same way that we hunger and thirst after food and water: that is, by putting our yearning into practice. — Cesar Chavez

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. — Michelle Alexander

Music and the arts feed our souls, but a decent wage puts food on the table. Musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations are a potent force to fight for social justice. — Tom Morello

I was never a Republican, because those gentlemen, distinguished as they are, have only one real interest, and that is the making of special laws in order to protect their fortunes. I also know they have no compassion for the masses of the people in this country who are without money and who are, many of them, without food or houses. I have always thought that only as a Democrat, reflecting Jefferson and Jackson, could justice ever be done the people because, at this moment in history, ours is the only party which is even faintly responsive to the force of ideas. — Samuel J. Tilden

We know about your presence that fills the world, that occupies our life, that makes our life in the world true and good. We notice your powerful transformative presence in word and in sacrament, in food and in water, in gestures of mercy and practices of justice, in gentle neighbors and daring gratitude. We count so on your presence and then plunge - without intending - into your absence. We find ourselves alone, abandoned, without resources remembering your goodness, hoping your future, but mired in anxiety and threat and risk beyond our coping. In your absence we bid your presence, come again, come soon, come here: Come to every garden become a jungle Come to every community become joyless sad and numb. We acknowledge your dreadful absence and insist on your presence. Come again, come soon. Come here. — Walter Brueggemann

The good guys fight for freedom, justice and most words that don't put food on the table. The bad fight to scrub those words from our speech. Only problem is, both sides claim to be good. — David Gunn

Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind. — Norman Borlaug

The Indians are the Italians of Asia", Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. "It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indians in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna - they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The Language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. They are nations where love - amore, pyaar - makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. — Gregory David Roberts

By 2005, Monsanto had filed ninety lawsuits against U.S. farmers for patent infringement, meaning GM genes found in the fields of farmers that had not paid for the right, and Monsanto had been awarded over $15 million. I'll tell you here and now: We have a screwed-up justice system. These lawsuits and seeds are nothing less than corporate extortion of American farmers, said Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, as reported in the Seed Savers Summer Edition 2005. — Janisse Ray

One important aspect of justice, Jose Miranda reminds us, involves the restoration of what has been stolen. Giving food to the hungry or clothing to the naked is not a charitable handout but an exercise in simple justice - restoring to the poor what is rightfully theirs, what has been taken from them unjustly. — Robert McAfee Brown

How we eat is connected to how we care for the planet
which is connected to how we use our resources
which is connected to how many people in the world go to bed hungry every night
which is connected to how food is distributed
which is connected to the massive inequalities in our world between those who have and those who don't
which is connected to how our justice system treats people who use their power and position to make hundreds of millions of dollars while others struggle just to buy groceries
which is connected to how we treat those who don't have what we have
which is connected to the sanctity and holiness and mystery of our human life and their human life and his little human life
which is why we hold up that baby's hand and say to the parents, 'it's just so small. — Rob Bell

Why do so many today want to wander off to South Africa or Kenya or India or Russia or Honduras or Costa Rica or Peru to help with justice issues but not spend the same effort in their own neighborhood or community or state? Why do young suburbanites, say in Chicago, want to go to Kentucky or Tennessee to help people but not want to spend that same time to go to the inner city in their own area to help with justice issues? I asked this question to a mature student in my office one day, and he thought he had a partial explanation: 'Because my generation is searching for experiences, and the more exotic and extreme the better. Going down the street to help at a food shelter is good and it is just and some of us are doing that, but it's not an experience. We want experiences. — Scot McKnight

However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? 'If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!' shouts the child. — Audre Lorde

If [the loss of fertility of the soil and the loss of soil as a renewable resource] does happen, we are familiar enough with the nature of American salesmanship to know that it will be done in the name of the starving millions, in the name of liberty, justice, democracy, and brotherhood, and to free the world from communism. We must, I think, be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason, not even for any apparently good reason. We must be prepared to say that enough food, year after year, is possible only for a limited number of peaople, and that this possibility can be preserved only by the steadfast, knowledgeable care of those people. — Wendell Berry

The Spirit of Justice is the single most important seed Piers planted; if you don't live by its teaching, your chance of salvation is nil. Unless Conscience and the Cardinal Virtues form the food that people live on, just take my word for it, they're utterly lost - every single living soul among them! — William Langland

They [the church] wanted us to give food out to malnourished mothers and children, but they didn't want us to question why we were malnourished to begin with. They wanted us to grow vegetables on the tiny plots around our houses, but they didn't want us to question why we didn't have enough land to feed ourselves. [p. 16] — Elvia Alvarado

Let the revolting distinction of rich and poor disappear once and for all, the distinction of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed. Let there be no other differences between human beings than those of age and sex. Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be one education for all, one food for all. — Francois-Noel Babeuf

Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received. — Walter Benjamin

It is to the United States that all freemen look for the light and the hope of the world. Unless we dedicate ourselves completely to this struggle, unless we combat hunger with food, fear with trust, suspicion with faith, fraud with justice - and threats with power, nations will surrender to the futility, the hopelessness, the panic on which wars feed. — Omar N. Bradley

The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with. — Elvia Alvarado

Are you like all other men after all? The poor should have no justice, just as they have no food, no decent shelter, no regular livelihood? Is that how your saviour Jesus treated the poor? — Jeanette Winterson

She reminded him of ( ... ) all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! — Joseph Heller

That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbism does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency. — Cornelia Otis Skinner

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

we can conclude that a professed Christian who is not committed to a life of generosity and justice toward the poor and marginalized is, at the very least, a living contradiction of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God, whose Father "executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry — Timothy J. Keller

There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace. — William Bourke Cockran

In the USA, where so many people compete for one and the same thing, where job opportunities, residential facilities, and food resources have to be spread over so many people, the question of justice becomes more imperative than ever before if communal and individual life is to be made possible and enjoyable. — Ndabaningi Sithole

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only one day, of modern warfare. — Peter Ustinov

It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can't sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today. — Naomi Klein

If life doesn't seem livable with the body's nature corrupted, not even with every sort of food and drink and every sort of wealth and every sort of rule, will it then be livable when the nature of that very thing by which we live is confused and corrupted, even if a man does whatever else he might want except that which will rid him of vice and injustice and will enable him to acquire justice and virtue? — Plato

Battles are won one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible.This is known as the piecemeal solution. — Neel Mukherjee

Happy is the one whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, 6 the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them. He remains faithful forever, 7 executing justice for the exploited and giving food to the hungry. The Lord frees prisoners. 8 The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord raises up those who are oppressed. The Lord loves the righteous. 9 The Lord protects foreigners and helps the fatherless and the widow, but He frustrates the ways of the wicked. — Anonymous

Much of the way food has been shaped and formed in prisons is due to the cultural thought about prisoners in general, and how they should be treated by society and by the state. Food in prison is a reflection of culture and cultural thinking about criminal justice and reform. — Erika Camplin

Lem glowered. Your lion friends ride into some village, take all the food and every coin they find, and call it foraging. the wolves as well, so why not us? no one robbed you, dog. You just been good and foraged. — George R R Martin

What's the point of these demagogic campaigns if these hungry kids are still here on the road? All little ones deserve protection, food, love and peace. — Carla Perez

In high school, I stole a six-foot submarine sandwich from a banquet room in front of several hundred people. I did it because I was in marching band, and we were promised food if we played, and they broke their promise. It was my first and only heist, motivated by justice and hunger. — Greg Van Eekhout

Dr. Wyman preached a God I couldn't quite see in my mind, and certainly couldn't love. I dimly pictured some kind of Grandfather, who dealt out to bad people their awful "just deserts," which I thought must be poisoned food at the end of delicious meals. — John Hersey

Compassion is not a sometime action; it's an every time passion! You can't be compassionate for less than 7 days in one week ... That's first class hypocrisy! — Israelmore Ayivor

Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food. — Elias Canetti

The real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food. Enough grain is squandered every day in raising American livestock for meat to provide every human being on earth with two loaves of bread. — John Robbins