Quotes & Sayings About Food Prices

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake. — Kurt Vonnegut

Most people out there are just trying to keep their job and provide for their family. If climate change is now a once-in-a-mortgage problem, and if food prices start to spike, people will pay attention. — David Titley

"The ultimate recession": a recession caused not by failed regulation and bankers' greed, but by very high oil prices, food and water shortages, disappearing forests, accelerating climate change, forced migration and mass civil disruption ... The long and the short of it, unfortunately, is this: more politicians still believe that economic recovery depends on continuing to live beyond our means (financially and ecologically) than on learning to live within our means. And that's why the ultimate "Perfect Storm" recession still looms on the horizon — Jonathon Porritt

In 302, the Roman emperor Diocletian commanded "there should be cheapness," declaring, "Unprincipled greed appears wherever our armies ... march ... Our law shall fix a measure and a limit to this greed." The predictable result of Diocletian's food price controls were black markets, hunger and food confiscation by his soldiers. Despite the disastrous history of price controls, politicians never manage to resist tampering with prices
that's not a flattering observation of their learning abilities. — Walter E. Williams

Some argue that now isn't the time to push the green agenda - that all efforts should be on preventing a serious recession. That is a false choice. It fails to recognise that climate change and our carbon reliance is part of problem - high fuel prices and food shortages due to poor crop yields compound today's financial difficulties. — Lucy Powell

What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic. — Muhammad Yunus

Food cost rather than the absolute absence of food can often be the key factor in shortages and possible starvation. During the height of the Irish Potato Famine in 1845, Ireland was actually exporting food to England. The peasants starved because they could not afford to buy food at the local prices, enhanced by the loss of the potato crop. There was enough food, in absolute terms, to keep everyone alive; they died because they had no money to buy it. — Peter Wadhams

Food and energy account for a significant portion of household budgets, so the Federal Reserve's inflation objective is defined in terms of the overall change in consumer prices. — Janet Yellen

Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds. — Jonathan Sacks

With the news reporting soaring food prices and shrinking crops on all continents, the project made sense, even good sense. But he nevertheless felt unsettled about it, like a warning he had received and then forgotten, the shadow of a Kraken passing beneath the surface. — Berit Ellingsen

We cover hamburgers, chicken, veggie burgers, salads, we've got a pretty broad range. To me, McDonald's isn't only about the food. It's about the prices, it's about the way we eat. — Jim Cantalupo

If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture. — Bill Gates

When it comes to ethnic markets, most of the shoppers really are very well informed. Most of the shoppers come from cultures - including China - where food preparation receives a lot more attention than in the United States. These shoppers also are largely immigrants or children of immigrants. Either they come from cultures where most food prices are lower than in the United States, or the immigrants have lower incomes themselves, or both. — Tyler Cowen

There are currently three places to obtain food in Dublin, where the prices vary according to whim: Chester's, the Fae, and the black market. If you ask me, they're all black. Of course nobody does ask me because nobody sees me because I lay low all the time and I've got a boyfriend who isn't much for talking.
I snort. I just thought of Jericho Barrons as my "boyfriend." I doubt that cataclysm was ever a boy and he certainly can't be called friendly.
It's official. I'm losing it. — Karen Marie Moning

In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before. — Mitt Romney

Milo had been earning many distinctions for himself. He had flown fearlessly into danger and criticism by selling petroleum and ball bearings to Germany at good prices in order to make a good profit and help maintain a balance of power between the contending forces. His nerve under fire was graceful and infinite. With a devotion to purpose above and beyond the line of duty, he had then raised the price of food in his mess halls so high that all officers and enlisted men had to turn over all their pay to him in order to eat. Their alternative - there was an alternative, of course, since Milo detested coercion and was a vocal champion of freedom of choice - was to starve. — Joseph Heller

Women oftentimes are the ones making those economic decisions, sitting around the kitchen table and trying to figure out how to pay for rising gas prices or food prices or the health insurance costs. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

When the commodities go up and the cost of transportation is going up, and the value of the dollar is going down, it's all going to translate to an 8 to 10 percent rise in food prices. — John Catsimatidis

If commodity prices are no longer going up then food prices in the grocery store will no longer go up, at some point. — Matt Martin

As to the latter point - that by having a child in America you are somehow starving a child in Bangladesh - remember that agricultural economics is not a zero-sum game. Farmers want to make a living, so as demand increases, so does production. Not only that, but agricultural productivity has increased so rapidly that in some countries the government pays farmers not to plant crops in an effort to keep food prices from dropping. — J. Budziszewski

Travelling, I worry about luggage, prices, and strange food. At home, I am free to broaden my mind by thinking about the higher things. — Mason Cooley

The idea that when people see prices falling they will stop buying those cheaper goods or cheaper food does not make much sense. And aiming for 2 percent inflation every year means that after a decade prices are more than 25 percent higher and the price level doubles every generation. That is not price stability, yet they call it price stability. I just do not understand central banks wanting a little inflation. — Paul Volcker

When food prices surge, poor families suddenly find themselves unable to afford enough nutritious food. If this happens during the first thousand days of a child's life, the damage to his or her body and mind can be permanent. — Ban Ki-moon

Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn] — Michael Pollan

Where food trucks are concerned, nothing's better than having a whole flock of them at one location. Competition not only improves the quality of the food, it prompts these rolling lunch wagons to lower prices and offer specials, too. — Robert Sietsema

Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business. — Jack Welch

If you look at the way society is structured , it is structured to keep people overwhelmingly in a state of fear and always trying to survive, in terms of physically, in terms of terror, in terms of financially, the credit crunch, rising food prices; all this is survive, survive, survive. — David Icke

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control
what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another. — Michael Pollan

While it is clear that our food choices are a matter of personal responsibility, it is important to recognize that we do not make our choices in a vacuum. We select our foods in an environment toxic with government policies that encourage cheap prices for foods with low nutrient value, and in which billions of dollars have been spent to convince us to distrust ourselves, to overeat, and to eat foods laced with ingredients that raise our setpoints and damage our health. — Linda Bacon

Rice at present prices provides more food for the money than most of the other cereals. — David F. Houston

Due to climate change and growing world population, the demand for vital requirements for human survival will continue to rise. If the world is not producing as much food as demanded, the prices will continue to rise affecting the poor and lower classes more, in every society. It is sad, looking at the shocking statistics of people who die every day as well as the spread of preventable diseases in developing nations, just because people do not have access to clean drinking water. So are we proud of our leadership contribution? Are we doing enough to increase food production, harvest rain water and replenish underground water reserves? — Archibald Marwizi

Rising oil prices have focused the world's attention on the depletion of oil reserves. But the depletion of underground water resources from overpumping is a far more serious issue. Excessive pumping for irrigation to satisfy food needs today almost guarantees a decline in food production tomorrow. — Lester R. Brown

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? — Thomas Friedman

For industrial goods, productivity growth has been more rapid than for the economy as a whole, so that prices in this sector have fallen relative to the average of all prices. Foodstuffs is a sector in which productivity has increased continuously and crucially over the very long run (thereby allowing a greatly increased population to be fed by ever fewer hands, liberating a growing portion of the workforce for other tasks), even though the increase in productivity has been less rapid in the agricultural sector than in the industrial sector, so that food prices have evolved at roughly the same rate as the average of all prices. Finally, productivity growth in the service sector has generally been low (or even zero in some cases, which explains why this sector has tended to employ a steadily increasing share of the workforce), so that the price of services has increased more rapidly than the average of all prices. — Thomas Piketty

Models used to describe and predict inflation commonly distinguish between changes in food and energy prices - which enter into total inflation - and movements in the prices of other goods and services - that is, core inflation. — Janet Yellen

Thousands of Mexicans gathered in Mexico City to protest high food prices. The protest only lasted an hour, because everyone had to leave for their jobs in Los Angeles — Conan O'Brien

The world is only one poor harvest away from chaos. We are so close to the edge that politically destabilising food prices could come at any time — Robert Zoellick