Food System Quotes

Ladies and Gentlemen: The American food system is completely safe!

The Safe and Affordable Food Labeling Act aims to address unnecessary impediments to feeding the world.

The brutal fact is that which foods are available in your grocery store is determined by trade wars, agriculture policy, and the outsized power wielded by large corporations.

Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system. It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization, big use of water, and also refrigeration.

Do I think it would be better that people knew the atrocities that Monsanto commits or the influence of corporate money in government or government subsidies for our current food system that's a disaster and not sustainable? Yes. That would be really great, but a lot of that information unless you look for it, it's not available to you because that's not the discussion that's happening on mainstream news.

I think that once I started connecting dots of where my food was coming from and the reality of that, as opposed to maybe what you think it is as a little kid, and the realities of how my food was getting to my plate and what the real effects of that are. When I started connecting those dots, I couldn't disconnect them.

Whenever you have war, you often have more deaths because the medical system and the food system breaks down, than you have directly through violence.

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.

The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…. Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where the animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us. This isn’t just about what we’re eating. It’s about what we’re allowed to say. What we’re allowed to know.

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.

Too many Americans are getting sick on our over-commercialized food system.

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

The industrial food system ships in high-calorie, low-nutrient, processed food from thousands of miles away. It leaves us disconnected from our food and the people who grow it.

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.

How is the government going to run without people like us? We make 35 percent of the bread in this country, and that much of the margarine, and cooking oil, and all the other things.

I have a tremendous platform and responsibility to talk to people about these issues about sustainability and about health and wellness when it comes to food.

Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'

There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is - the fresher, the more transparent that system is - the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage.

When you actually integrate the health savings from an improved food system, eliminating food deserts, ensuring that everyone can afford a healthy diet, that you don't have to be sort of a person of substantial means in order to have access to healthy food, there are remarkable health improvements.

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.

If you eat, you should be concerned about the people who are providing you with food.

Food is at the core of our lives in ways we don't always think about - how it affects our environment, how it affects our health and well-being, how it affects the expense of society, the expense of government.

The single most important problem with food in this country is that it is vastly overproduced.

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.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.