Hunger

"Nälkä ja uni on köyhän herkkuja. (Kärsämäki, Northern Bothnia) (KRA)"

"Kyllä nälkä opettaa lappalaisen ampumaan. (Sodankylä, Lapland) (KRA)"

"Nälg on kõige parem kokk. (EVS)"

"The Gods have not ordained hunger to be our death: even to the well-fed man comes death in varied shape, The riches of the liberal never waste away, while he who will not give finds none to comfort him, The man with food in store who, when the needy comes in miserable case begging for bread to eat, Hardens his heart against him, when of old finds not one to comfort him. Bounteous is he who gives unto the beggar who comes to him in want of food, and the feeble, Success attends him in the shout of battle. He makes a friend of him in future troubles, No friend is he who to his friend and comrade who comes imploring food, will offer nothing."

"When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine.”"

"During the election, Prime Minister Harper ended some of his speeches with the words “God bless Canada.” Indeed, the prophet Isaiah says that God blesses you when you “share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house” (Isaiah 58.7). We urge the Prime Minister to spend tax dollars now in a way that will bring the homeless poor into their own house, and allow them the dignity of sharing their bread with others."

"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet."

"It was a warm day and he had a long way to go. He hadn't gone more than half-way when a sort of funny feeling began to creep all over him. It began at the tip of his nose and trickled all through him and out at the soles of his feet. It was just as if somebody inside him were saying "Now then, Pooh, time for a little something"."

"Henry Ducard: Over the ages, our weapons have grown more sophisticated. With Gotham, we tried a new one - economics. But we underestimated certain of Gotham's citizens. Such as your parents. Gunned down by one of the very people they were trying to help. Create enough hunger, and everyone becomes a criminal."

"I have no doubt that every form of cannibalism, excepting at most those which happen in times of extreme hunger and whose only purpose is to secure survival, has a pathological, perverse background."

"it is a kind of hunger that brings us to love"

"As valuable as animal protein is, livestock are relatively inefficient protein-making machines. ...only 23 percent of the protein that a cow takes in ends up as usable protein in its meat or milk. Beef cattle pay back about 10 percent... while pigs return 12 percent. ...Grazing in a pasture, a 1,000-pound cow turns the grass into edible protein at the rate of about a pound a day. The same weight of bacterial organisms... produces 2,750 pounds of protein in the same "grazing" day. Bacteria are also less demanding... they do not care what the weather is and do not need as much personal attention..."

"Peru, a country which is severely lacking in animal protein, has... a thriving fish meal industry which produces more than a million tons of nutritious fish meal annually. What frustrates the food experts is that almost the entire output of fish meal—derived from anchovies... is exported to North America, where it is used in poultry feed."

"Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing."

"Relatively available, but relatively untapped, food sources, whose protein content can be favorably compared to animal protein, are the oil seeds, such as soybean, peanuts, and cottonseed. Potentially these seeds could contribute and additional twenty million tons of protein to the expanding population, but except for soybean, very little reaches human stomachs in critically underfed areas."

"Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and stared up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil."

"A child with loses little weight, but... is very susceptible to cuts and bruises, poor bone development, enlarged liver, mental dysfunction and a premature death. In kwashiorkor areas, the peak death rate is sixty per thousand as compared to the mortality of four per thousand in other areas. ... the condition can be quickly corrected if the child's diet is supplemented with essential animal protein."

"Part of her wanted to be a swan. The other part wanted to eat one. She had broken her fast on some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs weren't so bad when you got used to them. Worms were worse, but not so bad as the pain in your belly from days without food."

"Nutritionists suggest that a normal adult male should receive about seventy grams of protein a day, with larger amounts going to pregnant women, children and the sick. Of the total protein requirement, about thirty grams should be of animal origin. ...only one quarter of the world's people receive more than thirty grams of animal protein daily; many receive far less... the present total world deficit is about five million metric tons, one quarter of a year's total supply."

"There are now about 100,000 different types of protein-producing plants that are almost completely ignored as food staples. These unused protein suppliers are the fungi, which include the yeasts, mushrooms and molds. ...there are many carbohydrate-containing plants that can be used as food for fungus... in low-protein areas of the world. ...even wood pulp has been a fair starting material for the protein-manufacturing machinery of the '. Dr. [William D.] Gray has calculated that if only seven major crops were converted into fungal protein, the protein would meet the yearly needs of more than four and a half billion people."

"New cottonseed processes... can produce high protein concentrates containing little or none of the poisonous pigment . All of the processes use a variety of chemical solvents... to sidestep the need for protein-destroying heat which was used in earlier processes."

"But hunger is probably the strongest motive for eating what under normal circumstances would be considered inedible. Perhaps if the ominous prognostications of pundits terrified by untrammeled population growth came true, one can imagine a world in which each member of humanity crouches on his sternly alloted sand pile and presents his plastic card at. the state controlle commissary for his weekly ration of fish protein. At such a time, the placenta may well become a delicacy of haute cuisine. In that far-off dy mankin may find useful the valeditory used by the Toradja natives of the Celebes who hang the placenta in the fork of a large Ficus tree and on departing address it: "You afterbirth, do not say that I do not ove you; we love you. Do not tickle the soles of the feet of the feet of your little brother (sister) and do not pinch his (her) stomach."

"690 million people in the world are hungry – almost 9% of the entire population of the planet. Many more people could slip into hunger this year. We must make food systems more sustainable and healthy diets affordable & accessible for all."

"The slippers of the mortal Earth, Now touched the chest of the Moon. Oh, It is shameful that the misery of hunger is still continuing as it was in the past."

"What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger."

"If all the protein of just the cottonseed, peanuts and soybean now grown were made available as a concentrate for human consumption, this would have the effect of doubling the quantity of protein concentrates now available. This alone would wipe out the world protein concentrate deficit that now exists."

"Because of so many wars, climate change, the widespread use of hunger as a political and military weapon, and a global health pandemic that makes all of that exponentially worse, 270 million people are marching toward starvation. Failure to address their needs will cause a hunger pandemic which will dwarf the impact of COVID. And if that’s not bad enough, out of that 270 million, 30 million depend on us 100% for their survival. How will humanity respond?"

"For Schwartz, the hunger for food is just one of the body’s appetites; for my female students, it is “the” most insistent craving and the preeminent source of their anger and frustration with the body, indeed, of their “terror” of it."

"Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything, what's a little bit of hunger? I can go a little while longer."

"Do you wish to honor the Body of the Savior? Do not despise it when it is naked. Do not honor it in church with silk vestments while outside it is naked and numb with cold. He who said, “This is my body,” and made it so by his word, is the same that said, “You saw me hungry and you gave me no food. As you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.” Honor him then by sharing your property with the poor. For what God needs is not golden chalices but golden souls."

"Humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan, where the U.N. estimates that more than half of the population suffers from acute hunger. The country has fallen into an economic crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government following the Taliban takeover in August. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves that are held in banks overseas. “Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently visited Afghanistan and with refugees in Iran, where as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing every day. “They told me very clearly, 'We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through.'”"

"There is more than enough food in the world to feed our population of 7.8 billion. But, today, more than 820 million people are hungry & #COVID19 is making things worse. To eradicate hunger, we must ensure inclusive access to healthy and nutritious food."

"To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, "If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can.""

"When scolded for masturbating in public, he said "I wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.""

"The gnawings of hunger conquers by degrees, till all that a man has he would give in exchange for a single crust of bread."

"Well, I was myself recently also in Afghanistan, and I sat down with the mothers in these displacement camps around Kabul. And I asked them, “What about the future? What do you think of the future?” And they told me very clearly, “We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter, unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through and unless there is a public sector again that is able to provide services.” It is as acute as that. Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August."

"Money should not go to the military political group called the Taliban that took power by force. The money should go to the people, and it is possible. So, number one, there has to be trust funds, as we call it, that is held by U.N. agencies, that funnel money directly to the hospitals, that you just showed, where people are dying at the moment. It can go straight to the teachers that were on the payroll of the World Bank previously, can go straight to them. So, the money can go through us, international organizations, straight to the people. Secondly, unfreeze those funds that will enable banks to function again. At the moment, we cannot even buy relief items in Afghanistan. We have to ship them over, take them over from Pakistan and Iran, which means that employment is dying in Afghanistan. And thirdly, donors, come down from the fence. See that we are there. We are reliable channels for funding. The money will go to the people. Transmit funding, not just come with pledges. This will not become Switzerland in a long time. You have to share the risk with us to save lives this winter."

"FAO’s imperative is to make sure no one suffers from hunger. Yet, while many people may not be “hungry” in the sense that they are suffering physical discomfort caused by a severe lack of dietary energy, they may still be food insecure. They might have access to food to meet their energy requirements, yet are uncertain that it will last, or they may be forced to reduce the quality and/or quantity of the food they eat in order to get by. This moderate level of food insecurity can contribute to various forms of malnutrition and can have serious consequences for health and well-being."

"Much has changed since 1974, when FAO first began reporting on the extent of hunger in the world. The world population is growing steadily and is increasingly urbanized. Technology is evolving incessantly and the economy is more and more globalized. At the same time, there are worrying global trends in malnutrition, including a rapid rise in overweight and obesity, even as forms of undernutrition persist. The way food is produced, distributed and consumed worldwide has also changed dramatically. This vastly different world calls for new ways of thinking about hunger and food insecurity."

"We, the Heads of State and Government, or our representatives, gathered at the World Food Summit at the invitation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, reaffirm the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger. We pledge our political will and our common and national commitment to achieving food security for all and to an ongoing effort to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015. We consider it intolerable that more than 800 million people throughout the world, and particularly in developing countries, do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. This situation is unacceptable. Food supplies have increased substantially, but constraints on access to food and continuing inadequacy of household and national incomes to purchase food, instability of supply and demand, as well as natural and man-made disasters, prevent basic food needs from being fulfilled. The problems of hunger and food insecurity have global dimensions and are likely to persist, and even increase dramatically in some regions, unless urgent, determined and concerted action is taken, given the anticipated increase in the world's population and the stress on natural resources."

"National and international relief operations are often the only solution for hungry people facing immediate starvation, and should continue to be a priority and be provided in an impartial and apolitical manner, with due respect to national sovereignty and in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the guiding principles of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 46/182. However, emergency food assistance cannot be a basis for sustainable food security. Conflict prevention and resolution, and stepped up rehabilitation and development promotion activities, which prevent recurrence of and reduce vulnerability to food emergencies, are essential elements of food security. Emergency preparedness is a central element for minimizing the negative effects of food emergencies and famines."

"Because of population growth, the very small decrease in the number of hungry people has nevertheless resulted in a reduction in the proportion of undernourished people in the developing countries by 3 percentage points – from 20 percent in 1990–92 to 17 percent in 2001–03. (…) the prevalence of undernourishment declined by 9 percent (from 37 percent to 28 percent) between 1969–71 and 1979–81 and by a further 8 percentage points (to 20 percent) between 1979–81 and 1990–92."

"FAO’s most recent estimates put the number of hungry people at 923 million in 2007, an increase of more than 80 million since the 1990–92 base period."

"Good progress in reducing the share of hungry people in the developing world had been achieved – down from almost 20 percent in 1990–92 to less than 18 percent in 1995–97 and just above 16 percent in 2003–05. The estimates show that rising food prices have thrown that progress into reverse, with the proportion of undernourished people worldwide moving back towards 17 percent."

"The number of undernourished people in the world remains unacceptably high at near the one billion mark despite an expected decline in 2010 for the first time since 1995. This decline is largely attributable to increased economic growth foreseen in 2010 – particularly in developing countries – and the fall in international food prices since 2008. The recent increase in food prices, if it persists, will create additional obstacles in the fight to further reduce hunger. However, a total of 925 million people are still estimated to be undernourished in 2010, representing almost 16 percent of the population of developing countries. The fact that nearly a billion people remain hungry even after the recent food and financial crises have largely passed indicates a deeper structural problem that gravely threatens the ability to achieve internationally agreed goals on hunger reduction: the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and the 1996 World Food Summit goal. It is also evident that economic growth, while essential, will not be sufficient in itself to eliminate hunger within an acceptable period of time."

"The analysis of hunger during crisis and recovery brings to the fore the vulnerability to economic shocks of many poor countries. Lack of appropriate mechanisms to deal with the shocks or to protect the most vulnerable populations from their effects result in large swings in hunger following crises. Moreover, it should not be assumed that all the effects of crises on hunger disappear when the crisis is over. Vulnerable households deal with shocks by selling assets, which are very difficult to rebuild, by reducing food consumption in terms of quantity and variety and by cutting down on health and education expenditures – coping mechanisms that all have long-term negative effects on quality of life and livelihoods."

"The number of people in the world affected by hunger continued to increase in 2020 under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. After remaining virtually unchanged from 2014 to 2019, the PoU increased from 8.4 percent to around 9.9 percent between 2019 and 2020, heightening the challenge of achieving the Zero Hunger target in 2030. The 2020 estimate ranges from 9.2 to 10.4 percent, depending on the assumptions made to reflect the uncertainties around the assessment. In terms of population, it is estimated that between 720 and 811 million people in the world faced hunger in 2020. Considering the middle of the projected range (768 million), 118 million more people were facing hunger in 2020 than in 2019, with estimates ranging from 70 to 161 million."

"With less than a decade to 2030, the world is not on track to ending world hunger and malnutrition; and in the case of world hunger, we are moving in the wrong direction. This report has shown that economic downturns as a consequence of COVID-19 containment measures all over the world have contributed to one of the largest increases in world hunger in decades, which has affected almost all low- and middle-income countries, and can reverse gains made in nutrition. The COVID-19 pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg, more alarmingly, the pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities forming in our food systems over recent years as a result of major drivers such as conflict, climate variability and extremes, and economic slowdowns and downturns. These major drivers are increasingly occurring simultaneously in countries, with interactions that seriously undermine food security and nutrition."

"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."

"In spite of the bacteria's bad reputation, oil chemists and nutritionists anticipate that someday they might be able to put these pests to work as valuable protein producers. The bacteria use petroleum hycrocarbons as a source of carbon...Dr. [Alfred] Champagnat... calculates that if petroleum were used as a protein source, it would make only a small dent in the oil reserves."