Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

Usually, cheap food is not nutritious. You're feeding people, but you're not really feeding people something that is good for them.

I don't know too many parents that want to feed their kids soda, but high-fructose corn syrup is cheap. The price of soda in 20 years has gone down 40 percent while the price of whole foods, fruits and vegetables, has gone up 40 percent and obesity goes up right along that curve.

Unhealthy food has gotten a whole lot cheaper and healthy food has gotten a whole lot more expensive… We have to make healthy food cheaper and unhealthy food more expensive, but we are not ready to go there yet.

Usually, cheap food is not nutritious. You are feeding people, but you are not really feeding people.

To a significant degree, we are an overfed and undernourished nation digging an early grave with our teeth, and lacking the energy that could be ours because we overindulge in junk foods.

We must pay greater attention to keeping our bodies and minds healthy and able to heal. Yet we are making it difficult for our defences to work. We allow things to be sold that should not be called food. Many have no nutritive value and lead to obesity, salt imbalance, and allergies.

A few years ago, kids from poor areas in France were asked to draw items of food. For a chicken, they drew a drumstick. For a fish, they drew a fish stick. Those are extremes, but there is a lot that needs to be done to help children discover good food.

Close to a billion people - one-eighth of the world's population - still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve.

The lack of access to proper nutrition is not only fueling obesity, it is leading to food insecurity and hunger among our children.

It’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

Hunger is the most influential disease.

There are at least 1 billion people who struggle for basic caloric protein sufficiency; probably another 2 billion people … who have serious micronutrient deficiency… We don’t have a healthy food supply for the world, nor is it assured for the future.

The less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.

More die in the United States of too much food than too little.

I love the accessibility that my great nation affords us, but it is virtually inescapable for most people in America, and many places abroad, to rely on inexpensive yet unhealthy meals as a main source of sustenance.

If people were able to afford to eat nutritious food, I think they would make better choices.

People don't speak of hunger when they know what it is to be hungry.

Child hunger and child obesity are really just two sides of the same coin. Both rob our children of the energy, the strength and the stamina they need to succeed in school and in life. And that, in turn, robs our country of so much of their promise.

We're the only nation in the world where most of our poor people are fat.

The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.

Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get a hamburger than a salad, and that's insane.

We have these weapons of mass destruction on every street corner, and they're called donuts, cheeseburgers, French fries, potato chips, junk food. Our kids are living on a junk food diet.

The federal government spends about $2.51 per child per day to feed them lunch. Out of that, you have to pay for labor, facilities, and administrative costs, leaving about a dollar for food. Imagine trying to feed yourself a nutritious meal every day with only a dollar. Very difficult.

Just because you eat doesn't mean you eat smart. It's hard to beat a $1.99 wing pack of three at a fast-food restaurant - it's so cheap - but that wing pack isn't feeding anyone, it's just pushing hunger back an hour.

I didn't know what to do with calories.