Jacques Pepin Quotes

In Cuba you get a quarter of a chicken per month. They give you one bread per person a day. So, it makes your life really tough.

I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.

Well, as a general remark, I would say that I was discouraged by the physical and economic conditions in continental Europe after the war.

Well, you know... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating rabbit. That's what there was in the butcher shop.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

I was born in 1954. My parents were brought up in the war years, and life was hard.

Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.

Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.

I'm really still a child of the Forties. I still think about it a lot, about the repercussions of armed conflict. Until 1953 we had rationing. We couldn't buy meat, we couldn't buy pleasurable goods like cigarettes and sweets. I didn't starve - my family were lucky - but I knew what it was like standing in line waiting for foodstuffs.

People were consuming on average less calories after the war than during the war. Things were still very tough. If you look at the film footage of London streets, even in areas which weren't slums, there are kids in the streets who are dirty and have no shoes on. It was rough. There was a real edge.

George Stigler was a delightful correspondent. In a letter from London in 1948, after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, "So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds.

When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere.

People who, like me, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s after World War II, grew up with cars.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn't have anything. It's influenced the way I look at the world.

I have stopped at farm after farm where lean, underfed women and sickly men repeated again and again the same story—little food and no opportunity to get more.

No one has starved.

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulations, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

How fared the Irish artisan—how fared the Irish peasant? Where one pined, as he yet pines, in your beggared cities, the other starves, upon your fruitful soil.

[In the 1924 presidential election, campaign contributions from workers to the senator were not as high as had been hoped for by the campaign staff. Those pay checks are all that stand between starvation for those workers and their families. You are asking too much of them.

When the fish price is too low, the fishermen starve.

On my way back to Missouri I stopped in St Louis and I saw my first bread line – 200 starving men forming a gray line as they waited for food. The sight of them disturbed me.

The English proletariat lives under such wretched conditions that a few extra privations will not cause it much discomfort.

Food Will Win the War

If Victual should prove scarce, as we have not Goods or Money for any Value to send out for Corns [food grains like wheat]; so only a part of the People could be maintained: The better part would have Bread, but the more necessary part, the Laboring Men would be forced to leave the Country, or to starve in it.

It was in the early spring of 1871 when we entered Paris in one of the first trains that had arrived in that city since the suppression of the Commune. It was dark when we detrained and when we asked for a cab we were laughed at; the porter asked of what use a cab would be since all the horses had been eaten. We were also told that all the famous hotels whose names we remembered had been converted into hospitals.