Food sovereignty... is most of all characterized by it’s conversations around how to end hunger and poverty.

I do think we have a food problem. In 2006, which is the year for which we have the latest data, 35.5 million Americans were food insecure. That means there are 35.5 million Americans who are so hard up at some point during the year that they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. That's a lot of Americans. They don't get reported very much because there's nothing spectacular about people skipping a meal because they're poor. The media tends to ignore that, just as it ignores the sort of chronic food shortages elsewhere in the world.

The current food crisis is an opportunity for companies to engage in agriculture or biotechnology.

The opposite of consumption is not thrift - it is generosity.

By the end of the 1960s, the United States owned more than half of the Indian rupee money supply, and that had been acquired through food aid. So I think it's very interesting to see the very long history of how sovereignty and food go together. When some countries remove another country's ability to feed itself, it is a very powerful tool. Imperialist countries, like the United Kingdom, like the United States, have used it for centuries.

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanctions policy that kills one and a half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

One of the most abused country on earth is Mexico. The marketing spills over the border, and people are persuaded to eat food that's bad for them, more in rich countries than in poor ones. I was traveling the world. What really struck me was the way we engage with food - how it's a global phenomenon - the world becoming more and more disconnected from it.