The food shortages and high prices have certainly sparked the world media's attention, particularly since they're coming in such diverse places, being everywhere from Haiti, to Senegal, to Bangladesh, to Egypt - a range of countries. That sort of caught the media off guard, and serves the media's prurient interests insofar as "it bleeds, and so it leads".

For every $1 advertisers spend advertising something healthful like apples, they spend $500 advertising junk food.

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.

The one thing that everyone knows about America is people will say, I know my rights. One of those rights is the right to organize. When workers do get together and organize and drive up their wages, they are much, much better off. I think this is one integral part of food policy. We can't talk about increasing the price of food without figuring out how working Americans are going to pay for that.

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

Yet if you go to the supermarket and look at food that's produced through industrial agriculture, look at what's happened to the prices. Have they been going down? They've been going up and they will continue to go up. So the choice is either, do we hitch onto a system of agriculture that's doomed and will doom the planet with it, and go along the route of industrial agriculture, or do we want to shift to a kind of system that we know is going to be, in the long run, cheaper, because we'll have a planet left at the end of it? We need to factor that cost in.

Right now you're seeing more and more families reporting that they are skipping meals. They're having to give up meat. Mothers are foregoing food so their kids can have something. People are growing their own vegetables, not because they've gone organic, but because it's one of the few assured sources of food they have. For low-income Americans food is costly right now. The price of food has been going up, and wages haven't. This puts working Americans in a real bind. The fact that the mainstream media hasn't reported it doesn't mean that it's not happening.