The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
Frances Moore LappRead
Hunger is a people-made phenomenon, so the central issue is power: the power of those who make the decisions about what is grown and who, or what, it's grown for.
Interpretation
Hunger results from social and political choices, highlighting the importance of power in food distribution.
In this quote, Frances Moore Lapp emphasizes that hunger is not merely a natural occurrence, but rather a construct arising from the choices made by those in power. It suggests that the decisions regarding agricultural production and food distribution are influenced by politics and power dynamics, rather than being solely dictated by necessity or availability.
In practice
In a speech on social justice, you might say, 'As Frances Moore Lapp stated, hunger is a people-made phenomenon, reminding us to address the power structures in our food systems.'
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-woo l possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant.
Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain.
We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.
Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.
There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.
In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
When you give up vengeance, make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine...Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secure when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction. Vengeance is personal satisfaction. Justice is moral accounting...Human forgiveness does not do away with human justice.
Ask most people who live in a home and have a mortgage on it whether they own their own home and the answer is almost guaranteed to be a resounding 'yes'. Yet it's the wrong answer. Technically speaking, until they have paid the mortgage off, they don't own it. Herein lies the difference between reality and illusion, between ownership and control. This confusion lies not only at the individual level, but also at the heart of government thinking.
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
I am the infinite sea, and all worlds are but grains of sand upon my shore.
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