18,000 children die from hunger every day. ~ United Nations

It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name. ~ Rod Serling

Hunger is a sensation caused by insufficient food.

See also: starvation

Quotes

• The slippers of the mortal Earth, Now touched the chest of the Moon. Oh, It is shameful that the misery of hunger is still continuing as it was in the past.
  • Manmohan Acharya .

• What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger.
  • Alcuin in R Lacey and D Danziger, The Year 1000, Little, Brown and Co,GB, 1999, p. 57

• If all the protein of just the cottonseed, peanuts and soybean now grown were made available as a concentrate for human consumption, this would have the effect of doubling the quantity of protein concentrates now available. This alone would wipe out the world protein concentrate deficit that now exists.
  • Aaron Atschul, as quoted by John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything, what's a little bit of hunger? I can go a little while longer.
  • Alessia Caracciolo, "Scars to Your Beautiful" (2015), Know-It-All

• Do you wish to honor the Body of the Savior? Do not despise it when it is naked. Do not honor it in church with silk vestments while outside it is naked and numb with cold. He who said, “This is my body,” and made it so by his word, is the same that said, “You saw me hungry and you gave me no food. As you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.” Honor him then by sharing your property with the poor. For what God needs is not golden chalices but golden souls.
  • John Chrysostom Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Homily L

• Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and stared up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
  • Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book 1, Chapter 5: The Wine Shop: Page 2 (1859)

• To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, "If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can."
  • Diogenes of Sinope quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 40

• When scolded for masturbating in public, he said "I wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly."
  • Diogenes of Sinope quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 46, 69
  • Variant: If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate.
    • As quoted in Encarta Book of Quotations (2000) edited by Bill Swainson, p. 274

• There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
  • Mahatma Gandhi The Spirituality of Bread p. 26

• Nutritionists suggest that a normal adult male should receive about seventy grams of protein a day, with larger amounts going to pregnant women, children and the sick. Of the total protein requirement, about thirty grams should be of animal origin. ...only one quarter of the world's people receive more than thirty grams of animal protein daily; many receive far less... the present total world deficit is about five million metric tons, one quarter of a year's total supply.
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• A child with kwashiorkor loses little weight, but... is very susceptible to cuts and bruises, poor bone development, enlarged liver, mental dysfunction and a premature death. In kwashiorkor areas, the peak death rate is sixty per thousand as compared to the mortality of four per thousand in other areas. ... the condition can be quickly corrected if the child's diet is supplemented with essential animal protein.
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• Peru, a country which is severely lacking in animal protein, has... a thriving fish meal industry which produces more than a million tons of nutritious fish meal annually. What frustrates the food experts is that almost the entire output of fish meal—derived from anchovies... is exported to North America, where it is used in poultry feed.
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• As valuable as animal protein is, livestock are relatively inefficient protein-making machines. ...only 23 percent of the protein that a cow takes in ends up as usable protein in its meat or milk. Beef cattle pay back about 10 percent... while pigs return 12 percent. ...Grazing in a pasture, a 1,000-pound cow turns the grass into edible protein at the rate of about a pound a day. The same weight of bacterial organisms... produces 2,750 pounds of protein in the same "grazing" day. Bacteria are also less demanding... they do not care what the weather is and do not need as much personal attention...
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• Relatively available, but relatively untapped, food sources, whose protein content can be favorably compared to animal protein, are the oil seeds, such as soybean, peanuts, and cottonseed. Potentially these seeds could contribute and additional twenty million tons of protein to the expanding population, but except for soybean, very little reaches human stomachs in critically underfed areas.
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• New cottonseed processes... can produce high protein concentrates containing little or none of the poisonous pigment gossypol. All of the processes use a variety of chemical solvents... to sidestep the need for protein-destroying heat which was used in earlier processes.
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• There are now about 100,000 different types of protein-producing plants that are almost completely ignored as food staples. These unused protein suppliers are the fungi, which include the yeasts, mushrooms and molds. ...there are many carbohydrate-containing plants that can be used as food for fungus... in low-protein areas of the world. ...even wood pulp has been a fair starting material for the protein-manufacturing machinery of the Fungi Imperfecti. Dr. [William D.] Gray has calculated that if only seven major crops were converted into fungal protein, the protein would meet the yearly needs of more than four and a half billion people.
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• In spite of the bacteria's bad reputation, oil chemists and nutritionists anticipate that someday they might be able to put these pests to work as valuable protein producers. The bacteria use petroleum hycrocarbons as a source of carbon...Dr. [Alfred] Champagnat... calculates that if petroleum were used as a protein source, it would make only a small dent in the oil reserves.
  • John F. Henahan, Men and Molecules (1966)

• During the election, Prime Minister Harper ended some of his speeches with the words “God bless Canada.” Indeed, the prophet Isaiah says that God blesses you when you “share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house” (Isaiah 58.7). We urge the Prime Minister to spend tax dollars now in a way that will bring the homeless poor into their own house, and allow them the dignity of sharing their bread with others.
  • Andrew Hutchison The Globe and Mail, March 29, 2006.

• When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine.”
  • John the Evangelist Revelation 6:5-6

• Part of her wanted to be a swan. The other part wanted to eat one. She had broken her fast on some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs weren't so bad when you got used to them. Worms were worse, but not so bad as the pain in your belly from days without food.
  • George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings, Arya (V)

• It was a warm day and he had a long way to go. He hadn't gone more than half-way when a sort of funny feeling began to creep all over him. It began at the tip of his nose and trickled all through him and out at the soles of his feet. It was just as if somebody inside him were saying "Now then, Pooh, time for a little something".
  • A. A. Milne, in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926).

• Their anger in darkness turning, unreleased, unspoken, it's mouth a red wound, its eyes hungry...hungry for the moon.
  • Alan Moore, Swamp Thing #40, "The Curse", (September 1985).

• Today 850 million people are hungry and malnourished. Over half of them are children. 18,000 children die every single day because of hunger and malnutrition.
  • James Morris, as reported in "18,000 children die every day of hunger, U.N. says", USA Today, (February 17, 2007).

• But hunger is probably the strongest motive for eating what under normal circumstances would be considered inedible. Perhaps if the ominous prognostications of pundits terrified by untrammeled population growth came true, one can imagine a world in which each member of humanity crouches on his sternly alloted sand pile and presents his plastic card at. the state controlle commissary for his weekly ration of fish protein. At such a time, the placenta may well become a delicacy of haute cuisine. In that far-off dy mankin may find useful the valeditory used by the Toradja natives of the Celebes who hang the placenta in the fork of a large Ficus tree and on departing address it: "You afterbirth, do not say that I do not ove you; we love you. Do not tickle the soles of the feet of the feet of your little brother (sister) and do not pinch his (her) stomach.
  • W. B. Ober p.598

• I have no doubt that every form of cannibalism, excepting at most those which happen in times of extreme hunger and whose only purpose is to secure survival, has a pathological, perverse background.
  • Friedemann Pfafflin. (2009) Reply to Beier (2009). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, pp. 166-167; as quoted in "Turn on the Eater", by Mark D. Griffiths, Psychology Today, (Nov 29, 2013).

• We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet.
  • Ronald Reagan, A Time For Choosing, (October 27, 1964).

• Judas: Woman your fine ointment - brand new and expensive
  Should have been saved for the poor
  Why has it been wasted? We could have raised maybe
  Three hundred silver pieces or more
  People who are hungry, people who are starving
  They matter more than your feet and hair!
  

• Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar, Everything's Alright, (1970).

• Naturalists and egalitarians don’t believe the rosy predictions about how genetically enhanced food will end famine. Starving people are hungry not because of high population density but inequality in food distribution… Similarly geni-modified food is neither the best nor the only way to feed starving people.
  • Peter Rosett, in “World Hunger: Tweleve Myths” in Designer Food: Mutant Harvest Or Breadbasket of the World?, (2002), quoted by Gregory E. Pence, p. 149

• Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. That something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth. But in just a moment Peter Vollmer will ply his trade on another kind of corner, a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone.
  • Rod Serling, "He's Alive", The Twilight Zone, (January 24, 1963).

• It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.
  • Rod Serling, Commencement Address at the University of Southern California; (March 17, 1970).

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