Food Shortage Quotes

We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations; but examples of wise social planning are not so easy to find.

Five years of destruction and mayhem, lives lost everywhere, shortages of food and fuel and clothing - and the insane mind behind it just urges us all on and on to more destruction. And we all keep playing.

Grow a garden. When there’s a food shortage in the future, you’ll need it. And when people try to steal your food and you shoot them, you’ll also need a good place to hide the bodies.

A rational explanation eluded her. Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided the other was insignificant.

Nobody admires the sculpture of dance, and my moves are as fluid as a statue, which few people are willing to pay to watch. That's why I'm now selling duck eggs at food shortage prices.

There is a coming food shortage crisis, and so I started a duck farm. I can’t start one after everyone is starving. It has to be up and running like Roger Bannister.

All of Israel was blessed with a conditional covenant. If Israel kept her end of the bargain, her Husband guaranteed protection from enemies and food shortages. (De 28:1-4) pg 17

. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people. Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home. The lawn has become the curse of modern town landscapes as sugar cane is the curse of the lowland coastal tropics, and cattle the curse of the semi-arid and arid rangelands. It is past time to tax lawns (or any wasteful consumption), and to devote that tax to third world relief. I would suggest a tax of $5 per square metre for both public and private lawns, updated annually, until all but useful lawns are eliminated.

Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all; and further, that unavoidable suffering—such as hunger in times of an unavoidable shortage of food—should be distributed as equally as possible.

Now one of the great things about a democracy, which anyone considering setting one up in their native city should bear in mind, is that the voters really do believe that anything is possible. If there is a food shortage, for example, it’s no use explaining to them that there is no food to be had; that the Spartan fleet is blockading Byzantium and we can’t get so much as a grain of wheat past them, or that the Public Treasury is so empty that you can see more floor than coins. They won’t believe you. What you must do is blame somebody.

During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began to understand that this happened because I was starving myself. In starvation mode, my body literally thought I was facing a famine. It didn’t know that I was living near a grocery store and several fast-food restaurants. Thinking I was facing a real food shortage, its primal instinct was to binge on large amounts of food, conserving fat in preparation for the hard times ahead.

Famine sometimes increases the number of people who are overweight.

The cruelty could not register for her. Bloodlust, she understood. Bloodlust, she was guilty of. She had lost herself in battle, too; she had gone further than she should have, she had hurt others when she should have stopped. But this—viciousness on this scale, wanton slaughter of this magnitude, against innocents who hadn’t even lifted a finger in self-defense, this she could not imagine doing. They surrendered, she wanted to scream at her disappeared enemy. They dropped their weapons. They posed no threat to you. Why did you have to do this? A rational explanation eluded her. Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant. The Federation had massacred Golyn Niis for the simple reason that they did not think of the Nikara as human. And if your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed? What was the difference between crushing an ant and setting an anthill on fire? Why shouldn’t you pull wings off insects for your own enjoyment? The bug might feel pain, but what did that matter to you? If you were the victim, what could you say to make your tormentor recognize you as human? How did you get your enemy to recognize you at all? And why should an oppressor care?

That’s the thing about the collapse of civilization, Blake. It never happens according to plan – there’s no slavering horde of zombies. No actinic flash of thermonuclear war. No Earth-shuddering asteroid. The end comes in unforeseen ways; the stock market collapses, and then the banks, and then there is no food in the supermarkets, or the communications system goes down completely and inevitably, and previously amiable co-workers find themselves wrestling over the last remaining cookie that someone brought in before all the madness began.

You don't have to be a prophet or a psychic to see the future. All you have to be is an average observer and notice bare grocery shelves to know food shortages are coming. When you're hungry, you think of your favorite restaurant. But when you're starving, I hope you think of BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm.

All farms require a resident dreamer, someone to thumb through seed catalogs in the cold days of late January, imagining summer fields of squash and cucumbers, tomatoes and sunflowers. Fall harvests are the reward of winter dreams. Someone must decide where the next fence should be placed, or conceive of a clever new way to organize the market stand. On a farm, there's no shortage of little dreams needing to be dreamed.

It was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions

On the collective level, the global trade network turns droughts and floods into business opportunities, and makes it possible to overcome food shortages quickly and cheaply.

There is practically no social life, partly because of the food shortage, partly because, when anybody is arrested, the police are apt to arrest everybody whom they find in his company, or who comes to visit him.

Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant. The Federation had massacred Golyn Niis for the simple reason that they did not think of the Nikara as human. And if your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed?

A secret Rand Corporation study for the Pentagon had concluded in 1966 that while the bombing had caused widespread hardship and even food shortages in the North, “there is, however, no evidence of critical or progressive deterioration or disruption of economic activity

The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness, pitiless isolation, food shortages, and the realization that so much of what ails Tarawa, the overpopulation and all its attendant health and social problems, need not be as bad as it is.

…there is rapidly developing a soil shortage on your planet. That is, you are running out of good soil in which to grow your food. This is because soil needs time to reconstitute itself, and your corporate farmers have no time. They want land that is producing, producing, producing. So the age-old practice of alternating growing fields from season to season is being abandoned or shortened. To make up for the loss of time, chemicals are being dumped into the land in order to render it fertile faster. Yet in this, as with all things, you cannot develop an artificial substitute for Mother Nature which comes even close to providing what She provides.

It was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions. The French Revolution was spearheaded by affluent lawyers, not by famished peasants. The Roman Republic reached the height of its power in the first century BC, when treasure fleets from throughout the Mediterranean enriched the Romans beyond their ancestors’ wildest dreams.

[what can “too expensive” mean when we are contemplating the inundation of the world’s most populous cities, dire food and water shortages, mass migrations, the sixth extinction?]

Learning is like the fuel that moves the machinery of your body towards it's destination of success. Shortage is possible, hence spare supply is necessary!

The LORD your God is bringing you into a good land … where you will eat food with-out shortage, where you will lack nothing.Deuteronomy 8:7, 9

When the productive lands lose their essence, our productive lives shall least have essence!

The worst thing in life is not shortage of food; it's human indignity.

Conservatives point out the shortages, food lines, and outright famines in Venezuela, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China, while American socialists stubbornly cling to the only “socialist” model left that has any claim to success—Scandinavia. Unfortunately for them, the so-called socialist success of Scandinavia is, in fact, due to good old-fashioned private property and capitalism!

The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks. Yet in order to take advantage of these new opportunities, food surpluses and improved transportation were not enough. The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war. And if no agreement can be reached, strife spreads, even if the storehouses are bulging. It was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions. The

. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people. Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home.

Historical context apart, Klemperer’s journals can be read for their own sake as a gnawing meditation on the disappointments of life and the irrevocability of choices. He is intensely aware at all moments, perhaps because of his consciousness of being a “survivor,” that death is only a breath away. He is one of the great kvetches of all time, endlessly recording aches and pains, bad dreams, shortages of food and medicine, snubs and humiliations. And, like everyone else, he wants everything both ways. In

The chronic shortage of oil, the debility of the European coal mines and the fragility of the food chain, made it seem unlikely that Germany would in fact be able to ‘consolidate’ its conquests of 1940 without falling into excessive dependence on the Soviet Union.

There's an analogy to be made between our craving for story and our craving for food. A tendency to overeat served our ancestors well when food shortages were a predictable part of life. But now that we modern desk jockeys are awash in cheap grease and corn syrup, overeating is more likely to fatten us up and kill us young. Likewise, it could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where books, MP3 players, TVs, and iPhones make story omnipresent - and where we have, in romance novels and television shows such as Jersey Shore, something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies. I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd is right to wonder if overconsumimg in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a "mental diabetes epidemic." Similarly, as digital technology evolves, our stories - ubiquitous, immersive, interactive - may become dangerously attractive. The real threat isn't that story will fade out of human life in the future; its that story will take it over completely.

forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages, and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much

We must realize that we don’t live in a vacuum; the consequences of our actions ripple throughout the world. Would you still run the water while you brush your teeth, if it meant someone else would suffer from thirst? Would you still drive a gas guzzler, if you knew a world oil shortage would bring poverty and chaos? Would you still build an oversized house, if you witnessed first-hand the effects of deforestation? If we understood how our lifestyles impact other people, perhaps we would live a little more lightly. Our choices as consumers have an environmental toll. Every item we buy, from food to books to televisions to cars, uses up some of the earth’s bounty. Not only does its production and distribution require energy and natural resources; its disposal is also cause for concern. Do we really want our grandchildren to live among giant landfills? The less we need to get by, the better off everyone (and our planet) will be. Therefore, we should reduce our consumption as much as possible, and favor products and packaging made from minimal, biodegradable, or recyclable materials.

The United States Department of Defense makes its position clear in a policy statement published in 2014. The document begins: Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe. In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today—from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.

Whether caused by allegations of voter fraud and stolen elections, perceived racial injustice, Occupation protestors, bank closings, the collapse of the dollar, shortage of food or some other triggering event, America could quickly erupt in violence, even revolution, in its streets.

Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade. "She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts." Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers. "On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia." The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić. The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone, in his act lay an ocean of hope.

Have you swallowed all that war stuff?" "No, of course I--" I was so committed to refuting him that I had half-denied the charge before I understood it; now my eyes swung back to his face. "All what war stuff?" "All that stuff about there being a war." "I don't think I get what you mean." "Do you really think that the United States of America is in a state of war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?" "Do I really think..." My voice trailed off. He stood up, his weight on the good leg, the other resting lightly on the floor in front of him. "Don't be a sap," he gazed with cool self-possession at me, "there isn't any war." "I know why you're talking like this," I said, struggling to keep up with him. "Now I understand. You're still under the influence of some medicinal drug." "No, you are. Everybody is." He pivoted so that he was facing directly at me. "That's what this whole war story is. A medicinal drug. Listen, did you ever hear of the 'Roaring Twenties'?" I nodded very slowly and cautiously. "When they all drank bathtub gin and everybody who was young did just was they wanted?" "Yes." "Well, what happened was that they didn't like that, the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts. So then they tried Prohibition and everybody just got drunker, so then they really got desperate and arranged the Depression. That kept the people who were young in the thirties in their places. But they couldn't use that trick forever, so for us in the forties they've cooked up this war fake." "Who are 'they' anyway?" "The fat old men who don't want us crowding them out of their jobs. They've made it all up. There isn't any real food shortage, for instance. The men have all the best steaks delivered to their clubs now. You've noticed how they've been getting fatter lately, haven't you?

A rational explanation eluded her. Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply. what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant.

[...] during one train stop, I watched as another guard with a spirit of empathy, ran out into an apple orchard and picked apples. He carried his jacket like a bag and filled it with apples. The kind German came to our open train window and handed us each an apple. The juicy apple tasted so delicious. I so appreciated that apple and his unusual compassion.

When Sartre wrote “Paris Under the Occupation,” the dead were still being mourned while the fate of prisoners of war and the deported remained unknown. Shortages of food and raw materials, a crippled transportation system, rampant inflation, and a thriving black market were sources of great unrest. Months before the Liberation, the settling of scores had begun.

When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food is coming later in the day, and therefore it has no reason to fear starvation, doesn’t alleviate the powerful sensation of hunger. Similarly, explaining to your brain that the neglected interactions in your overfilled inbox have little to do with your survival doesn’t seem to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety. To your entrenched social circuitry, evolved over millennia of food shortages mitigated through strategic alliances, these unanswered messages become the psychological equivalent of ignoring a tribe member who might later prove key to surviving the next drought. From this perspective, the crowded email inbox is not just frustrating—it’s a matter of life or death.

acute, chronic. These two are sometimes confused, which is a little odd as their meanings are sharply opposed. Chronic pertains to lingering conditions, ones that are not easily overcome. Acute refers to those that come to a sudden crisis and require immediate attention. People in the Third World may suffer from a chronic shortage of food. In a bad year, their plight may become acute.

The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change… If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm, despite its good intentions, is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be… We need to dial back on the panic, look at the science, face the economics, and address the issue rationally.

More food is good, but agricultural diets can provoke mismatch diseases. One of the biggest problems is a loss of nutritional variety and quality. Hunter-gatherers survive because they eat just about anything and everything that is edible. Hunter-gatherers therefore necessarily consume an extremely diverse diet, typically including many dozens of plant species in any given season.26 In contrast, farmers sacrifice quality and diversity for quantity by focusing their efforts on just a few staple crops with high yields. It is likely that more than 50 percent of the calories you consume today derived from rice, corn, wheat, or potatoes. Other crops that have sometimes served as staples for farmers include grains like millet, barley, and rye and starchy roots such as taro and cassava. Staple crops can be grown easily in massive quantities, they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for long periods of time after harvest. One of their chief drawbacks, however, is that they tend to be much less rich in vitamins and minerals than most of the wild plants consumed by hunter-gatherers and other primates.27 Farmers who rely too much on staple crops without supplemental foods such as meat, fruits, and other vegetables (especially legumes) risk nutritional deficiencies. Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers are susceptible to diseases such as scurvy (from insufficient vitamin C), pellagra (from insufficient vitamin B3), beriberi (from insufficient vitamin B1), goiter (from insufficient iodine), and anemia (from insufficient iron).28 Relying heavily on a few crops—sometimes just one crop—has other serious disadvantages, the biggest being the potential for periodic food shortages and famine. Humans,

A Springfield “horseshoe” was an often grotesque open-faced sandwich in which a piece of meat was covered first with french fries and then with a cheeselike sauce. Visitors knowledgeable enough to avoid the local delicacy felt rightfully proud. The statement that Springfield was a city of “bad hotels and worse food” was perhaps apocryphal, but there was no shortage of bars, because drinking was state politicos’ top recreational activity.

How did we define “poverty-free”? After interviewing many borrowers about what a poverty-free life meant to them, we developed a set of ten indicators that our staff and outside evaluators could use to measure whether a family in rural Bangladesh lived a poverty-free life. These indicators are: (1) having a house with a tin roof; (2) having beds or cots for all members of the family; (3) having access to safe drinking water; (4) having access to a sanitary latrine; (5) having all school-age children attending school; (6) having sufficient warm clothing for the winter; (7) having mosquito nets; (8) having a home vegetable garden; (9) having no food shortages, even during the most difficult time of a very difficult year; and (10) having sufficient income-earning opportunities for all adult members of the family. We will be monitoring these criteria on our own and are inviting local and international researchers to help us track our successes and setbacks as we head toward our goal of a poverty-free Bangladesh.

There is one itty-bitty ray of hope in the coming global fertilizer—and from that, food—shortage: most studies by most agricultural scientists suggest that most farmers have been overfertilizing for decades, especially when it comes to potassium fertilizers. This would suggest that at present most farms in most places have a potassium surplus baked into the soil. This would further suggest that most farmers can reduce their inputs of fertilizer without sacrificing yields by all that much. The question is, for how long?

There are some who look on our global problems here on Earth—at our vast national antagonisms, our nuclear arsenals, our growing populations, the disparity between the poor and the affluent, shortages of food and resources, and our inadvertent alterations of the natural environment—and conclude that we live in a system that has suddenly become unstable, a system that is destined soon to collapse. There are others who believe that our problems are soluble, that humanity is still in its childhood, that one day soon we will grow up.

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. The "liberals" remain stunned: they admit we had not been polite enough to the "natives," that it would have been wiser and fairer to grant them certain rights, wherever possible; they would have been only too happy to admit them in batches without a sponsor to that exclusive club -- the human species; and now this barbaric explosion of madness is putting them in the same boat as the wretched colonists. The metropolitan Left is in a quandary: it is well aware of the true fate of the "natives," the pitiless oppression they are subjected to, and does not condemn their revolt, knowing that we did everything to provoke it. But even so, it thinks, there are limits: these guerrillas should make every effort to show some chivalry; this would be the best way of proving they are men. Sometimes the Left berates them: "You're going too far; we cannot support you any longer." They don't care a shit for its support; it can shove it up its ass for what it's worth. As soon as the war began, they realized the harsh truth: we are all equally as good as each other. We have all taken advantage of them, they have nothing to prove, they won't give anyone preferential treatment. A single duty, a single objective: drive out colonialism by every means. And the most liberal among us would be prepared to accept this, at a pinch, but they cannot help seeing in this trial of strength a perfectly inhuman method used by subhumans to claim for themselves a charter for humanity: let them acquire it as quickly as possible, but in order to merit it, let them use nonviolent methods. Our noble souls are racist.

The World is currently facing a confluence of mounting shortages in three commodities essential to the continuance of human life on this planet: water, energy, and food. Those three elements combine into something much greater than the sum of its parts, a looming global disaster by 2030. By 2030 the demand for water will increase by 30 percent, while demands for both energy and food will shoot up 50 percent. All this will be driven by a global population increase to about 8 billion people, placing tremendous stress on our highly industrialized global food system.

She could not dissociate the rabbit's flesh from the charred bodies in the square. She could not see the hundreds of decapitated heads on poles without seeing the soldier who had walked down the row of kneeling prisoners, methodically bringing his sword down again and again as if reaping corn. She could not pass the babies in their barrel graves without hearing their uncomprehending screams. The entire time, her own mind scream the unanswerable question: Why? The cruelty could not register for her. Bloodlust, she understood. Bloodlust, she was guilty of. She had lost herself in battle, too; she had gone further than she should have, she had hurt others when she should have stopped. But this- viciousness on this scale, wanton slaughter of this magnitude, against innocents who hadn't even lifted a finger in self-defense, this she could not imagine doing. They surrendered, she wanted to scream at her disappeared enemy. They dropped their weapons. They posed no threat to you. Why did you have to do this? A rational explanation eluded her. Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant.

But Germany is stronger than her enemies realize. True, it is a poor country in raw materials and agriculture; but it is making up for this poverty in aggressiveness of spirit, ruthless state planning, concentrated direction of effort, and the building up of a mighty military machine with which it can back up its aggressive spirit. True, too, that this past winter we have seen long lines of sullen people before the food shops, that there is a shortage of meat and butter and fruit and fats, that whipped cream is verboten, that men’s suits and women’s dresses are increasingly being made out of wood pulp, gasoline out of coal, rubber out of coal and lime; that there is no gold coverage for the Reichsmark or for anything else, not even for vital imports. Weaknesses, most of them, certainly, and in our dispatches we have advertised them. It

All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.

The technological efficiency of daughter-proofing a pregnancy may make it seem as if the girl shortage is a problem of modernity, but female infanticide has been documented in China and India for more than two thousand years.119 In China, midwives kept a bucket of water at the bedside to drown the baby if it was a girl. In India there were many methods: “giving a pill of tobacco and bhang to swallow, drowning in milk, smearing the mother’s breast with opium or the juice of the poisonous Datura, or covering the child’s mouth with a plaster of cow-dung before it drew breath.” Then and now, even when daughters are suffered to live, they may not last long. Parents allocate most of the available food to their sons, and as a Chinese doctor explains, “if a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once, but if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ll see how she is tomorrow.

It was my mother, my frequent co-conspirator in the kitchen and my conduit to our past, who suggested the means to convey this epic disjunction, this unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths. We would reconstruct every decade of Soviet history - from the prequel 1910s to the postscript present day - through the prism of food. Together, we'd embark on a yearlong journey unlike any other: eating and cooking our way through decade after decade of Soviet life, using her kitchen and dining room as a time machine and an incubator of memories. Memories of wartime rationing cards and grotesque shared kitchens in communal apartments. Of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning and Stalin's table manners. Of Khrushchev's kitchen debates and Gorbachev's disastrous antialcohol policies. Of food as the focal point of our everyday lives, and - despite all the deprivations and shortages - of compulsive hospitality and poignant, improbable feasts.

In Belarus, as elsewhere, local German policy was conditioned by general economic concerns. By 1943, the Germans were worried more about labor shortages than about food shortages, and so their policy in Belarus shifted. As the war against the Soviet Union continued and the Wehrmacht took horrible losses month upon month, German men had to be taken from German farms and factories and sent to the front. Such people then had to be replaced if the German economy was to function. Hermann Göring issued an extraordinary directive in October 1942: Belarusian men in suspicious villages were not to be shot but rather kept alive and sent as forced laborers to Germany. People who could work were to be 'selected' for labor rather than killed - even if they had taken up arms against Germany. By now, Göring seemed to reason, their labor power was all that they could offer to the Reich, and it was more significant than their death. Since the Soviet partisans controlled ever more Belarusian territory, ever less food was reaching Germany in any case. If Belarusian peasants could not work for Germany in Belarus, best to force them to work in Germany. This was very grim reaping. Hitler made clear in December 1942 what Göring had implied: the women and children, regarded as less useful as labor, were to be shot. "This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of 'subhumans,' only to import millions of other 'subhumans' to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves - had they not been abroad killing 'subhumans.' The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves, had they not been abroad killing.)

Political change--alterations in public mood, sharp shifts in crowd sentiment, the collapse of party allegiance--has long been a subject of intense interest to academics and intellectuals of all kinds. There is a vast literature on revolutions, as well as a mini-genre of formulas designed to predict them. Most of these investigations focus on measurable, quantifiable economic criteria, like degrees of inequality or standards of living. Many seek to predict what level of economic pain--how much starvation, how much poverty--will produce a reaction, force people to the street, persuade them to take risks. Very recently, this question has become more difficult to answer. In the Western world, the vast majority of people are not starving. They have food and shelter. They are literate. If we describe them as "poor" or "deprived," it is sometimes because they lack things that human beings couldn't dream of a century ago, like air-conditioning or Wi-Fi. In this new world, it may be that big, ideological changes are not caused by bread shortages but by new kinds of disruptions. These new revolutions may not even look like the old revolutions at all. In a world where most political debate takes place online or on television, you don't need to go out on the street and wave a banner to assert your allegiance. In order to manifest a sharp change in political affiliation, all you have to do is switch channels, turn to a different website every morning, or start following a different group of people on social media.

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

Olive,’ Mum said, stroking my fringe. ‘I need you to listen to me, and I need you to be brave.’ Opening my eyes again, I swallowed nervously. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Your sister didn’t arrive at work today.’ Sukie was a typist for an insurance company in Clerkenwell. She said it was the dullest job ever. ‘Isn’t today Saturday, though?’ I asked. ‘She was due in to do overtime. No one’s seen her since she was with you and Cliff last night. She’s missing.’ ‘Missing?’ I didn’t understand. Mum nodded. The nurse added rather unhelpfully: ‘We’ve had casualties from all over London. It’s been chaos. All you can do is keep hoping for the best.’ It was obvious what she meant. I glanced at Mum, who always took the opposite view in any argument. But she stayed silent. Her hands, though, were trembling. ‘Missing isn’t the same as dead,’ I pointed out. Mum grimaced. ‘That’s true, and I’ve spoken to the War Office: Sukie’s name isn’t on their list of dead or injured but-’ ‘So she’s alive, then. She must be. I saw her in the street talking to a man,’ I said. ‘When she realised I’d followed her she was really furious about it.’ Mum looked at me, at the nurse, at the bump on my head. ‘Darling, you’re concussed. Don’t get overexcited now.’ ‘But you can’t think she’s dead.’ I insisted. ‘There’s no proof, is ther?’ ‘Sometimes it’s difficult to identify someone after…’ Mum faltered. I knew what she couldn’t say: sometimes if a body got blown apart there’d be nothing left to tie a name tag to. It was why we’d never buried Dad. Perhaps if there’d been a coffin and a headstone and a vicar saying nice things, it would’ve seemed more real. This felt different, though. After a big air raid the telephones were often down, letters got delayed, roads blocked. It might be a day or two before we heard from Sukie, and worried though I was, I knew she could look after herself. I wondered if it was part of Mum being ill, this painting the world black when it was grey. My head was hurting again so I lay back against the pillows. I was fed up with this stupid, horrid war. Eighteen months ago when it started, everyone said it’d be over before Christmas, but they were wrong. It was still going on, tearing great holes in people’s lives. We’d already lost Dad, and half the time these days it felt like Mum wasn’t quite here. And now Sukie – who knew where she was? I didn’t realise I was crying again until Mum touched my cheek. ‘It’s not fair,’ I said weakly. ‘War isn’t fair, I’m afraid,’ Mum replied. ‘You only have to walk through this hospital to see we’re not the only ones suffering. Though that’s just the top of the iceberg, believe me. There’s plenty worse going on in Europe.’ I remembered Sukie mentioning this too. She’d got really upset when she told me about the awful things happening to people Hitler didn’t like. She was in the kitchen chopping onions at the time so I wasn’t aware she was crying properly. ‘What sort of awful things?’ I’d asked her. ‘Food shortages, people being driven from their homes.’ Sukie took a deep breath, as if the list was really long. ‘People being attacked for no reason or sent no one knows where – Jewish people in particular. They’re made to wear yellow stars so everyone knows they’re Jews, and then barred from shops and schools and even parts of the towns where they live. It’s heartbreaking to think we can’t do anything about it.’ People threatened by soldiers. People queuing for food with stars on their coats. It was what I’d seen on last night’s newsreel at the cinema. My murky brain could just about remember those dismal scenes, and it made me even more angry. How I hated this lousy war. I didn’t know what I could do about it, a thirteen-year-old girl with a bump on her head. Yet thinking there might be something made me feel a tiny bit better.

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

He was prepared for both food shortages and loss of water in the most extreme circumstances.

...the food shortages required inventiveness...Daphne showed me the difference it made if she placed plums in a green bowl or in a yellow bowl before she set them on the table.

In this recipe sugar has been omitted because of the serious shortage, but after the war a teaspoon of sugar should be added.

Goats. This was once thought to be an antidote for North Korea’s economic ills. The terrain in the northern portion of the peninsula is mountainous and not suitable for farming. There are no green plots of grass for grazing cows, and therefore no source of dairy products or meat. So, in 1996, the North Koreans started a campaign to breed goats. These mountain animals are a good source of milk and meat; moreover, they feed on the shrubs tucked away high in the rocky terrain. The goat-breeding campaign led to a doubling of the goat population almost overnight, and tripled it within two years. This solved a short-term problem, but it had long-term consequences that were more destructive. The goats completely denuded the areas they inhabited, chewing up every single shrub in sight. This then had the effect of removing the last line of the land’s defense against the annual massive rains. The result? Annual monsoons led to deluges of biblical proportions, which wiped out the little remaining arable land and flooded the coal mines that were a source of energy. This only worsened the chronic food and energy shortages.

the settlers in the little fort on the banks of the James must have been dismayed when they discovered that the “admiral” bearing Sir Thomas and Sir George was missing in action along with the lion’s share of provisions meant to help the colony survive the winter, when food was scarce at best. Of course, the seven ships that survived the hurricane did carry at least some food and other supplies, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the growling bellies inside the fort. Then, too, there was the fact that the ships carried all those new settlers whose presence could only add to the colony’s seemingly endless food shortages.

One such scientist is Paul Ehrlich, who writes: “Scientists need to be direct and succinct when dealing with the electronic media. One could talk for hours about the uncertainties associated with global warming. But a statement like ‘Pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere could lead to large-scale food shortages’ is entirely accurate scientifically and will catch the public’s attention.”42 Is such a statement “entirely accurate scientifically”? What about the fact that were it not for the industry that necessarily emits greenhouse gases and were it not for the fact that Ehrlich’s proposals to dismantle it were not followed, millions or billions would have died of starvation?

contrast, people living right on the edge of farmland are understandably eager to see the end of farming that is noisy, smelly and messy, even if it’s all an essential part of a farmer’s livelihood — and even if the farm was there long before their subdivisions were. But deep in the public gut is a feeling that farmland is a community resource, not just a commodity, and one day we all might have to depend on our own local farms to supply a lot more of our food. Fields used for export crops and animals today are our insurance against food insecurity tomorrow. It’s a primal, practical instinct to protect ourselves against food shortages, however disconnected that might be from the reality of what’s being produced on farms on the edges of our cities. That might be horses, Christmas trees, ornamental shrubs, flowers, or produce and livestock for export — all completely unrelated to what we are eating today, but grown on land that could feed us tomorrow if we really needed it.

While there was some sugar rationing during World War I and supplies of candy for the soldiers became a priority (it was a quick and portable energy source and did not go bad), women on the home front especially felt the shortages during World War II. It was the first commodity to be put on the ration list and the last to be taken off (in 1947).

The trouble of many is half consolation" as the Hebrew saying goes. We weathered that hard time with fortitude and expectations of better days to come. At the time, food was in critically short supply. The influx of population and shortage of production resulted in poor availability of food. Although meat, eggs and fats - oil and margarine - were rationed, the monthly allotments were minimal. A person would receive, at official price, about one pound of meat and eight eggs monthly. Shortages brought about a relatively minor black market. Even unrationed fruits and vegetables were not readily available.

Yuda and myself did not dwell much on the matter, but it brought about discussions about food constantly. As an example, in the first 4 to 5 years of my life in Israel, I never ate an apple. I enjoyed the plentiful citrus fruits and never made an issue that apples, pears and peaches were beyond my means and expectations. The first few years, known as years of "Tsena," austerity, shortages, remained in my mind as trying times because other areas of daily life were also hard to cope with: housing, high rates for electricity, no telephone, shortages of textiles - a tough life.

Darwin argued that this struggle for existence results from the fact that populations tend to increase in size exponentially, generating inevitable shortages of finite resources such as food, living space, and mates.

that meat production is the second or third largest contributor to environmental problems at every level and at every scale, from global to local. It is a primary culprit in land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, species extinction, loss of biodiversity, and climate change.

For example, we now know that the Mayans lived with drought conditions, civil war, and growing food shortages for thousands of years prior to collapse. However, foreseeing all these problems in advance was of little use. The Mayans lacked the ability to discern the complexity of their circumstances and, therefore, had little possibility of rectifying deteriorating conditions. Instead, they did what every great civilization does when it reaches a cognitive threshold: They simply passed their dangerous problems from one generation to the next as these problems continued to grow in magnitude and peril.

One of Hitler’s obsessions was that the First World War had been lost on the Home Front by food shortages often caused by Jewish rackets. He was determined that, this time, no Jew should eat a mouthful of food more than was necessary, and the Ministry of Food played a major part in his anti-Jewish policy. Indeed the bureaucrats there took progressively more severe measures designed, in effect, to starve the Jews to death.

Food shortages are stoking inflation, while tourism and agriculture—two of Crimea's mainstays—are suffering.

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

This business is only at the beginning. It’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets any better.’ If it ever did get any better, which privately he doubted. ‘There’s going to be a shortage of food, for a start. And when there’s a shortage of food, people get desperate. And when people get desperate, they get nasty. Like that gang of little kids—except that it won’t always be little kids. One day it’ll be big kids. And then what are you going to do?

The illegibility of local measurement practices was more than an administrative headache for the monarchy. It compromised the most vital and sensitive aspects of state security. Food supply was the Achilles heel of the early modern state; short of religious war, nothing so menaced the state as food shortages and the resulting social upheavals. Without comparable units of measurement, it was difficult if not impossible to monitor markets, to compare regional prices for basic commodities, or to regulate food supplies effectively.49

Inevitably, the British barrier ringing Boston created new hardships for residents. While initially forbidden to leave the city, new food shortages sweltering summer temperatures convinced Gage to grant some citizens passes. ...Even after the arrival of fishing boats civilians could not buy the catch until the British were supplied. Outbreaks of disease became common.

Who, after all, was to say, what was the 'right side' of the war, especially after the turmoil, the food shortages, and scarcity of luxuries?

Revelation 16:16 calls it the "war of the great day of God the Almighty," Armageddon. This war will come in the twentieth century. It will come right on schedule, as have the wars, food shortages, earthquakes and other events foretold. This generation will see its fulfillment.

Development was, in other words, part of a policy mindset that linked international trade, military power and a programme of redistribution. What was to be redistributed was, it turned out, food. The Marshall Plan – the US aid programme to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – had instigated, among other initiatives, the transfer of food to the hungry and possibly querulous European population in response to the post-war food shortages.

The lack of a functioning, trustful community also heightened the refugees’ fears of being abducted by the extremist organization Islamic State. Many initially refused to move to Azraq camp, and although the numbers have increased more recently, Azraq is still far below the 130,000 capacity for which it was built. It’s fitting then that this pop-up city, in real need of some functioning social capital, is now the scene of a radical experiment in new models of community governance, institution-building, and the management of resources. At the heart of that effort is blockchain technology, the decentralized ledger-keeping system that underpins the digital currency bitcoin and promises a more reliable, immediate way to trace transactions. The World Food Program (WFP), a UN agency that feeds 80 million people worldwide, is putting 10,000 Azraq refugees through a pilot that uses this system to better coordinate food distribution. In doing so, the WFP is tackling a giant administrative challenge: how to ensure, in an environment where theft is rampant and few people carry personal identifying documents, that everyone gets their fair share of food. Among those participating in this project was forty-three-year-old Najah Saleh Al-Mheimed, one of the more than 5 million Syrians forced to flee their homes as the brutal, ongoing civil war has all but destroyed their country. In early June 2015, with mounting food shortages and reports of girls being kidnapped by militias in nearby villages, Najah and her husband made the drastic decision to leave her hometown of Hasaka, where their families had lived for generations. “It was an ordeal that I pray to God no human will ever witness,” she said in an interview conducted on our behalf by WFP staffers working in the Azraq camp.

I met Dr. Freeman in 1991 when he came to Harvard to talk to my fellowship program about his New England Journal of Medicine article. With calm deliberation, this tall, elegant physician disrupted my vision of Harlem and other Black communities throughout the United States. He detailed a cascade of health conditions triggered by inadequate facilities, lack of access to health insurance, and a shortage of medical personnel, healthy food, safe neighborhoods, and basic education. He called the problem a national tragedy, an emergency analogous to a hurricane, flood, or other ruinous natural disaster, yet one for which no one was sounding the alarm.

Without cheap fuel oil and raw material, it couldn’t keep the factories running, which meant it had nothing to export. With no exports, there was no hard currency, and without hard currency, fuel imports fell even further and the electricity stopped. The coal mines couldn’t operate without electricity because they required electric pumps to siphon water. The shortage of coal worsened the electricity shortage. The electricity shortage further lowered agricultural output. Even the collective farms couldn’t operate properly without electricity. It had never been easy to eke out enough harvest from North Korea’s hardscrabble terrain for a population of 23 million, and the agricultural techniques developed to boost output relied on electrically powered artificial irrigation systems and on chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced at factories that were now closed for lack of fuel and raw materials. North Korea started running out of food, and as people went hungry, they didn’t have the energy to work and so output plunged even further. The economy was in a free fall.

First they warn everyone to wear a mask. Then we find out unless it's a special kind of mask it's not going to protect you at all." "It's not just a question of beds. There's not enough linen, not enough gloves, gowns, hypodermic needles, disinfectant, meds, you name it. Not enough ambulances, not enough ventilators or other equipment. Hospitals are even running out of food." "It's not like every other bad thing stopped happening to make room for the flu. People are still getting cancer and having heart attacks and strokes and road accidents. The idea that we could handle any kind of surge on top of that--whoever's fantasy that was, it was never going to happen." "The retired workers they were depending on to take over for the workers out sick? Very few of those people ever showed. The volunteer doctors and nurses and the other helping hands--they aren't showing up, either. It's not like 9/11. There aren't any heroes rushing toward the danger. The danger is everywhere, and everyone's running scared." "Let's face it, this is America. Anything that's bad for business, people don't want to hear. When it comes to money or doing the right thing, most people are going to choose money. Close up shop for months till they can make a new vaccine? How many businesses would still be alive after that?" "This disaster proves what some of us have been saying about America all along: everything is broken.

Police conducted regular spot checks around midnight to make sure nobody had unauthorized visitors. One had to carry at all times a “citizen’s certificate,” a twelve-page passport-size booklet that contained a wealth of information about the bearer. It was modeled on the old Soviet ID. All that changed with the famine. Without food distribution, there was no reason to stay at your fixed address. If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity. Among the homeless population, a disproportionate number were children or teenagers. In some cases, their parents had gone off in search of jobs or food. But there was another, even stranger, explanation. Facing a food shortage, many North Korean families conducted a brutal triage of their own households—they denied themselves and often elderly grandparents food in order to keep the younger generation alive. That strategy produced an unusual number of orphans, as the children were often the last ones left of entire families that had perished. The kochebi, the wandering swallows

It was vitally necessary to conceal this fact from the outside world. Emboldened by the collapse of the windmill, the human beings were inventing fresh lies about Animal Farm. Once again it was being put about that all the animals were dying of famine and disease, and that they were continually fighting among themselves and had resorted to cannibalism and infanticide. Napoleon was well aware of the bad results that might follow if the real facts of the food situation were known, and he decided to make use of Mr. Whymper to spread a contrary impression. Hitherto the animals had had little or no contact with Whymper on his weekly visits: now, however, a few selected animals, mostly sheep, were instructed to remark casually in his hearing that rations had been increased. In addition, Napoleon ordered the almost empty bins in the store-shed to be filled nearly to the brim with sand, which was then covered up with what remained of the grain and meal. On some suitable pretext Whymper was led through the store-shed and allowed to catch a glimpse of the bins. He was deceived, and continued to report to the outside world that there was no food shortage on Animal Farm.

The FPA, in its 1974 Annual Report, stated that “Studies conducted at Mount Weather involve the control and management of domestic political unrest where there are material shortages (such as food riots) or in strike situations where the FPA determines that there are industrial disruptions and other domestic resource crises.” The report states that the bureaucracy at Mount Weather invokes what it calls “civil crisis management.

Journalism will increasingly play a key role in informing the world's population about the causes and consequences of global warming: analysing the reports of scientists, including the alarmists and sceptics among them; investigating the influence of oil and coal industries on government policies; exploring the measures needed to save future generations from the looming disasters of extreme weather and world food shortages; and above all, as in any war, going to the "conflict zones" to carry out one of the basic tasks of journalism - reporting the impact of great events, in this case climate change, on ordinary people's lives. It will mean chronicling a gigantic struggle with nature, and a force that threatens to destabilise societies across the world in decades to come.

In short, the invention of agriculture caused the human food supply to increase in quantity and deteriorate in quality, but food industrialization multiplied this effect. Over the las hundred years, people have developed many technologies to produce orders of magnitude more food that is usually nutrient poor but calorie rich. Since the Industrial Revolution began about twelve generations ago, these changes have enabled us to feed more than an order of magnitude more people and to feed them more. Although approximately 800 million people today still face shortages of food, more than 1.6 billion people are overweight or obese.

of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable “rubbish,” a rude rather than robust population. The English subscribed to the idea that the poor dregs would be weeded out of English society in four ways. Either nature would reduce the burden of the poor through food shortages, starvation, and disease, or, drawn into crime, they might end up on the gallows. Finally, some would be impressed by force or lured by bounties to fight and die in foreign wars, or else be shipped off to the colonies. Such worthless drones as these could be removed to colonial outposts that were in short supply of able-bodied laborers and, lest we forget, young “fruitful” females.

You can NOT love & support Socialism and hate Communism, Nasizm & Fascizm, because they all started from Socialism. I remember when I was 8 yrs old when Albania was Socialism stores was full with food, by the time I was 14 socialism turned Albania into communism, 1st they took people guns, then they seized/stole people's wealth including lands, and all farm animals, all stores ends up being empty, we start shopping with rashes but that didn't guaranty you food. There many times we went in bed hungry because of food shortage! This is why you should never trust the government with anything especially with your guns!

One hundred thousand workers protesting food shortages had marched to Manchester’s town hall in January. British trade union membership was rising, and 1918 saw more than 5.8 million workdays lost to industrial disputes,

With full awareness that food is still lacking for many families, knowing also there is no shortage of solidarity in families on the outskirts, I see a large number of people taking non-perishable foods to churches to be donated to required people. Gradually, with very little, in the middle of ocean of difficulties a droplet sprouts in each heart. I can see an inexhaustible source of kindness and love in helping others.

It was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions.