Quotes About Consumption

she believed material desires were toxic.

Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were.

The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners. Our culture is not acquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're juts particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.

A quick way to improve food-related fuel economy would be to buy a quart of motor oil and drink it.

To hear you tell it, you'd think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.

Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers.

A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.

said, sounding a little nervous. "Skipping ahead to Everyday Necessities. Try your best to buy reused.

Saturn Devouring His Son

the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.

Americans spent about $27 billion on nontraditional remedies, most of them unproven.

As the magnitude of the gain increases, the amount of additional satisfaction people get out of each additional unit decreases. The shape of this curve conforms to what economists have long talked about as the "law of diminishing marginal utility." As the rich get richer, each additional unit of wealth satisfies them less.

The country is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a man eats to his fullest day after day, that man becomes fat…sleepy…piggish. But in this land…it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become.

Compared with the 20 million motorcars in the United States, cars and trucks in the Soviet Union numbered perhaps 5,500

Here is a poem for you: The candy peddler is ringing his bell, and the child cries to its mother. Money becomes candy and candy becomes money. Money goes into the peddler's pocket, and candy goes into the child's mouth and is sweet.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed. - Mahatma Gandhi

In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. . . . Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. — FRANCIS YOUNG, ADMINISTRATIVE LAW JUDGE, DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION

Los gusanos nunca están satisfechos, no importa la cantidad de comida que les des»

Most of us have a lot more experience being consumers than producers, so we tend to view things through the lens of demand rather than supply.

To Chen's surprise, Felix and the others responded rationally. When the price of a given food rose, the monkeys bought less of it, and when the price fell, they bought more. The most basic law of economics—that the demand curve slopes downward—held for monkeys as well as humans.

The same thing happens if health care is distributed in a similar fashion: people consume more of it than if they were charged the sticker price. This means the "worried well" crowd out the truly sick, wait times increase for everyone, and a massive share of the costs go to the final months of elderly patients' lives, often without much real advantage.