Quotes About Consumption

We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it's only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.

Domesticated animals were often too valuable to be eaten. Indeed, the amount of meat consumed per person may well have gone down with the advent of farming as wild animals became scarce, at least near villages. (In fact, it's safe to say that meat consumption has fluctuated greatly throughout history and throughout the world, and that, with very few exceptions, until recently it was mostly eaten occasionally.)

We have a rule of thumb: The longer the shelf life of a food, the shorter the shelf life of the person eating the food! There are exceptions, of course—beans and whole grains keep forever—but it's worth bearing in mind.)

R. F. Kahn asked, "If I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?" "Yes," said Hayek, "but … it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why.

Most of us spend more time with advertisements than with Scripture.

Rich men have big libraries. Poor men have big TVs.

what right [do] people in wealthy countries have to blame the poor for their poverty, much less for humanity's environmental dilemma, when it [is] rich countries' consumption patterns that [are] responsible for the vast majority of the world's resource depletion and ecosystem destruction?

It's far too rarely stated that the technology industry is not in the business of making people productive. It is only in the business of selling more technology.

consumption of flour, which raises blood sugar more than table sugar does, is

It is high-fructose consumption that turns on fat production and storage in your liver through a process called lipogenesis.

One can of soda a day increases a child's risk of becoming obese by 60 percent.

If you are what you eat, you're part plastic - because every animal on earth is eating it.

studies have failed to find any substantial evidence proving a relationship between sugar consumption and hyperactivity.

It would be easy to laugh this off were it not so obviously counterproductive. The idea that tackling climate change means accepting profound levels of intrusion into our everyday lives – and the economic disaster of dramatic drops in consumption and living standards – is an illusion that is actually shared by the Green left and the libertarian right.

Calculated globally, human society consumes the equivalent of 400 years' worth of ancient solar energy (expressed in terms of the net primary productivity of plants during previous geological eras) each year through our use of fossil fuels.

We'd do better-if it were possible-just to eat the oil directly. For example, it takes 127 calories of fuel to fly in each calorie of iceberg lettuce from the United States to the UK. According to one estimate, the US food system consumes ten times more fossil energy than it produces in food energy. With

By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States would consume nearly half of the world's coffee.

we have come to invest so much attention on something so shallow.

The way money goes so fast these days, they should paint racing stripes on it.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi

In capitalist economies that require continuous increase in consumption, voluntary poverty constitutes a threat to power. What keeps the gears spinning is income that is both taxable and disposable.

It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less the give. Similarly, generous cultures produce less waste because excess is shared, whereas stingy nations fill their landfills with leftovers.

hadn't the agrarian Wendell Berry written, "How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable.

instead of purifying my character I was multiplying my wants.