Consumerism – Love Ugly Food

How to Have a Healthy Relationship With Spending

Crafting your space intentionally can help articulate what you stand for—as not only your aesthetic, but your experiences, passions, and values are reflected back at you.

Shopping Addiction: Purge Your Urge to Splurge

When you begin a ritual behavior, it’s like the act of pushing a ball downhill—it’s the beginning of a compulsive cycle that builds powerful momentum. When engaging in ritual behaviors, there is a buildup of excitement, commitment (sometimes unconscious), and often a strong feeling of conflict.

An Imperfect Food System: How Food Waste Perpetuates Food Insecurity

What are we teaching our children or encouraging in our culture if we reject anything that doesn’t fall within a slim margin of perfection—within the standard shape, color, and size that we have deemed desirable?

An Imperfect Food System: Grocery Privilege

If you’re food secure, you probably walk the aisles with a sense of possibility. Especially when it comes to higher-end or more intimate markets, your identity as customer means you are there to be served and valued: imagine what this alone does for your sense of worth.

Progress Over Perfection: Finding Balance as a Conscious Consumer

The side of myself that wants my hands in the dirt and never to encounter a shower usually overpowers the side of myself that finds restoration in makeup application and shoes that clack when you walk, but sometimes the dynamic shifts. When it does, I thoroughly appreciate Goodwill sprees and REI store explorations, sometimes even H&M (don’t tell anyone)…

How to Shop Responsibly (and Buy Less Stuff)

Many of these items (plastic and paper cups, utensils, napkins) are so cheap to produce that they automatically come with our food—even if we don’t want them to. As a result, we view these “free” materials as nearly worthless, and they go from single-use resources to “zero-use” resources: how many times have you received a straw with your drink that you didn’t use, or a clean napkin that you threw away with the rest of your meal?

Captive Overconsumers: Why We’re Stuck in a Cycle of Spending

Most Americans would agree on the counterproductiveness of needless spending, while admitting to doing so quite regularly—it is something we are all guilty of in our pursuit of pleasure. Many of us rationalize this spending as a necessary evil for a strong economy; in reality this could not be further from the truth.