Is it Ever Possible to Truly Live According to Your Non-Consumer Values?

I read any interesting article today that really resonated with me -- talking about the impossibility of an ethical life.  The author discusses the myriad inconsistencies in her lifestyle: Abstaining from meat, but owning leather; recycling, but owning two cars; buying local produce, but purchasing clothing from big-box stores.  It's a conundrum that I think all of us face at one time or another. 

Ethics is not an entirely black-and-white field.  If it were, there would be no room for debate and differing opinions -- we would all just do what was right or be "evil" people.  But life isn't a Disney movie, and the lines are not drawn in such clear contrast. 

Everything Affects Everything Else 

The problem with living a sustainable lifestyle is that we're all interconnected.  None of us is really, truly self-sufficient.  We rely on other people in some form or another.  And those people all have their own lives and ethical dilemmas and problems.  Do we buy our clothes from a major chain, which sources them from sweat shop workers?  If we buy those same brands second-hand, aren't we still supporting the original purchase to some degree?  If we make our own clothes, where are we sourcing our fabric from?  Synthetic materials use up petroleum products, but cotton is a GMO crop.  What if we only use organic cotton?  Even then, it uses up so much water to produce.

And on, and on.

The deeper you delve into the question of conscious consumerism, the more complicated it starts to become.  It's tempting to stop caring at all when there seems to be no perfect answer.  

It's true that nobody can do everything.  However, everyone can do something.

And that's really all we can ask for.  Be aware of the impact you're making in the world, and strive to improve the areas that you can.  Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- just because you can't be 100% committed to a zero-harm, zero-waste, non-consumer lifestyle doesn't  mean there isn't real value in doing your best.  Every dollar you spend (or don't spend) is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in, and those votes do count. 

How to Shop for Groceries (the right way)

Note: This is a re-post from my old blog.  I thought it was still worth sharing.  In the coming weeks, expect to see a lot more re-posts as I work on some digital house-cleaning :)

Grocery Shopping: A Surprisingly Daunting Task

Most people have gone shopping for groceries at one point or another.  It's not that difficult, in theory: you go to the store, you buy some stuff, you come home.  But it's not actually that easy in practice, and shoppers quickly realize that, without the proper strategies, they end up spending way too much money on food they won't eat.  Sound familiar?

Here's the thing.  If you don't know how to cook, grocery shopping can seem like navigating a country whose language you don't speak.  Even if you have a list, you might spend way too much money on groceries or end up with the wrong food.  Luckily, you don't have to despair!  Here's how you save money, buy healthy food and cook cheap, easy meals even if you kind of suck at cooking.

Planning Meals 

If you're not big on experimenting in the kitchen, you'll want the guidance of a meal plan.  Otherwise, how do you know what to buy for groceries?  There's plenty of ways to put together a meal plan.  You could ask the people who live with you, "Hey, what do you want to eat this week?" You can download a pre-made meal plan from one of many sites.  You can put something together from your selection of known recipes.  My mom had three months' worth of meal plans that she cycled through - write them up once, then just buy the same things every month.

If you're really budget-conscious, your best bet is to plan your menu around what you have in the kitchen + what's on sale.  This is what I do, and it enables me to eat surprisingly gourmet food on a tight budget.  Here's my process:

• Take stock of everything you have in the house.  Go through your cabinets, freezer and fridge and make note of every single item you have.  (this is a great opportunity to throw anything out that's gone bad and wipe down your fridge and cabinets, btw) 
• Look at the list and brainstorm several meals that you could make using only the ingredients you have in the house.  Write all of those down.  
• Next, look through the sales adverts for your local grocery stores.  Write down all of the sales for ingredients that you could use in conjunction with the foods in your house in order to cook meals.  
• Figure out what meals you can cook with the foods in your house + the foods that are on sale, and make a list of them.  That's your meal plan.  
• Determine what items you need to buy, both on sale and not on sale, to make everything on your list.  That's your grocery list.  
• Add up the prices of every item from the sales flyer, then add $10 - $20 (depending on what additional items you need to buy).  That's your budget. 

Now you know what you can eat for the week, you know what you need to buy to make those meals, and you know how much money it's going to cost to buy it.  There should be no surprises at the grocery store if you do this.  If you want some help getting inspired, you can use the Supercook link on the right side of my blog to plug in ingredients and get ideas for food.

Once you get to the grocery store, pretend you're on a game show called "Find a better price."  Look at the item on your list, then see if you can get the same or comparable items for an even better price.  You'd be surprised at how often the advertised products aren't even the cheapest version in the store.  If you clip coupons, you can also cross-reference your grocery list with your coupons to get more savings.  (I don't do this, for reasons I've discussed in the past).

 Tips For Success

When you're planning meals, writing a grocery list and going shopping, there are a few things you can do to improve your odds of success:

• Learn about your staples.  Staples are items that you need to always keep in your kitchen because they serve as the base for so many other foods.  Every household will have different staple items depending on what type of foods they eat frequently.  In my house, staples are pasta, canned tomatoes, rice and frozen vegetables.  Every time I run out of those items, I know I need to buy more because they make up the core of so many things I cook.  
• Plan meals around your protein.  Proteins, especially meat and dairy, are going to be the most expensive items on your list.  Plan your menu accordingly.  If meat's on sale, pick whatever is the best deal and buy that one item.  Find ways to stretch that one item into several meals.  For example: If whole chickens are on sale, you might want to buy one and roast it one night, then shred the leftovers for tacos another night, then cook the bones for stock and make soup a third night.  
• Don't buy more fresh foods than you can deal with.  If you don't eat them in time, fruits and vegetables will go bad very fast.  Plan to eat the most delicate of them early in the week.  If you find an excellent deal on them and buy in bulk, make a plan to preserve them.  It's super easy to make small batches of jam or refrigerator pickles, and pretty much anything can be frozen if you do it right.  
• Learn what substitutions you can make.  If you get to the store and they're all out of zuchinni, it pays to know that you can cook crookneck squash or Mexican gray squash in pretty much exactly the same way.  Try to get as wide of an idea of what foods taste good together and what can be substituted in the dishes you like to cook, and be flexible with your list.  

So, there you go.  A few tips from me on grocery shopping.  Is this the only way you can buy groceries and save money?  Of course not.  But it's my method, and it works pretty well.

If you have any questions, I'll happily answer them!  

Week Three: A Whole Bunch of New Foods

As I think I've mentioned, we're doing the 14 weeks of 100 Days of Real Food mini-pledges (although I'm not quite doing them in order).  At the end of each week, we the goal is to add on the next challenge while continuing the first (or at least slightly modifying the first to make it long-term accessible).  Week one ("eat two fruits or vegetables with every meal") was pretty easy, and I've continued doing it since without too much trouble.  I've mostly displaced a lot of grains with vegetables (opting for veggies as a side or base instead of pasta or rice, for example, or wrapping things in lettuce instead of eating it on bread).  

Week two was a bit more of a challenge:  Don't drink any sweetened beverages.  I mostly succeeded at this.  I drank a latte instead of a mocha at the coffee shop, and I had a 100% juice when I somehow ended up at Jamba Juice while out shopping.  Mostly I've just been drinking a lot of water, and I like it that way.  I did stumble twice.  The first time, I ended up at a fast food-style Greek restaurant.  After paying for my drink, I discovered that they didn't have any unsweetened iced tea (my go-to drink for fast food places) so I got stuck with the house-made lemonade.  Oh well.  The second time, David bought us an agua fresca (de fresas) at the market, and the person selling it didn't speak enough English to confirm whether it had sugar in it.  So the jury's still out on that one (but from the taste, I'm assuming "yes." And let me just say - it was delicious). 

Today was the day to buy groceries for weeks three and four.  One of those challenges is super easy -- "Buy nothing low-fat or fat-free."  The rationale being that when food manufacturers artificially remove fat, they often replace it with sugar and chemicals.  For the most part the only thing I had to avoid buying "light" was dairy.  I still don't have a good source for raw milk (or even local milk) but I did get some organic whole milk, so that's a start.  

The other challenge is more fun:  Eat two new whole foods per week.  I actually went slightly over and got six new foods instead, because I'm an over-achiever.  Here are the foods I got -- along with a bit of fun information about them.  

Watercress 

A semi-aquatic plant in the Brassica family (along with broccoli and cabbage), watercress was one of the first leafy vegetables to be eaten by people.  It goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, and it's mentioned in the Talmud.  Apparently it also makes up a primary part of a swan's diet.  Nutritionally, it's a power-house:  iron, calcium, iodine, folic acid, and vitamins A and C as well as antioxidants.  It's also been reported to have some medicinal qualities, including as a diuretic, expectorant and digestive aid, and it's rumored to have some anti-carcinogenic properties.  

Because it's so delicate, you have to eat watercress pretty much as soon as you get it home.  You can eat it raw or cook it.  It tastes sort of spicy and a little bitter, almost like mustard greens, but the flavor is much more mild.  When you cook it, the flavor mellows and picks up a flowery hint.  

Milkfish

The local Asian market has an amazing selection of fresh fish.  David's always very excited about picking them out because he'd always thought he didn't like fish -- until he had some real fresh fish.  After surveying our options, we ended up bringing home a milkfish, which are native to the Indian and Pacific oceans and spend some time in swamps and estuaries before heading back to the sea.  Ours -- like pretty much all other milkfish you'll find sold -- was farm-raised.  They live on a diet of algae and invertebrates and make up an important part of the diet for people in the Philippines.  

If you're looking for recipes, it may help to search for their other common names, "bangus" or "chanos chanos." When preparing these guys, be careful of the bones as these are very bony fish.  There are about a billion different ways to cook and eat it, but pan-frying seems to be one of the most popular.  Here's some more information about cooking them.  

Lotus Root

The root -- or, actually, the sunken stem -- of the aquatic lotus blossom.  Lotus plants have a long, somewhat sacred history in Asia, especially in Buddhist countries, where it's a symbol of purity.  The root is commonly used in varying types of cuisines.  

They're a great source of fiber, and they also provide thiamin, vitamin B6, potassium, phosphorous, copper and manganese.  They also have about 27% of your necessary vitamin C.  Here's a few tips for preparing them.  

I had this once in a pho and fell in love with it, though I had absolutely no idea what it was and didn't find it again until discovering it at the Asian market.  It has a flavor and texture somewhat similar to jicama, and it plays well with others in soup.  The easiest way to prepare it is to peel and slice it, then boil it in vinegared water to remove some of the tannins that lend bitterness to it.  After boiling for a minute or two, you can pull it out to use as a crunchy ingredient, or you can keep boiling it and put it in soup.  

Flax Seed

Cultivated as far back as ancient Egypt, flax used to be an extremely common clothing fiber.  Some evidence suggests flax was spun and worn in pre-historic times, dating back to 30,000 B.C. The seeds are eaten as-is or made into oil.  

These things are chock-full of fiber and omega-3s as well as a whole slew of nutrients: thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin B6, folate, vitamin C, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium and zinc.  There's some research that suggests it might play a role in reversing diabetes, high cholesterol and cancer, but the jury's out on just how accurate all that is.  

So what do you do with this stuff?  First, you can mix it into things, like yogurt or muffin batter.  Lots of people like putting them in smoothies.  You can also pound it down into a flour-like substance and use it in various baked goods.  The easiest way to do that is to grind it in a coffee grinder.  

Mung Beans

These little guys are native to India, but they're grown throughout Asia and the southern U.S.  They can be cooked and eaten or sprouted.  Cooked, they can be substituted for lentils in most dishes. 

They're packed with fiber and vitamin C, and they're also a good source of protein, thiamin, niacin, iron, magnesium, and a bunch of other things.  

Before we went to the Asian market today, we stopped off at Pho Saigon.  While we were eating our lunch, we got to musing about just how yummy bean sprouts are, and it made me think I needed to buy some mung beans and sprout them myself.  I'm curious to try them cooked.  

Kale

During the Middle Ages, this was one of the  most popular and common green vegetables eaten.  My vegetarian friends have been riding me to try this stuff since forever, so I'm finally giving in.  

This humble vegetable is another of the brassicas, closely related to cabbage.  It's high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C and calcium.  It's also rumored to have some cancer-fighting properties.  

You can eat it cooked or raw.  I hear you can dehydrate it into a delicious chip, so I'll be trying that.  It can also be mixed into things or even snuck into smoothies.  

Stop the Demand, End the Supply

I've noticed an interesting thing as I've started my quest toward a nonconsumerist lifestyle: Most of the other people interested in this same thing tend to be animal welfare activists.  Not just the vegans and vegetarians I know, but the omnivores as well.  I think this interest in animal welfare goes deeper than the question of whether or not to eat flesh.  I think it strikes at the very core of non-consumerism. 

Let me pause to give you a bit of back story.  I started rescuing rats in 2008.  Since then, I've taken in over a dozen unwanted rodents myself, and I've helped rehome about 50 to forever-homes.  I have friends who are fellow rat-rescuers, dog rehabilitators, cat TNR workers, you name it.  But it's all a similar goal: Find homes for as many unwanted animals as possible.  

When you work in rescue, you become pretty fanatical about spaying and neutering.  That's because the more animals that are born every year, the more end up being unwanted.  Worse, new puppies displace older dogs in shelters.  Every puppy or kitten that's born is a death sentence for some other animal.  And it's insanely difficult to get that into people's heads sometimes.  Try as we might, animal rescuers are time and again confronted with the backyard breeders who bred puppies "because they were cute" or some other asinine reason and now want us to clean up their mess. 

Anyway, a friend of mind in the rat rescue business has this very simple quote in her signature for all online dealings:  Stop the demand, end the supply.  

And I thought -- wow, that's powerful.  Not just for animals, but for everything else we consume. 

The Power of the Consumer

It's easy to think that consumers have no power.  We feel buffeted around in a world that's bigger and scarier than us.  "What difference can I possibly make?"  We say.  "Why does it matter what I do, when the rest of the world is still doing other things?"

What we don't realize is that we are the rest of the world.  The decisions we make do make a difference, and in a very real way.  When you stand up and demand something, people will listen.  They have to, because you're the consumer.  You're the person funding their payroll. 

If you stop the demand for certain things, they'll stop getting made.  It won't be instantaneous, but it'll happen.  If people couldn't make money by breeding cute puppies, fewer backyard breeders would churn them out.  If food companies couldn't make money by selling you prepackaged convenience foods, they wouldn't make them. 

Instead of bemoaning the state of the world and feeling helpless about it, make your stand!  If you don't like something, don't buy it.  Don't support industries you disagree with just because "it's the way the world works" and you're too intimidated to change.  Vote.  With every purchase and decision you make, vote.  One person at a time, one issue at a time, the world will start to change. 

Stop the demand.  End the supply. 

And with that, I'm off for the weekend.  I have a stack of library books to read and lots of new food to try out!

What's So Bad About Consumerism, Anyway?

For better or worse, human society is intimately connected to economics.  And that's not a bad thing.  The barter system works okay for some things, but it's unwieldy in practice.  If you're in a barter system, and you want something from someone who doesn't want what you have, you're in trouble.  If you can pay them with something that represents purchasing power so they can buy what they want, you're in business.

So there's nothing inherently wrong with money or technology.  I would be lying if I said that I wished there were no money or technology.  I like having clean running water and indoor plumbing.  I like electricity, and Internet connections, and laptops and video games.  In order to have those things, we need to pay for them, and in order to pay for them we need jobs, and most jobs require producing goods and/or services that other people need to pay for.  It's a system.  We're part of it.  You have to accept that.

Consumerism - A Symptom of Fear Culture

The problem with the consumer mindset is that it's excessive, wasteful, and it preys on fear.   Advertisements are carefully created to make you feel insufficient.  They show you a wonderful life and promise that you, too, could have it if you just bought their product.  They show everything that's wrong with your life, even things you didn't realize were problems, and tell you the only way to fix this problem is to buy their product.

And even this, on its own, wouldn't be so bad.  I actually like watching commercials.  I find them to be some of the most effective storytelling on TV. Commercials are often better-written than any of the shows actually on air.  But most people who watch TV aren't looking at commercials as clever marketing tools or well-crafted short films.  They're passively absorbing the lessons inherent in them without stopping to examine the effects of those ads on their life.

Full disclosure:  The next car I buy will probably be a Kia Soul.
And there's several reasons for that -- gas mileage, cargo space, price -- but I would absolutely be lying if I didn't admit that I am at least partially influenced by the dancing hamster commercials.  

Critical thinking skills are not something that most people have learned to cultivate, and that puts them at risk of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous advertising companies.

Money, Power and Politics

The worst part about consumerism, though, is the power it wields.  It wouldn't be so bad if every advertisement made itself obvious, but advertising is more insidious than that.  For better or worse, power and money are synonymous in our culture, and there are few things more dangerous than the intersection of politics and financial interests.

We like to think we can trust certain authoritative sources of information.  Unfortunately, a lot of what we grow up believing to be simple fact is actually clouded by financial interests.  For example, the "Got Milk?" campaign that was so incredibly popular a decade ago?  That came from the National Milk Processor Board, as pretty much a shameless attempt to get more Americans to drink milk.  These ads exhort how wonderful and healthy and essential milk is, which wouldn't be so bad on its own except that the USDA supports these claims despite pretty compelling evidence that milk isn't actually that healthy for you and may actually be bad for you.

So someone we thought we could trust -- the USDA -- is cowing (no pun intended) to the dairy industry.  And who suffers?  The people who are drinking their 2-3 servings of dairy a day because that's what they genuinely believe is healthy for them.

I don't say this to make a statement about dairy one way or another -- that's an issue for a different day -- but to point out the danger of assuming you can trust any single authoritarian source to tell you the truth.  You can't, because of their financial interests.

And that, friends, is my biggest problem with consumerism.

This kind of political power overlapping with monetary gain is in every part of our society, from industries funding political campaigns (traditionally, the biggest backers of presidential elections are Wall Street and the insurance industry) to corporate sponsorship of events (like McDonalds being the official sponsor of the Olympics -- wtf?) to chicken fast food companies donating money to political causes that many people find aberrant.

Not to Mention the Environment...

And all of that doesn't touch the ecological impact of all the trash we're dumping into landfills (not to mention in our oceans), the fossil fuels burned making and shipping the goods we buy, the pollution created by manufacturing plants and the natural and unnatural products that go into things that are made, consumed and thrown away every day.

I'm not saying we need to own nothing.  We need to own some things.  But we probably don't need to own as much as we do, and the things we buy aren't necessarily the things we need.  I'm just saying we need, as a society, to become more conscious consumers.  And maybe the first step to becoming a careful consumer is to stop consuming altogether first -- going cold turkey -- and realizing then what you really need to buy and what you're willing to pay for.