I’m getting soup at a Whole Foods in San Francisco. My only real choice is the vegan Lentil Spinach soup. A big cup for $10ish. If you’ve followed my blog from past and you he future, you might know that I sometimes require extra fiber in my diet. So I pick at the spinach to make sure my cup has much more spinach than a randomly selected cup of soup. I also scoop it in a way so as to pick up drier ingredients than a straight scoop would pick up.

In the now very vague memories of my head, I remember a time, an old and reassured voice tells me: don’t be greedy, a little is all you need, leave more for others, that’s the right way to be. the memory is very calming and beams a lot of warm satisfied gratitude towards my feelings. The whole memory comes almost as a guttural moan.

This memory is however now being argued with by a cogent voice that speaks clearly. If you eat the spinach, the others who drink the soup wf or the spinach will not buy the soup, the store will have to modify the soup. If they modify by adding spinach, then you have done a good thing, you have given the store a push towards satisfying the true market demand for the spinach. If they decide that nobody is drinking this soup, and stops providing it, while you suffer the loss of lunch, the store will have again moved towards satisfying the true demand of the market. Your honest selfish action is what the market economy demands of you—you have done well. And with that, a small dose of highly processed satisfaction is misted into me.

What is one to believe in this situation. It would seem that conservation of personal consumption have always permeated our cultures. It might just be that the people who survived the natural busts of world economy only remembers that they (and their surrounding lives) survived because of their abstemiousness, and therefore that is a virtue to be held. The people who did not conserve, they did not survive, they cannot remember the successes of excessive consumption.

This argument is of course self defeating in some ways. The conserving populace my not survive the next bust because they did not consume enough during the boom to survive the bust—much like the grass hopper dying before the squirrels.

But I cannot truly argue against the pro-consumption philosophy, we’ll except for that it may damage the climate and environment.

Sigh…