Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.
When is population going to become an accepted part of the food debate? If it's fine to encourage people to think about halving their meat consumption, can we really not cope with a conversation about how many children we have?
I eat too much.
The more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises: Do you need a tidier closet? A nicer family picture album? Elderly parents who are truly well cared for? Children who have an edge in school, on tests, in college and beyond? If we can afford the services involved, many if not most of us are prone to say, 'Sure, why not?'
I do worry that we're failing in a whole bunch of fundamental ways to distinguish for our kids between needs and wants. And we're failing to distinguish between production and consumption.
I like to drink wine more than I used to. Anyway, I'm drinking more.
We have to change the kind of free trade deals we sign. We would have to change the absolutely central role of frenetic consumption in our culture. We would have to change the role of money in politics and our political system.
What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?
America's lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence.
Consuming three planets' worth of resources when in fact we have one is the environmental equivalent of childhood obesity - eating until you make yourself sick.
Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.
There are two ways to be rich: to have more or need less. It's estimated that we squander about 30 percent of our energy leaving the lights on, the refrigerator door open, and so on. Then there is the enormous amount of food that we expend huge amounts of energy to raise and then throw away.
How we eat can change the world
I remember when a Coke came in a six-ounce bottle, and delicious it was. Now it comes in sizes so big that I question how the human bladder can deal with the intake.
On a large scale, people aren't going to cut back how much they use. That's a pipe dream. If anything, as the developing world gets richer, the world's going to consume more - more cars, bigger homes, more energy, more water, more food.
We have to give people the freedom to choose lifestyles and material satisfactions that suit their needs, and we have to redefine need itself. We can't redefine need among ghetto people by telling them we should all give up our TV sets or automobiles: we have to tell them there's enough to go around, now let's talk about using it sensibly.
The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one-third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on.
It's funny, I probably have 500 pairs of shoes - all these sneakers or whatever that I've collected - but when push comes to shove, I always end up wearing the same two or three pairs.
Poor people have big TV's. Rich people have big libraries.
In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.
Money flows into the US, and inflates US assets, and allows the US to have a monstrous trade deficit. That means we are consuming more than we are producing.
I probably eat yogurt more than anything else.
I try to not eat as much sugar, but it's so hard in our American diet to do that... It's hard to completely avoid.
I consume music the way other people consume movies.
One of the hardest challenges posed by the modern world is how to deal with abundance. It's even harder to confront because admitting that it's a problem seems spoiled.
