No specific topic so why limit myself?

I have not written for some time but I'll try and give something now. So I haven't drank any pop (pardon my Midwestern North American upbringing but by pop I mean, Coke/Pepsi/Mountain Dew/Dr. Pepper/etc) since April of 2002. Now I haven't eaten any mammal products (read: beef/pork/lamb) since 2006. The pop drought was easy and I personally find eating intelligent animals such as a cows but especially pigs unethical.

I've recently crossed another threshold. I live with my parents (I'm a college student; I'm a loser, no doubt, but I'm not that much of a loser) and they do not care about food and the only way they quantify it is by price. This past week, my father returned with a gallon of milk from a large American discount store based in Arkansas which shall go nameless. It suddenly hit me that I simply do not have faith in that company to provide acceptable milk.

So I decided on my own to purchase a half gallon of organic milk from Meijer (a large, private company based in my state of Michigan). I will not claim that it is better or that I can even taste the difference (I did buy 1% so I can taste the difference actually, as my family purchases skim) but I do have faith that it is better for me than the same milk from that discount store.

I also bought some organic bananas and after a simple taste test, I think I made my mother switch too. Organic bananas, from my experience, taste a lot better than non-organic which is basically just banana shaped, tasteless mush. Plus, the price I feel is marginal (69 cents a pound versus 52 cents a pound as of yesterday).

So what I'm trying to say is that I would like to believe that I am a better consumer, by being able to differentiate between price and value. Now if only the rest of my family can learn that idea...

This is slightly related but this quote from TreeHugger has literally changed my life. Hopefully it changes your perceptions like it has changed mine.

Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff. That was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor, and stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively I accumulated it.

What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's 'worth?' The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will."