It takes a village, and here at Tempted Temple, we lean on our community to educate each other. The items we purchase, the foods we eat, and the choices we make all work together to create a healthy lifestyle. We are here to offer help and guidance to make your life easier and to take some of the work out of buying food and other household products. We strive to provide our followers with tools to grow their understanding of the foods they consume, the products they utilize, and the little decisions they make on behalf of their household, day by day. In our next few blog posts, we’d like to explore several topics related to purchases we make and what influences those decisions. We hope you’ll join us.
Thought Behind Health
Many of the purchases we make for our households are done on autopilot. We buy the same products over and over without really giving it much thought. We toss items into our cart or purchase online without so much as checking the label- but there is another way. Today, we'll look into the ways that consumer habits feed an unhealthy system of creation. How are the goods we purchase sourced, produced, and packaged? How can we make better choices for our homes, our health, and our communities?
Purchase Power
There is power in the purchase. It is important that we choose to buy goods and services from companies that are ethical and have good morals. What that looks like will differ from person to person. Some may value sustainability, while others think animal rights are most important. Your biggest concern might be how employees are treated or how much the company invests back into local communities. Whatever your values are, it is important to support those companies whose morals align with your own. If we are buying goods and services from companies that don’t align with us morally, those companies will continue to produce what we are buying. It perpetuates a cycle of production and consumption, and we actually become a part of the problem. We get to choose where we spend our money, and therein lies our power.
Small Business Support
There are lots of reasons to support small businesses. While it’s not always true, typically smaller companies maintain their moral standards. Small businesses have a real person or people behind it who care about giving the customer a quality product. Many times, though, when small companies sell out to larger companies, their value systems get lost in the shuffle. The larger company will come in and change all the processes, and the product you were once purchasing is now produced in a completely different way but is still packaged as it was, so the consumer thinks they are getting the same product but it is not the same.
Whole and Local Food Sourcing
Seeking out whole real foods is an important step to maintaining your health. One of the easiest ways to ensure the food you consume is natural and whole is to purchase food that is produced locally and comes directly from environmentally responsible farmers. When you buy from local farmers, you help create healthy environments and strong communities, and you support your local economy. U-picks, farmers’ markets, farm stands and food co-ops are all ways to find local food. There are many websites available to help you locate local farmers in your area who sell their goods. Farmmatch.com, sustainableagriculture.net, and farmaid.org are three excellent websites. Localharvest.org is an information-rich resource that allows users to search for local farmers, farmers’ markets, and CSAs (community supported agriculture) by zip code. When you attend farmers’ markets, have conversations with the vendors, and ask questions: how do you grow what you grow? Can I visit your farm? How long have you been farming?Doing your due diligence and research can be eye-opening. Our mission at Tempted Temple is to share a lifestyle of old-fashioned values combined with strategic modern technologies both contributing to the health and well-being of ourselves and the world. We hope to help you leverage technology to make your life healthier and easier. There are more tools and information available today than ever before to help us be intentional buyers. With so many apps and websites, the solution is literally at our fingertips.
In the next few blog posts we will discuss additional important topics related to how we think about everyday health, including, green washing, functional medicine, diet trends and supplements.