From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is good food.

I wasn't raised by a mom who lived to shop.

If we needed something, we went and got it, the most inexpensive way possible except for food.

That was it.

So I often get consumer whiplash.

Walking into a mall or Costco can leave me feeling really overwhelmed and sad.

Emily Mester didn't grow up like I did.

Her childhood was punctuated by an excess of what she calls getting.

In her debut collection of essays, American Bulk, Mester explores how our lives are impacted by

how and what we consume. Hi. Hi. I so enjoyed your collection of essays. It's really

wonderfully written and fantastic food for thought. Oh, thank you for reading.

Did your family have a designated shopping day? Yes, it was Sunday, not to say that shopping did not

occur outside of Sunday, but Sunday was sort of, we didn't go to church, but that was kind of our day of retail. We would go to Costco and then kind of before the Costco trip,

which was every Sunday, we would go to like REI sometimes or at the service merchandise or

weird pet stores or Sam's Club. It was old, but yeah, Sunday was always the shopping day.

Was there a list,

or was it a kind of free range shopping experience for all members of the family? Absolutely no list.

My mom, so my mom, because Costco does not sell, actually a lot of the stuff you need or not in the quantities you need, she would go like regular grocery shopping during the week. She had a list. But yeah, we would go sort of under the guise of

necessity like, oh, I have to do my shopping. But no, it would be sort of like my dad would get,

you know, like another toolkit, a pack of scissors, another like box of sharpies like nothing really that sexy but i think exciting to him and then yeah it was

also exciting for the kids because i feel like we couldn't get absolutely anything we wanted but

certainly the like ability to acquire things it felt like sort of the reins were like loosened and

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