Five Brands I No Longer Use As A Conservative

The first big purchase I ever made for myself was a silver Catbird ring. I was working as a fellow at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On lunch breaks, I’d wander around the corner and down Bedford Avenue for a smoothie, stopping to peer in at the books or the cake-shaped soaps. During my first week, I stumbled upon Catbird Jewelry, then operating out of a cramped showroom, and became a loyal customer. At the end of that summer, I made my largest purchase for myself to date: a $90 Tomboy ring in sterling silver.

For nearly a decade, my friends and I invested in their permanent bracelets. I chose Christmas and birthday presents from its carefully curated collection of dainty things. 

Unbeknownst to me, when I made my first purchase, the company was already donating a portion of its sales to Planned Parenthood. Catbird would be the first (and most beloved) of the brands that would teach me the particular pain of being a conservative in a liberal city: the discovery that the things you love may not love you back. It would also prompt me to investigate the companies behind the products I bought and eventually to purge many of the brands I knew and loved in favor of healthier alternatives for my body, mind, and moral compass. Here are a few brands I no longer support, as well as some alternatives.

Catbird Jewelry 

Catbird founder Rony Vardi has said that the company’s “giving back ethos and environmental ethos” were “baked in from day one.” Catbird formally established its Giving Fund in 2014, eventually committing at least 1% of all sales to nonprofits aligned with its beliefs in “equality and helping others,” which to Vardi meant organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Citizens’ Climate Education. 

By 2017, Catbird was publicly participating in the fashion industry’s campaign supporting Planned Parenthood, and that same year it partnered with “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway on a transgender-themed jewelry collection that donated 50% of sales to the National Center for Transgender Equality. In a turn of the knife, the 2023 Phoebe Bridgers x Catbird collection (which I would’ve waited hours for in the pouring rain) was paired with a $25,000 donation to the same organization. 

Swap Catbird for local gems, which are often more personal and better priced. We have a jeweler (hi, Ernesto!) who knows our names and has become part of our family’s story. He created gifts for our closest wedding guests from gold recycled from my old pieces. Most lovely of all, a close friend designed and fabricated my engagement ring. Now, when I look at it, I see not only my eternal commitment to my husband, but the community in which our love is planted.

Ben & Jerry’s 

This one is a given. Ben & Jerry’s has never claimed to be politically neutral. In 1988, co-founder Ben Cohen launched “1% for Peace,” which advocated that a portion of the defense budget be redirected toward peace initiatives. In 2005, the company delivered a 900-pound “Baked Alaska” to the White House to protest Arctic drilling. In 2009, it renamed Chubby Hubby “Hubby Hubby” to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in Vermont; in 2011, it embraced Occupy Wall Street; and in 2018, it released “Pecan Resist,” an explicitly anti-Trump flavor supporting progressive organizations including the Women’s March and Color of Change. 

In 2020, the company called on Americans to “dismantle white supremacy” in the wake of George Floyd’s death, while also campaigning for racial justice and immigrant rights. Then, in 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would stop selling its ice cream in what it called the “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” making its political commitments impossible to mistake for mere corporate branding. My husband now calls it “terrorist ice cream.” 

As the company itself has put it: “At Ben & Jerry’s, we have always been political.”

Avoiding Ben & Jerry’s is the obvious choice for conservatives, but I have an alternative, a recent discovery so good it has changed the way I think about ice cream and, more surprisingly, the way I think about health altogether. 

Ice Cream for Bears was founded in 2020 by Tim Berg, who started experimenting with ice cream while pursuing his master’s degree in entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis. The concept was simple: make ice cream using basic ingredients, like grandma used to. Its base is just dairy, raw honey, and eggs, with grass-fed milk sourced from regeneratively managed farms. Instead of refined cane sugar, corn syrup, or other processed sweeteners, Ice Cream for Bears uses raw honey, and instead of gums and stabilizers, it relies on egg yolks for texture. 

As my most health-conscious friend said when I read her the ingredients, “I’d eat that for breakfast.” 

Mrs. Meyer’s (or any scented cleaning supplies) 

Before my husband and I were married, I went deep into fertility-maxing — from diet to environmental toxins to simple product swaps I could make in our own home. Mrs. Meyer’s was a difficult brand to let go of (its “Rain Water” scent smells like my childhood), but after considerable research, I decided it was time.

Mrs. Meyer’s does not disclose every chemical in its proprietary fragrance mixtures, and some of its products contain preservatives like methylisothiazolinone and benzisothiazolinone, which are well-established skin sensitizers. More broadly, fragranced consumer products can be a source of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Phthalates, for example, have been associated in human studies with altered reproductive hormones, reduced fecundability, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. 

That isn’t proof that Mrs. Meyer’s causes infertility, but given the potential for repeated exposure, particularly from laundry products that leave fragrance on our clothes and bedding, I decided there was little reason to take the risk. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists likewise recommends choosing fragrance-free products during pregnancy to reduce exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

There are great (and better-smelling) alternatives on the market: Branch Basics and Koala Eco top my list. Their eucalyptus bathroom cleaner makes our New York City shoebox feel like a spa. 

Tampax 

In my fertility frenzy, one of the last products I researched was one that actually went inside my body: the Tampax tampons I’d used since I was 12. 

A 2024 UC Berkeley study tested 30 tampons from 14 brands and found measurable amounts of all 16 metals it tested for, including lead and arsenic. The researchers noted that vaginal tissue is highly permeable compared with ordinary skin, and chemicals absorbed there can enter the bloodstream without first undergoing the “first-pass” metabolism that occurs when substances are swallowed. 

The study did not establish whether these metals leach from tampons during use or whether they cause health problems, and the researchers called for further investigation. But the discovery that a product I was putting against highly permeable tissue for hours at a time could contain lead and arsenic was enough to make me reconsider what I was willing to use every month.

Luckily, a parallel economy has emerged for just this purpose: to provide women with organic cotton menstrual products that they can trust. My favorites are Cora, Lola, and Daye. 

Nespresso and Keurig

For years, I stumbled out of bed and, half asleep, clamped the Nespresso or Keurig down on a fresh coffee pod on the way to the bathroom. That was before my friend, who’d long suffered from unexplained symptoms like extreme exhaustion and brain fog, was diagnosed with heavy metal toxicity, which her doctor traced to years of coffee brewed from single-serve pods.

The Keurig is no better. It is, when you stop to think about it, a strange way to begin the day if your goal is to minimize unnecessary chemical exposure: heating water and forcing it under pressure through a tiny plastic or metal capsule, then drinking whatever leaches out along with your coffee. Studies have found plasticizers and other endocrine-active chemicals in coffee brewed from capsules, and researchers have found that compounds can migrate from the plastic materials into the hot water during brewing.

The alternatives are closer to home than you might think. As soon as my taste for coffee returns (a first-trimester casualty), I’ll be back to my old habits: picking up a weekly bag of beans from the coffee shop down the street and grinding them myself. I can’t wait to wake up again to a Breville latte made with Maple Hill or raw milk.

If you’re somehow miles from the closest local coffee shop, there are a few brands I love that are proven to be delicious, mold-free, and high in antioxidants, Purity Coffee and Kion Coffee chief among them. If you want your morning brew to support pregnancy centers, try Seven Weeks Coffee.

In making these swaps, I have in no way become the perfect ideological consumer. I have, however, become more interested in what goes into the products I put in and on my family’s bodies, more skeptical of convenience for convenience’s sake, and more eager to spend my money with people and businesses whose work strengthens the world I actually want to live in. 

In the process, I’ve discovered something better than ideological purity: local coffee shops, a jeweler who knows my name, ice cream made from ingredients I can pronounce, unscented laundry, and products designed with my well-being, rather than my politics, in mind.

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Grace Salvatore is a Nebraskan writer based in New York City.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.