01/15/2026
Pay-What-You-Can at Green Mountain Ramen at the Heart Rose The Heart Rose Club, a Center for the Arts and Wellness
We got fresh Organic Garlic from Spain today! Thanks to our organic farmers around the globe! Thank you Brattleboro Food Co-op for giving us access to nourishing ingredients.
We’re proud to share that 100% of the vegetables we use are now organic.
To us, food is medicine. Nourishing the community is the true purpose of a restaurant, profit is simply a byproduct. If we want real change in this town, it has to begin with our diet and with how we choose to care for one another through food.
Money is often described as neutral: a tool, a measure, a simple medium of exchange. But tools shape behavior, and measures shape meaning. Over time, money doesn’t just record value, it compresses it, flattening complex human experiences into a single number. Different lives, different days, different needs are asked to fit the same price. This is convenient for systems, but rarely honest for people.
Recently, I read Capitalism in the 22nd Century by Japanese economist Yusuke Narita. He doesn’t argue for abolishing money. Instead, he treats it as a historical technology, one that once solved the problem of trust at scale, but now struggles under the weight of its own limits. As societies grow more complex, money begins to obscure more than it reveals.
Narita describes a shift toward 「物多価」one thing, many values. Value becomes situational, relational, deeply personal. Reading this, I realized something quietly obvious: we were already living this idea at Green Mountain Ramen, not as theory, but as practice.
Dynamic pricing already exists everywhere. Corporations adjust prices constantly, guided by algorithms designed to maximize profit. If that logic can exist at massive scale, then surely we can explore it at human scale, guided instead by trust and care.
Pay-what-you-can shifts the focus away from cost and toward meaning. The same bowl of ramen can be nourishment after a long shift, comfort during grief, celebration during joy, or simply warmth on a cold night. To pretend those moments are equivalent may be tidy for accounting, but it isn’t true to lived experience.
This isn’t charity, and it isn’t chaos. It’s shared responsibility. Each person is treated not as a consumer to be optimized, but as a moral agent capable of self-assessment. Money doesn’t disappear, it simply loses its authority. It becomes one signal among many, not the final word.
We don’t believe money will vanish anytime soon. But we do believe it can loosen its grip as communities rediscover other ways of measuring value. What we’re doing here isn’t “the future economy.” It’s a small signal from it. A reminder that value is contextual, not fixed. Felt, not owned. Shared, not extracted.
Maybe the extinction of money doesn’t begin with revolution or technology. Maybe it begins with permission, permission to trust one another again, permission to admit that not everything important can be priced, and permission to return economics to human scale.
Tonight, that future looks less like an algorithm and more like a warm room, a steaming bowl of ramen, and a community remembering how to measure what matters.
✨ Pay-what-you-can. Always.
Help us feed nourishing, organic food to the people of Brattleboro, made with care, intention, and the best ingredients we can find.
Green Mountain Ramen Hours:
Thursday: 4 pm to 9 pm
Friday: 12 pm to 9 pm
Saturday: 12 pm to 9 pm
Location: 11 Green Street, Brattleboro VT
Inside the Heart Rose Club
We're on and !
Order today on our website GreenMountainRamen.com
