The consumer power myth

Refuse consumerism and de-commodify food

The globalization of trade has given the wealthier share of the global population the impression that you can eat what you want. This fits well with the neoliberal ideology that portrays capitalism as democratic where people “vote with their wallets”. But it is an illusion - even for the rich countries. Rather than putting our faith in green consumerism we should strive to de-commodify food.

Who determined that we eat carrots - and that they should be orange? Photo: Gunnar Rundgren

The myth that the consumer is in command is an essential part of capitalist ideology. It portrays the market as a democratic institution which people can control by “voting with their wallets”. And, if markets are democratic, the best is to let markets take care of as much as possible – so the story goes. Regardless of the fact that some people have many more dollars in their wallet than others, it gives a totally distorted view of how markets work. Steve Jobs said “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” and proved it with the iPhone. It is true also on a much larger scale in time and place. And it is particularly the case for food.

For almost the whole history of human kind, people have eaten what could be foraged, hunted or fished by them or by others in their proximity. The idea that ”consumer demand” would drive production would be uncomprehensible for our ancestors. Not only didn't any ”consumers” exist as a category, there was no distinct demand or a market where such demand could be expressed. I am sure that people had their food preferences and that one day the band decided that it would be nice to feast on ripe figs or apples, and another day they devoured venison from a successful hunt. But people ate what was available, by reasonable efforts, in their ecological niche. Then as today, most people would eat the same as the others in the same group.

This didn't change much with the advent of agriculture. The range of food was more limited in agrarian societies (although the transition was mostly much more intermittent and gradual than what most people seem to believe), and the notion of consumer demand would be even more surreal than in foraging cultures. Most of the food was consumed by those growing it, the remainder was shared with kin and communities, sacrificed to gods or appropriated by various rulers. A very small share was sold in anything resembling a market. What was on offer was also not a result of consumer demand but of the material and biological conditions for production.

Our ancestors decided what we eat

Starting with the very basics, our ancestors domesticated a rather small number of crops and animals. It might be that they sometimes was driven by desires of a particular taste or nutritional content, but largely what was domesticated or not was determined by the conditions at site and the properties of the plant or animals. It is hardly because beef taste better than bison that cows were domesticated but not bison or asparagus instead of bulrush, lettuce instead of dandelion.

Once some plants and crops were domesticated and in the process have become easier to farm and yields well, we start to adjust both our palates and the production system to these crops. A rift opens, both culturally and materially between cultivated crops and livestock and wild ones. It is remarkable that in many places where agriculture has been an ”imported” system or where it was spread by invading cultures, hardly any native plants were domesticated, but the crops and livestock brought in were instead adapted to the new conditions. In Sweden, where I live and farm, almost no crop that we grow has any wild ancestor, and even when there is such one (black currants and carrot grow wild) it doesn't seem that we domesticated our wild varieties but took what was introduced.

It is astonishing that there have been so few successful domestication events for thousand years.

It is actually astonishing that there have been so few successful domestication events of major crops for thousand years. The Germans developed the sugar beet in the 18^th century as a result of them not having any colonies for sugar cane plantations, and this was just a refinement of the already domesticated beetroot. A number of fish species have been domesticated lately (even if fish farming has been wide-spread for a very long time), but still, an overwhelming majority of the foods consumed on the planet today were domesticated more than thousand years ago.

There is thus no consumer demand that has determined what food is available or what is not. It is the availability of certain foods that made us like them and therefore also consume them.

This is obviously also the reason for why people in various parts of the world have different food preferences. It is not consumer demand that led to consumption of cooked rice in Asia or bread in Europe.

The choice architects

When standing in front of a supermarket shelf, or sitting at a table reading a restaurant menu, there are many choices; a large supermarket may carry up to 50,000 food items. However, a very large part of food items are variations made out of the ‘Big Five’ – wheat, maize, palm oil, sugar and soybeans – and they are produced by a handful large companies, which source the raw materials from a few selected key locations. Farmers grow the crops and the varieties of those crops that the industry dictates and/or supply them with. There are many steps from raw materials to consumer and all those actors take decisions of what to produce and what not to produce or make available for sale. Mundane items and conditions such as shopping carts and transportation systems as well as the availability of a kitchen and the technical infrastructure in the kitchen also determine consumption patterns.

Government regulations rest heavy and restricts or promotes different kinds of products and production systems. In some countries you need to own a cow if you want to consume raw milk. Clearly, governments, agriculture input providers, the food industry and retailers are the real shapers of the food system, the ‘choice architects’ and their decisions shape what consumers can and cannot buy. It is no coincidence that the shop shelf space for crisps is ten times bigger than for fresh potatoes. In the Reko-ring in Uppsala, where we sell vegetables, there are many products on sale which are never made available in the shops and there are twenty five varieties of potatoes instead of three or four in the supermarkets.

Governments, agriculture input providers, the food industry and retailers decide what consumers can and cannot buy.

That people eat huge quantities of chicken and almost no magpies or starlings is not the result of consumer preferences but of the fact the hens were domesticated many thousand years ago. But even so, chicken was a luxury food for a long time, and therefore not much consumed (in the US they spoke about ”Sunday chicken” which gives you an idea). From the 1930s and onwards industrial processes of chicken production were developed. In addition, the food industry and restaurants like chicken as it is always tender, easy to process and tasteless so you can give it any taste you want. All this together has transformed chicken from luxury food to staple food and the relative price of chicken compared to beef or pork has gone down dramatically. Of course, one could say that consumers now ”demand” chicken, but that is really turning the story on its head.

Also within economics, there is even a ”law”, Say's law, that states that ”‘supply creates its own demand ”. You can read more about it here or here. The notion of ”consumer power” is also an offense to the majority of the world's population that has very little economic resources, as their choices are extremely limited.

The conscientious consumer

Especially in the environmental arena there is a lot of faith in using consumer demand as a tool for improving production. If we want to change consumption patterns we should, however, not see consumption primarily as an act of individual consumers. Consumption ”is a collective achievement in which consumers are both produced by, and part of producing specific capacities to act and consume” as expressed by Ingrid Stigzelius in her thesis Producing Consumers. And as I have pointed out above most decisions about our foods were already taken long before any ”product” reach the market.

People are not isolated individuals but social and cultural beings and our values, preferences and actions are very much predicated on collective norms. People prefer foods that are symbolically associated with their own culture. This is also the case for people making radically different choices than the mainstream culture, e.g. the rise of veganism or the strive to eat climate friendly or organic foods.

Based on all the above, it is apparent that markets and production methods are not consumer driven. It is important to call the bluff of consumer power as it is a major tool for justifying the current system and to make any ills the responsibility of ”the consumer”, instead of those in charge.

Having said all this, as long as you are a buyer in the market place it makes sense to make as good and ethical choices as you can. I believe the three rules are:

• consume as little as necessary,

• buy things for which you have a direct relationship with the producer, or at least intimate knowledge about under which conditions they were produced, and

• make ethical, social and environmentally sound choices.

Even within the context of the market economy, one can also act as a citizen rather than as a consumer to shape the market. This can be by pushing for regulations to ban certain production practices or improve the conditions for farm workers. One can also act politically towards the food industry and retailers. By and large, boycotts and shaming by committed people have made a bigger impact on the food chains than good consumer choices.

Refuse consumerism

More important than making ethical consumer choices, i.e. green consumerism, is to challenge consumerism as such. The ”consumer” perspective of food reduces food to commodities all the way from the farm to the plate. Commodities are produced for the market where every actor compete with other actors to sell. Commodity production will be made at the expense of the community, the environment, the rest of the living, workers etc. In a similar way, commodity consumption leads to deteriorating health, obesity and food waste. A commodity perspective, reinforced by the market, is simply not the appropriate way to organise our well-being and our relationship with the rest of the living. And food is the central piece of this relationship.

Therefore, a central task is to de-commodify food through multiple means, such as self-provisioning, co-producing, gifting and sharing or even just by having a stable relationship between producers and consumers. I see many such alternatives emerging and will write more about them in the near future.