The Politics of Grocery Shopping - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 645

be defined as power relations among people and choices about how resources should
be used and allocated globally” (2003, x). This definition usefully draws attention to the
critical power issues involved in food politics—which groups have power and resources
and, which groups are marginalized. This point is particularly important in relation
to global food resources and their maldistribution at a global scale (Paarlberg 2010).
Moreover, food politics cannot be reduced to a specific practice or market mechanism,
such as buying certified organic foods. Instead, food politics is better understood as a
broad discourse that includes consumer imperatives to buy “green,” local, fair-trade, and
sustainable products in the service of health, social justice, and sustainability. Within
that discourse, there are myriad tensions, contradictions, and questions (e.g., is it better
to purchase local non-certified-organic foods or long-distance organic fare?), but there
is also a unifying logic linking individual consumer change to improved ecological and
social conditions.
Many scholars now recognize the importance of consumers as political actors, but
there remains considerable debate about the political consequences and transforma-
tive potential of consumer-focused strategies for changing the food system. Rather than
depicting this debate as involving two different, discrete camps of scholars, it is more
useful to think about an active and continually emerging spectrum of arguments—par-
ticularly since some scholars highlight different ideas at different points of their writing,
and certain arguments are more convincing in specific empirical contexts. At one pole
of this spectrum, we find arguments depicting consumer politics as a legitimate form of
political action, one that exists alongside—and might possibly encourage—other forms
of political participation (Barnett et al. 2005; Lang and Gabriel 2005; Micheletti 2003;
Micheletti, Føllesdal, and Stolle 2004; Neilson and Paxton 2010; Schor 2007). These per-
spectives identify the politicization of the private sphere of consumption and lifestyle
(Giddens 1991; Stolle and Hooghe 2004; Stolle, Hooghe, and Micheletti 2005) especially
among young people, the highly educated, and women (Tindall et al. 2003; Stolle et al.
2005; Neilson and Paxton 2010). They argue that citizens feel distanced from traditional
public-sphere forms of political participation and distrust formal political institutions.
Consumer choice is thought to afford individuals a sense of political agency, and allow
them to align commodity choices with political preferences, morals, and values (Barnett
et al. 2005; Connolly and Prothero 2008).
At the other pole of this spectrum, we find various perspectives that express skepticism
about the transformative potential of consumer politics. These voices argue that consumer
politics represents a form of neoliberalism that downloads responsibility to self-auditing
individuals, leaving states and corporations less accountable for the public good (Power
1997; Rose 1999). In relation to food politics, researchers have identified fetishized con-
sumer approaches to “local” and “organic” food projects, critiqued the class and racial
biases of these consumption programs, cast doubt on the coherence of “citizen-consumers”
acting in a corporate-dominated marketplace, and suggested the need for reflexive
engagement with food politics (Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Guthman 2003; Hinrichs
2003; Johnston 2008; Maniates 2002; Moore 2006; Slocum 2004; Alkon and McCullen
2010). This literature problematizes consumption as a mechanism for political change,