The Politics of Grocery Shopping - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 657

with our larger interest in food system transformation. First, commodity substitution is
not necessarily organized around changing power relations within the food system or
improving the transparency of commodity chains. Rather, the focus is on selecting the
“right” commodity through small adjustments to existing shopping routines such that
the general configuration of material accumulation remains fairly constant. In contrast,
we see considerable value within an ecological citizenship perspective that confronts
how food is commodified and produced, and that challenges a “win-win” perspective
that smoothes over important contradictions that exist between maximizing individual
consumer pleasures and securing sustainable and socially just collective outcomes.
Second, an important, albeit somewhat obvious, limitation of commodity substitu-
tionism—one that too rarely surfaces in the consumer politics discourse—is that voting
with one's dollar requires a certain level of purchasing power (Jubas 2007; Szasz 2008).
Surprisingly, this critique is often minimized by those who focus on how the politics
of the plate can make a difference. Those interested in the pursuit of delicious, green
food often seem deeply unaware of the underlying class implications (Johnston and
Baumann 2009, 2010).
Third, making the “correct” commodity choice is often a highly complex endeavor,
especially given the sheer range of competing environmental sustainability and social
justice concerns that factor into even the most mundane of purchases. In buying a pack-
age of coffee beans, for example, does one prioritize the packaging (and therefore waste),
the company that produced the product (global corporation versus small start-up com-
pany), the particular Fair Trade or organic certification system used for that product,
the store that sells it (major corporate chain versus a smaller, locally owned store), and,
finally, whether one should even buy coffee as a basic “need”? The point of our chap-
ter has been, in part, to question whether consumers should be expected to weigh such
complex and competing concerns, especially since, in the last analysis, almost no prod-
uct choice is completely “correct.”
While the eco-shopping perspective has tremendous potential for tapping into and
modifying existing consumer demand (e.g., converting conventional broccoli buyers
into organic broccoli buyers), a fundamental weakness in this perspective is the reliance
on individual consumer demand as the primary channel for structural reform of the
agri-food system. Commodity substitutionism fits within a larger political-economic
and ideological apparatus of consumerism, and it does not guarantee that consumption
will be scaled down to promote sustainability and social justice, particularly on a global
scale. We identify greater promise for reform from an ecological citizenship perspective,
and even more concretely, through a normative ideal of food democracy. Food democ-
racy advocates for greater decentralization and decommodification of the agri-food
system, as well as cultivation of meaningful interactions between producers and con-
sumers of food. Under this model, eaters of food are not just consumers but are citizens
who have the opportunity and the responsibility to be involved in collective decisions
about how food is produced and how a population feeds itself (Halweil 2005; Hassanein
2003). From this perspective, access to food is a basic right that does not depend on one's
purchasing power and access to the market (Riches 1999). The food democracy ideal