Article
Food activists, consumer
strategies, and the
democratic imagination:
Insights from eat-local
movements
Journal of Consumer Culture
0(0) 1–20
! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1469540516659125
joc.sagepub.com
Emily Huddart Kennedy
Washington State University, USA
John R. Parkins
University of Alberta, Canada
Josée Johnston
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Scholars remain divided on the possibilities (and limitations) of conceptualizing social
change through a consumer-focused, ‘‘shopping for change,’’ lens. Drawing from framing
theory and the concept of the democratic imagination, we use a case study of ‘‘eatlocal’’ food activism to contribute to this debate. We ask two questions: first, how do
activists in the local food movement come to diagnose and critique the conventional
industrial food system? and second, what roles do they envision for participants in the
sustainable food movement? We address these questions by drawing from activist interview data (n ¼ 57) and participant observation of the eat-local movement in three
Canadian cities. Our findings illuminate a mixed picture of possibilities and limitations
for consumer-based projects to foster social change. On the one hand, the diagnostic
frames presented by food activists suggest skills in critical thinking, attention to structural injustice, and widespread recognition of the importance of collective mobilization.
This framing suggests a politically thick democratic imagination among eat-local activists.
In contrast, when it comes to thinking about prescriptions for change, activist understandings draw from individualistic and market-oriented conceptualizations of civic
engagement, which indicates a relatively thin democratic imagination. These findings
demonstrate that despite the sophisticated understandings and civic commitment of
movement activists, the eat-local movement is limited by a reliance on individual consumption as the dominant pathway for achieving eco-social change.
Corresponding author:
Emily Huddart Kennedy, Washington State University, 213 Wilson-Short Hall, Pullman, WA 99163, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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Keywords
Citizen-consumer, consumerism, individualization, local food movement, democratic
imagination
Introduction: The place of the consumer in our
democratic imagination
Consumer responses to diverse social issues proliferate in contemporary life. People
worried about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest can purchase products
certified by the Rainforest Action Alliance, driving a Prius makes it possible for
people concerned with climate change to feel that they are doing their part, and
shoppers worried about overfishing can buy certified ‘‘sustainable’’ fish products.
As the list of ‘‘ethical’’ products continues to grow, our shopping spaces are transformed from places to simply buy ‘‘stuff’’ to spaces to actualize and foster our
political concern on a range of issues from overfishing to climate change to animal
welfare. It appears that consumers can shop responsibly to behave as citizens, or
‘‘citizen-consumers’’ (e.g. Johnston, 2008).
The idea of ‘‘voting with your dollar’’ (or your fork) is popular with many
consumers but contested by scholars, and raises questions about the compatibility
of consumer and citizenship interests. From some vantage points, the citizenconsumer looks like an active, hybrid entity that is able to effectively combine
consumer desires with citizenship responsibilities to larger political and ecological
collectivities (Barnett et al., 2011). Other perspectives suggest that the roles of
citizens and consumers should be interrogated, rather than assumed to be compatible as is common in popular ‘‘shopping for change’’ rhetoric (Johnston, 2008). Still
others propose that acts of consumption alone cannot constitute an effective
response to complex problems, and that these approaches may instead work to
legitimate and perpetuate individualism, reliance on market-solutions, and the
devolution of regulation (Maniates, 2001; Szasz, 2007).
Contending with the merits and drawbacks of a consumer-focused approach to
food system change is a delicate balancing act. One strategy for research on this topic
is to use survey data to test whether the rise of private ethical consumption opportunities ‘‘crowds out’’ citizenship engagement in collective environmental projects
(e.g. Baumann et al., 2015; Micheletti and Stolle, 2012; Willis and Schor, 2012).
While this is a fruitful avenue, here we identify another, less trodden path through
this debate, which is to focus on the place and prominence of privatized consumption
projects in our collective democratic imagination (Perrin, 2006). Perrin’s (2006) concept of a democratic imagination accounts for the landscape of ‘‘what you can
imagine doing: what is possible, important, right, and feasible’’ (p. 2). This concept
can be researched by studying political conversations, ideas, and concerns. Without
explicit reference to a democratic imagination, other scholars utilize this general
approach to show how environmental issues and individual agency are discursively
framed, and how this agency encourages certain kinds of actions (e.g. private
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3
individual consumption) while discouraging others (e.g. lobbying for state regulation) (e.g. Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2009; MacKendrick, 2010).
Much of the consumer-studies literature outlines arguments for and against
‘‘shopping for change’’ strategies. We believe a focus on democratic imaginations
encourages a productive path forward; it allows scholars to recognize the attractiveness of consumer-focused approaches (e.g. one can imagine doing something),
while also putting forward a nuanced critique of their limitations at the broader
level of political discourse (e.g. is our imagination limited to a change in shopping
choices?). To move in this direction, we draw from the insights of political sociologists like Andrew Perrin, while building on pre-existing work on the political
complexities of consumer-citizenship (e.g. Johnston, 2008; Lockie, 2009;
Trentmann, 2007). The practice of ethical consumption may not be a panacea
for social or environmental problems, but it may serve as an entry-point into
broader political issues – especially when many people feel deeply cynical about
conventional politics (Lorenzen, 2012; Willis and Schor, 2012). Yet seeing private
consumption as an opportunity for public engagement contains a problematic class
dimension (Baumann et al., 2015; Carfagna et al., 2014), and an oft-ignored gender
dimension, since the care-work of making responsible shopping and eating choices
often falls to women (Cairns and Johnston, 2015: 117).
Thinking broadly about the prominent role of consumer-focused strategies in
food activism (Johnston and Cairns, 2012), we investigate the frames food activists
use to diagnose and find solutions to problems in the industrial food system (Benford
and Snow, 1988). Drawing from the framing research approach, we investigate what
diagnostic and prognostic frames food activists use to mobilize the food movement,
and how these frames foster a sense of democratic possibilities for civic engagement.
Our research questions are twofold. First, we investigate our participants’ diagnostic
frames, and ask, how do activists in the local food movement come to diagnose and
critique the conventional industrial food system? Second, we compare the diagnostic
frames to prognostic frames and ask, what roles do they envision for participants in the
sustainable food movement, and how do they view the role of consumer-focused strategies? After unpacking the theoretical concepts of framing and the democratic
imagination, we provide a set of empirically grounded insights through comparative
case study methods in three Canadian cities. Within this analysis, we note that despite the sophisticated understandings and civic commitment of movement activists,
the eat-local movement is limited by its reliance on individual consumption as the
dominant pathway for eco-social change. Our conclusions focus on the ways contemporary contexts of eco-social change constrain food activists’ capacity to effect
meaningful change in the issues that matter deeply to them.
Consumers as agents of change? Framing theory
and the democratic imagination
Little is known about the place of ‘‘the consumer’’ in the cultural toolkit political
actors use to fight for social justice and ecological sustainability. Several authors
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have used survey data to show that ethical consumption can be positively
associated with traditional political engagement (Baumann et al., 2015; Carfagna
et al., 2014; Willis and Schor, 2012). Although these authors do not demonstrate
that ethical consumption necessarily leads to more traditional forms of political
engagement, this work refutes the hypothesis that ethical consumption replaces or
prevents the adoption of traditional forms of political engagement. However, these
data leave several questions unresolved. Namely, how central is ethical consumption to our imaginaries of resolving problematic resource consumption patterns?
And is the practice of ethical consumption prescribed along with a broad array of
other civic engagement tools as strategies to ameliorate eco-social problems?
Despite what we know about the pro-social and pro-environmental motivations
of consumer-citizenship, a clear gap in the literature remains regarding its place
within a broader repertoire of political engagement that extends beyond consumer
behavior.
Questions regarding the nature of social mobilization are addressed in discussions of framing, largely situated in social movement research. This body of work
focuses on activists’ assessments of a problem, prescriptions for change, and mobilization strategies. Benford and Snow (1988) usefully distinguish between diagnostic
and prognostic frames. Diagnostic frames articulate how and why an issue persists
and prognostic frames make prescriptions for confronting an issue. Movements are
aided when diagnostic and prognostic frames support one another, a process
known as frame alignment. A central idea gained from the framing literature is
that frames will resonate with a wide range of the population when they contain an
element of injustice, and that frame alignment is necessary for collective mobilization (Gamson, 1992). Here, we use the analytic distinction between diagnostic and
prognostic frames as a tool to better understand the democratic imagination of
contemporary politics, as evidenced by a study of the eat-local movement.1
To analyze the place – and effect – of citizen-consumption in the diagnostic and
prognostic frames of eat-local activists, we draw on Perrin’s (2006) concept of the
democratic imagination. Perrin argues that citizenship is not just about doing
(e.g. voting or boycotting), but also about thinking and talking about citizen
engagement. Perrin (2006) argues that such ‘‘citizen speak’’ should be considered
as ‘‘citizenship goods, independent of any particular activities they may inspire’’
(p. 19) since ‘‘imaginative talk is crucial to citizenship because it lets citizens think
about the social world they are addressing. It provides the fodder for creativity,
leading people to envision modes of citizenship that apply new tools to political
problems’’ (Perrin, 2006: 51). Most importantly for our interests, the democratic
imagination is a key way to conceptualize how to get involved in politics. In
Perrin’s (2006) words, ‘‘[w]e use this democratic imagination to tell us when and
why to get involved in politics, how to do so, and when and how to stay away’’ (p. 2).
Put differently, the way we imagine participating in civic and political engagement
is significant because it conditions how we talk to each other about possibilities for
action, and shapes how effectively a group or society will respond to challenges,
crises, and opportunities.
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The concept of the democratic imagination offers a way to characterize political
culture as ‘‘thick’’ or ‘‘thin,’’ according to three dimensions: the range of topics
deemed appropriate for public debate; the range of outcomes for resolving social
problems, and the breadth of actions that can be taken in the public sphere.
These three factors define the scope, or ‘‘thickness’’ of the democratic imagination.
Evidence of a thick democratic imagination can be seen when a public is confronted with a challenge and responds by discussing the problem, imagining
myriad possible solutions, and identifying a range of tactics to advance solutions
(Perrin, 2006). Perrin illustrates the difference between a thick and a thin democratic imagination in the following way: when presented with a problem
(e.g. learning that migrant farm workers are paid below minimum wage) a thick
democratic imagination would propose wide-ranging solutions such as boycotting
producers with unfair labor standards, lobbying for reforming labor laws, and
organizing protests. As Perrin (2006) explains, ‘‘Thicker democratic imaginations
offer more possible reactions to new political information’’ (p. 5). In contrast,
a thin democratic imagination might be evidenced when citizens feel they cannot
discuss an issue, or when their imagined and actual responses are limited to a
handful of symbolic, or ineffective strategies.
Bringing the concept of a democratic imagination into the literature on ethical
consumption allows for a more nuanced evaluation of the practice of shopping for
change. Here, we study individuals who have a strong sense of civic responsibility
to a broader collectivity to understand the place of consumers in their diagnostic
and prognostic frames. We take this complex debate on the relative merits of
consumer-focused strategies for change as a launching point for our investigation,
bringing qualitative data from eat-local movements and the idea of a democratic
imagination to enrich the current literature on contemporary civic engagement.
Comparative case study of the eat-local movement
The North American local food movement offers a prototypical example of both
the individualization of environmental responsibility (e.g. protecting the environment by buying locally grown carrots) and vibrant civic engagement (e.g. citizen
efforts to start community gardens) (DuPuis and Goodman, 2005; Goodman et al.,
2013). Optimistic accounts of food movements herald the transformative potential
of activities such as community gardening (e.g. Elton, 2010; McClintock, 2014).
Critical scholarly accounts point out the limits of the local, demonstrate how class
and race inequalities can be reproduced through local food discourse (e.g. DuPuis
and Goodman, 2005; Guthman, 2003; Johnston and Baumann, 2010) and note
how the eat-local message is readily incorporated into corporate marketing campaigns (Johnston et al., 2009). Reflecting on the limited (and relatively elite) appeal
of alternative food movements, scholars have argued for the importance of understanding embodied tastes and their relationship to class, race, and the corporate
food system (e.g. Carolan, 2014; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010). Much
of the population has become ‘‘tuned’’ to the taste of industrial food (Carolan,
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2014: 2), raising questions about how to effectively recruit mass participation to
sustainable food habits without simply affirming and reinforcing elite taste preferences (e.g. local kale salad) and food practices (e.g. farmers’ market shopping).
In this article, we study the organizers of the eat-local movement – the people on
the front lines of the struggle to promote more sustainable, delicious, and socially
just food practices. To understand how organizers engage others, we carry out a
comparative case study that focuses on the relationship between talking and practicing citizenship. Fieldwork was conducted between May 2013 and May 2014,
guided by a grounded theory strategy in order to inductively develop an understanding of the social process at work in creating more just and sustainable food
systems.
The article relies on semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted in three Canadian cities where local food projects have had an active presence. In Canada, the local food movement grew rapidly in the early 2000s.
Although farmers’ markets and community gardens existed long before, these
sites were more closely focused on food procurement than identity display, civic
engagement and volunteerism, and social entrepreneurship. Wayne Roberts, a
popular author and icon in Canada’s food movement, claims to have witnessed
the birth of the movement in Canada in 2004 (Elton, 2015). As chair of the Toronto
Food Policy Council since 2000, Roberts noticed, ‘‘suddenly new people started to
participate.2 The meetings went from being sparsely attended to being so popular
that the fire marshal had to clear some people from the room’’ (Roberts quoted in
Elton 2015). The movement grew at different paces and in different ways across the
country and across urban and rural locations. We selected the case study sites in
order to compare the relative development of eat-local activities, including the
presence of a citizen’s municipal food council. Edmonton, Alberta, has a fastgrowing eat-local movement and a recently created food council. Toronto,
Ontario, is a more established site for local food initiatives and home to a food
council that acts as an exemplar to other jurisdictions. Victoria, British Columbia,
has a long-standing and active eat-local movement but does not have a municipal
food council.
We recruited participants from multiple sectors involved in the food system who
shared a focus on developing and using local food projects to advance a more
sustainable food system and shared an approach that is not limited to making
ethical private-sphere consumption decisions. These sectors include the state
(employees of municipal, provincial, and federal governments who lobbied for –
and now work in – positions where advancing a local food system is part of their
job description), the market (entrepreneurs, farmers), and civil society (volunteers,
employees of non-profit organizations) with a total of 57 people in the sample:
22 in Edmonton, 19 in Toronto, and 16 in Victoria. The participants interviewed
for this research were disproportionately female and White. The median age of our
sample (42 years) is slightly higher than the national median (40.6 years). Although
we do not have specific data on participants’ income and educational attainment,
most interviewees were university-educated, and reported earning a middle-class
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income (CAN$50,000–CAN$70,000) – with the exception of some senior government employees (who earned a higher income than average) and volunteers
(who tended to have lower levels of income). In each site, we also observed
local food events, such as citizens’ food council meetings, civic protests, and
farmers’ markets. We attended 12 events as participant-observers across the
three sites.
The interviews were designed to identify the practices that participants use to
address sustainability and justice in the food system, the barriers to those practices,
how participants recruit others, and the political significance participants place on
their speech and actions. For participant observation events, we used a template
adapted from Blee (2012) to note how decisions were made, how conflict was dealt
with, whether there were power struggles in the group, and any notes on stated or
implicit rules for citizen participation. The data presented below are the result of a
thematic analysis (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). After interviews and fieldnotes were
transcribed and entered into qualitative data organization software (NVivo), we
organized content by code before combining codes into themes. To protect the
anonymity of research participants, pseudonyms are used below and in some sections place names are not included.
Evaluating the democratic imagination of
citizen-consumer practices
Our thematic analysis revealed strong commonalities across the three study sites,
with minimal differences between regions or sectors of the food system. Therefore,
we begin by outlining and analyzing the common diagnostic and prognostic frames
taken up by research participants; we then move to detail a few important exceptions in our study. These ‘‘exceptions’’ call attention to the relative prominence of
shopping-for-change discourse in the prognostic frames of the majority of interviewees, and the lack of certainty that comes with imagining other pathways
toward food system change.
Diagnostic frames: A thick democratic imagination
Our conversations with participants about the limitations of conventional food
systems are suggestive of a thick democratic imagination, and rich diagnostic
framing that influence their entry into food activism. Participants discussed
corporate control of food production and retail, the ways privileged groups
maintain better access to nutritious food, and other justice-related topics. In
articulating their own pathways to activism, many participants conveyed a diagnostic frame that recognized the importance of collective mobilization and the
corresponding limitations of trying to fix the industrial food system through
individual action. In order to draw out diagnostic frames from our research
participants, we asked them to explain how and why they became involved in
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the eat-local movement. For example, Karen, a 34-year-old female farmer in
Victoria states,
Once I realized how access to nutritious food is intricately tied together with race,
class, and gender, I just couldn’t look at the food system the same way anymore. I now
see the options we have available to us as eaters as involving all these stories that are
invisible – stories about the people who plant our food, pick our food, sell our food.
I couldn’t accept that anymore. I had to work towards a different food system.
Similar comments – drawing attention to injustice and demonstrating critical thinking and an awareness of power and structural problems – were common across our
sample (40/57 participants). We recognize these diagnostic frames as politically
thick because they acknowledge the complexity and intersectionality of the social
world and recognize how food justice and sustainability are stymied by powerful
social actors and economic inequalities.
Participants spoke clearly about the importance of collective mobilization and
justified their own involvement on such grounds. For example, discussing why she
feels collective mobilization is vital in response to an agricultural system she
described as ecologically tenuous, Belinda, a 65-year-old who helped start a community garden in Victoria explained, ‘‘You can’t really solve this problem on an
individual level. This isn’t a personal problem. This is really a social issue. It’s a big
social issue.’’ In their diagnostic frames, multiple participants relayed their view
that there are complex issues with the industrial food system that adversely affect
marginalized populations and the sustainability of the planet, and that such complex and significant problems warrant collective action.
Bonnie, a 60-year-old female who works for the government in Toronto articulated a thick diagnostic frame in her story of working to promote a sustainable
food system:
I got involved in food politics after working in international development. I see the
same issues in the food system: it is all about power and disparity and it’s all about
control and power of international corporations and equitable financial systems at the
global level. It’s all the big corporations driven only by profit and not by community
or development or any of that . . . That is what drives my passion . . .
Bonnie’s remarks effectively illustrate the other-oriented motivations and thick
democratic imagination that were common in our sample of food activists.
A public-spirited orientation was commonly referenced when we asked participants
why they became involved in local food advocacy. Erin, a farmers’ market manager
in Toronto who is in her 50s, described how her path to food activism began with
her concerns for a growing disconnect between urban and rural places, increasing
urban sprawl, and the decline of rural communities. Erin’s involvement was motivated by a desire for community building, and in her current work she approaches
this goal by connecting urban consumers to rural farmers. Shannon, a woman in
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her 60s who volunteers for a community garden in a lower-income neighborhood,
traced her activism back to work as a guidance counselor in high school where she
observed how inequitable access to food impacted students’ capacity to concentrate
and succeed. In our interview, she expressed deep concerns with inequitable access
to nutritious food. Describing her involvement and leadership with a community
garden, Shannon specifically connected these actions to issues of food access and
public welfare.
The examples above showcase how the people we interviewed came to develop a
far-reaching critique of the food system, locating their collective action in a deeply
imaginative frame. Crucially, these activists saw themselves as making social and
ecological change primarily through their civic roles and responsibilities, rather
than through individual consumer activities. In their diagnosis of the industrial
food system, participants engage with complicated issues related to power while
recognizing the multi-scalar nature of food system problems. They approach
‘‘eat-local’’ projects that involve ‘‘voting with your fork’’ by working to overcome
barriers to local food consumption through community organizing, policy reform,
and other collective approaches. Even though these activists advocated for local
eating, personal food consumption rarely played a significant role in participants’
descriptions of how they became involved in the food movement; they instead cited
factors relating to their concern for broad-scale justice, inequality, and sustainability issues. In short, we see evidence of a thick democratic imagination among these
food activists’ diagnostic frames, as evidenced by a structural critique of the food
system and an understanding of the importance of collective action and civic
engagement to facilitate eco-social change.
Prognostic frames: A reliance on consumption
We now examine participants’ prognostic frames – the storylines common to activists’ accounts of how to engage support and find solutions to problems in the
industrial food system. Here, we observe discord between diagnostic frames that
privilege collective mobilization and call attention to structural injustice in the food
system, and prognostic frames that take on much more individualistic and consumer-focused characteristics. The prognostic frames typically eschew rights-based
notions of food in favor of commodified, choice-focused frames that privilege
individual food choices over collective responsibilities. In their estimations of
viable pathways to addressing the issues that drew them to activism, interviewees
drew heavily upon the consumer side of the citizen-consumer hybrid.3 We note two
dominant narratives in participants’ prescriptions for change: ‘‘better food makes
better citizens’’ and ‘‘education equals change.’’
Better food makes better citizens. First, although our participants’ diagnoses of the
conventional food system drew connections to unequal distribution and access to
nutritious food, prescriptions for change frequently glossed over themes such
as inequality and the right to food. The narrative frame ‘‘better food makes
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better citizens’’ is premised on the argument that once consumers experience the
taste of local food, they will become supporters of the movement and will prioritize
their social and ecological responsibilities. This frame sells the local food movement as a collective effort to improve consumer tastes and pleasures based on the
contention that satisfied consumers will rally for systemic change. For example, we
asked 34-year-old Damion, who owns and operates a non-governmental food
policy organization in Toronto how to mobilize the population to join the eatlocal movement. In response, he stated that ‘‘with people who aren’t involved, if
you could just get them to the farmers’ market, that could really get them involved,
because there is better food right over here.’’ This response (which was commonly
heard in our interviews) relies on an individually centered narrative of consumer
taste as the basis for change, and also replicates a common, but critiqued, tendency
in alternative food networks to reify and romanticize activists’ own taste preferences (Carolan, 2014; Guthman, 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010).
Another example is drawn from participant observation of a civic protest in
Victoria. The rally was organized to oppose the provincial governments’ announcement of plans to reform the act that protects agricultural land from development.
After a politically rich description of the danger of removing land from third party
management and stringent development criteria, the closing speaker’s prognostic
frame draws on the narrative that better food makes better citizens. The speaker
ended with the rallying cry, ‘‘Just eat some local, farm fresh food and you’ll see
what this is all about!’’ During the interviews, participants indicated that access to
land is important for enhancing resilience in the face of ecological crisis, connected
to the right to earn a livelihood from farming, and more. In this civic protest, we
recognize that, on one level, the existence of this type of civic action signals a thick
prognostic frame in the form of direct state-focused action; yet on another level, a
thinner prognostic frame is revealed as equally salient when we scrutinize key discursive moments within the protest event.
The narratives of food activists recognize that widespread support for local,
sustainable food is needed to challenge a globalized industrial food system.
The question is how to get that support. The narrative that simply tasting local
food will mobilize citizens’ concern for food equity, access, and equality overlooks
not only the barriers to accessing local food such as cost, convenience, social
norms, and knowledge (Guthman, 2008), but is also not reflective of the speakers’
own experiences. Participants themselves recounted navigating the boundary
between private and public through awareness of injustice and the gradual development of skills required to actively participate in civic life.
Education equals change. The second narrative theme is centered on the argument
that the transformative changes needed to solve the problems identified in the
diagnostic frames are straightforwardly linked to education. Significantly, the
type of education that most participants called for was not the justice-focused,
critical thinking skills central to their own work, but a more market-based and
normative education to help consumers make sense of and accept the price
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premium associated with local food and develop personal skills like growing,
cooking, and appreciating ‘‘good’’ food.
A key challenge facing the local food movement is how to make local food
accessible to a broad swathe of consumers, while still supporting local farmers’
livelihoods and paying workers a living wage. This challenge arose in discussions of
diagnostic frames, where the problem was related to multiple structural factors like
the high cost of land, government subsidies for industrial agriculture, unfair labor
practices (particularly for migrant farm workers), and the relatively cheap cost of
global food imports. In comparison to this complex and nuanced understanding of
challenges in the local food system, the prognostic frames encouraging consumer
education are noticeably simpler. Tina is a farmer and community liaison who
works for the municipal government in Victoria. When asked to describe her
ideal food system, she invoked a similar picture to what we had heard before: in
the ideal food system, more people would source food from small, local farms. She
discussed how that would come to pass, seeing the transformation as a series of
‘‘small steps’’ rather than sweeping change. Education plays a central role in her
vision:
We need people to see the value of going to the farmers’ market. A lot of people go
now and say, ‘‘Oh my God, I’m not paying that.’’ I work across the street from WalMart and I’ll walk in there at lunch if I have to pick up something, and I look at all of
the people shopping in there. That is still what people are thinking is good food. So
how can you educate individuals to see the importance of that?
The type of education called for by this participant is not intended to highlight the
inaccessibility of prices for local food. Instead, it draws upon narratives asserting
that food is not a right, but an elected taste preference. In prognostic frames,
participants drew upon discourses that link market-focused education with social
change. This observation suggests that the solution-focused prognosis for change in
the eat-local movement has a much thinner democratic imagination than the problem-focused diagnosis of issues related to conventional agriculture. Also, civic
leaders prescribe practices and strategies that played no part in their own pathway
to food system activism, based on a sense that their experience was an exception.
In another example, Jason, who runs a series of very popular workshops on
foraging and preserving food, argues that fighting for political change is an uphill
battle, whereas the terrain of cultural change is a more tractable area for affecting
change. When asked how he differentiates between cultural and political change,
Jason argued that ‘‘policy can do whatever it wants’’ and that our food system will
only change when people change their consumption behaviors. He articulated this
more fully:
If you educate enough people, and let’s go back to [the example of] meat, about how
meat could be raised and how it’s raised when you buy it from the box stores, I think
people would make a different decision and policy might eventually change on how
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meat actually should be raised for human consumption. But it really does start with
shifting and educating people on the ground.
Jason is arguing that if consumers knew more about production, they would
support and demand policy that targeted unethical or unsustainable producers.
This is the type of critical thinking that was central to his own path to activism.
Yet when pushed to explain how that sort of broader shift would come about,
Jason said,
Ultimately I guess what that would mean is that people are more . . . people celebrate
food more and people celebrate food and other people more. In doing so they’re
actually caring about what they’re eating and sharing with people that they care
about. If you’re sitting in front of your computer at your desk in your cubicle
eating your cup of noodles, you don’t give a crap who thinks what about it. You’re
not going to talk about it so you might as well just pound it back and get on with your
work, right?
When suggesting a prognosis, in this vignette Jason hesitated but ultimately turned
to individual consumer values and consumption decisions as the best path to the
much-needed transformation of the food system.
Although many participants spoke of critical thinking skills as an important
part of their own transformation to civic engagement in the food system, the type
of education that 50 of the 57 study participants advocated is relatively consumeroriented, practical and experiential. By meeting a farmer, or growing a tomato, or
eating a locally grown carrot, individuals are thought to develop a sense of belonging to a larger civic project of food sustainability. The rich diagnoses of problems
and challenges to justice and sustainability narrow when manifested into specific
types of citizen engagement – this is a crucial dimension of Perrin’s (2006) definition of a thin democratic imagination.
Toward a thickening of prognostic frames
The previous sub-sections described how the majority of participants draw on
dominant narratives of consumer agency to solicit citizen engagement. It is important to note there were a few (4/57) exceptions to this majority. In the exceptions
to consumer-focused prognostic frames, participants make strong connections to
citizen-work but simultaneously express a sense of frustration and uncertainty
about what next steps ought to be taken (in contrast to the prognostic frames
presented earlier, where next steps were clearly and unequivocally articulated).
Participants who illustrated politically thick diagnostic frames and a potential
thickening of prognostic frames shared an intuition that change strategies may
include but must involve more than consumer-focused, commodity-based tactics.
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In the first example, Alison, a 32-year-old employee of a non-governmental foodassistance organization, described, with uncertainty, an ideal food system as a place
where more people in society are active in the food system, and where food was
seen more as a human right than a commodity:
Somehow I don’t think food should be a commodity. It should not have a price tag.
I don’t know how you do that. I have absolutely no idea. But it has to be treated
differently. I don’t think people should be able to make massive profits off of food.
But I have no idea what that looks like.
Strategies for change that begin with shopping are so prevalent in contemporary
social imaginaries that when change demands strategies outside the market, activists struggle to envision what that may look like. Strategies for change that move
beyond consumer actions are experienced as exhausting or uncertain and perceived
as unconventional or even unknown.
The next example illustrates the emotional and strategic difficulties involved
with challenging a ‘‘shop for change’’ prognostic frame. In response to our question about what she felt needed to change for the local food system to expand,
Sherry (a 45-year-old farmer outside of Victoria) rejected the idea that education
equals change, and expressed a firm commitment to equitable food access and
government income supports:
Well, everyone would have to be able to afford it . . . but farmers can’t afford to produce food, like, we lose money when we let people pay what they can pay . . . So I guess
you would have to get the government to subsidize the farmers to a certain extent,
though I’m not sure how I would feel about that. The big farms already get subsidies
though. I think a better system might be for the government to offer income support, a
guaranteed annual income or a living wage.4
When asked if she felt that people visiting the farm experienced any changes in
their food consumption practices, she said, ‘‘Sure, [for] the ones who can afford to
buy our food. But that’s not who we’re in it for.’’ In these excerpts, Sherry demonstrates support for food system change based on state-redistribution and citizenship rights and questions the logic that education equals change, but subtly
expresses emotional hesitation when questioned about the best way forward.
In contrast to a degree of circumspection in calling for food system change that
takes inequality into account, our respondents’ calls for education and alternative
food consumption were much more decisive. In this next excerpt, Karen, a 34-yearold farmer in Victoria, has just finished explaining that her strategy for achieving
an ideal food system is to have more consumers visit organic farms. However, in
her diagnostic frame, discussed earlier, Karen drew attention to concerns that local
food was too expensive for most consumers, yet too cheap to provide farmers a
living wage. When we asked whether she thought farm visits were a sufficient
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strategy to resolving such complex issues, Karen expressed ambivalence and
frustration:
I don’t know at all. I feel like I’m not sure how to do it other than, I’ll just keep
growing local food and talking about it. I feel like I have no real engagement at that
other level . . . I feel quite exhausted thinking about it . . . I’m not rising with excitement
to seeing how you can do that work of tackling unfair subsidies and low wages and
everything other than just getting people to see what better farming looks like.
The comments above share two important characteristics: they acknowledge that
consumer-focused strategies are not a silver bullet for social change, and they
recognize that inciting broader engagement is strategically difficult and emotionally
exhausting. Existing research points to the ways in which alternative food movements incite engagement through positive emotional appeals (Hayes-Conroy and
Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2009). Here we draw attention to
a possible connection between activists’ feelings of uncertainty and fatigue, and the
difficulty of cultivating a thicker democratic imagination in relation to food system
solutions.
The ‘‘if people only knew’’ philosophy of social change seems ubiquitous in
alternative food initiatives (Guthman, 2008), and in our research findings. The
exception to this is with participants who had a particularly deep understanding
of the lived experiences of disadvantaged populations, either through their own
biography or their workplace. Our data highlight the way prognostic framing is
dialectically aligned with participants’ social class and past experiences.
Participants’ ways of thinking and talking appear to reflect dispositions structured
by social class and experiences that place participants in the shoes – so to speak – of
people in a different class than their own.
The development of thick democratic imaginations is not simply about holding
an effective protest, but having space to talk, think, and imagine multiple solutions
for food system transformation and how individuals talk, think, and imagine is
bound up with past experience and ‘‘visceral identification.’’5 This is important
because how citizens imagine participating in public life is a vital part of a
group’s capacity to respond to challenges to justice and sustainability.
Concluding remarks
At the outset of this article, we asked, how do activists in the local food movement
come to diagnose and critique the conventional industrial food system? What roles
do they envision for participants in the sustainable food movement, and how do
they view the role of consumer-focused strategies? These questions contribute to
recent scholarship on consumer-citizenship and address the call for more nuanced
study of shopping-for-change strategies by avoiding simply accepting or rejecting
consumers as a force for eco-social change. We contribute to this body of work
using a theoretical approach derived from framing theory and the concept of the
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democratic imagination in order to understand the place and prominence of consumers in contemporary political engagement. Using interview and observational
data from talking and listening to local food activists, we analyze participants’
diagnoses of what they perceive as problems or limitations with the current food
system and prognoses for addressing these problems. In short, while existing studies have characterized how consumers understand the tenuous balance between
consumption and citizenship, this study quite differently seeks to characterize the
place and prominence of consumer strategies in local food advocates’ political
imaginaries. The findings presented here portray food politics among a sample
of food activists in three Canadian cities; results do not apply to all participants
in a geographically disparate local food movement. Still, we believe that our findings yield important insights about the structural tensions facing a local food
movement that seeks to simultaneously garner consumer support while seeking
far-reaching goals of sustainability and social justice.
Our findings yield mixed conclusions on the efficacy of shopping-for-change
strategies to enrich political life. Food activists’ diagnostic frames reflect a thick
democratic imagination: activists call attention to unsustainable agricultural
practices, perverse government subsidies, unfair labor practices, and the unequal
distribution of food. These frames are characterized by politically rich critical
thinking skills. Our analyses demonstrate an imaginative critique of the food
system, and outline how activists came to understand the importance of collective action. However, participants’ prognostic frames demonstrate a comparatively thin democratic imagination reliant on shopping-for-change to the
exclusion of other strategies. In particular, we draw attention to two prominent
narratives: ‘‘better food makes better citizens’’ and ‘‘education equals change.’’
These narratives suggest that the current political framing of the citizen-consumer
is one that promotes a one-dimensional conceptualization of social change
operating within a framework of individualized action in the marketplace.
Alternative food movements, like the eat-local movement, have been critiqued
for catering to elite interests and under-appreciating structural inequalities based
on race, class (Guthman, 2003) and gender (Cairns et al., 2013). Whereas other
scholars see the propensity for local food activists to exhort citizen-consumers to
‘‘vote with their forks’’ as evidence of a blindness to structural inequality, we make
a different argument. Instead, we contend that local food activists and advocates
are working within a thin and largely pragmatic democratic imagination when
seeking ways to effect meaningful change in the eat-local movement. Their prescriptions for change are limited by the social context and political discourse in
which they operate. In a neoliberal market-society where access to consumer goods
is portrayed as a universal choice and form of freedom, it is not surprising that
individual consumption strategies permeate prognostic frames. Moreover, those
who look beyond shopping-for-change strategies as a standalone strategy for
reform shared a skeptical view of the potency of ethical consumerism, as well as
an affect of ambivalence and fatigue when contemplating strategies beyond ‘‘vote
with your fork.’’
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Tying together the theoretical strands of this article, we find that consumers play
a minor part in activists’ diagnosis of the problems with the food system. Activists
have a complex account of the significant structural problems with the industrial
food system – unfair labor practices, corporate control of the food system, allegiances between elected representatives and corporations, insufficient government
support for sustainable agriculture, and a reliance on fossil fuels. Virtually none of
our participants argued that consumers alone (ethical or otherwise) have caused the
myriad problems plaguing the globalized industrial food system. The democratic
imagination depicted here is politically thick: interviewees responded to perceived
concerns in the food system by engaging in collective efforts to ameliorate ecosocial problems, from advocating for state policy to promote local food production
to using unused backyard fruit to make and sell preserves in a social enterprise.
Framing theorists argue that social movements are more effective at mobilizing a
wide cohort of the population when diagnostic frames are aligned with prognostic
frames (Benford and Snow, 1988) and that frames are more effective tools for social
mobilization when connected to notions of injustice, both within and beyond the
food movement (Gamson, 1992; Sbicca, 2015). In other words, motivating mass
participation in local food projects purely on the basis of the promise of hedonic
consumer rewards appears unlikely – at least in our cases – to catalyze the panoply
of engagement responses emblematic of a thick democratic imagination. On the
other hand, the success that participants describe in mobilizing support suggests
that a feel-good mode of consumer engagement (e.g. eat a local strawberry; visit a
local farmers’ market) constitutes an attractive set of practices for individuals
across state, market, and civic spheres. There is no easy evaluation to be made
here: the food activists in our study are, primarily, motivated to create a better food
system but intuit that getting others on board demands appealing centrally to the
pleasurable and achievable aspects of local eating.
We recommend two avenues for future research. First, we suspect that an
important mechanism explaining the tension between how participants themselves
were mobilized to engage in social movement activity, and how they approach the
complicated, demanding work of engaging others may lie in an emotional
dynamic akin to the ‘‘visceral processes of identification’’ identified by HayesConroy and Martin (2009: 269). Researchers might more explicitly embed questions designed to elicit emotions in interviews in order to confirm or refute this
possibility. Second, we observed a propensity for those who had experienced the
lived realities of economic marginalization (either directly or indirectly) to demonstrate a thick democratic imagination in the prognostic frames for food system
change. We hope future researchers will examine the relationship between social
position, economic marginalization, and prognostic frames. It is possible that
there is a link between class (or other forms of) marginalization, and a willingness
to identify solutions that imagine repertoires of engagement beyond shoppingfor-change.
By combining framing theory with the democratic imagination, we conclude
with a nuanced assessment of the role of consumers in activist visions of food
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system problems and solutions. Our results demonstrate that prescriptions for
ethical consumption are tightly bound with visions of a more just and sustainable
planet. However, we also see cause for concern: prognostic frames suggest a thin
democratic imagination. This analysis indicates that the citizen-consumer hybrid
serves to reinforce the dominance of market-oriented conceptualizations of citizen
engagement in the wider democratic imagination. The results presented suggest a
need for greater academic (and activist) recognition of the value of thinking, talking, and imagining as crucial for civic engagement: this is where citizens play an
active role constructing the imaginaries that shape our sense of the possible. This
recognition necessitates pushing ethical consumption projects beyond individual
shopping choices to a consideration of the broader cultural, political, and economic
structures that enable and limit consumption practices. How people talk about
political engagement affects the scope and depth of civil society projects, as well
as the efficacy of contemporary responses to the pressing socio-ecological problems
centered in a globalized, market-driven food system.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by an Insight
Development Grant awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC) [Grant no. 430-2013-0559].
Notes
1. The weaknesses of the framing perspective include an overemphasis on how mobilization
takes place rather than why it takes place, and a tendency to produce overly rationalistic
accounts of individual action. Our use of framing theory attends to the reasons why
particular approaches to mobilization are taken.
2. Food Policy Councils, or Food Councils, are becoming more prevalent in North America
and beyond. These typically comprise citizens representing various facets of a local food
system (e.g. farmers; volunteers from food banks, community gardens, farm-to-school
programs, and more; entrepreneurs; farmers’ market managers; and food studies scholars). The council is usually sanctioned by the local government and aims to analyze the
functioning of the local food system and provide ideas and recommendations for how to
use advocacy and policy to improve it.
3. There is an undeniable gray area between the realms of ‘‘citizenship’’ and ‘‘consumerism,’’ especially in the realm of consumer and citizen practices (see Barnett et al., 2011).
Still, like Johnston (2008; also Grosglik, 2016) we believe in the utility of separating these
concepts for analytic purposes, seeing these categories as ideal types, and recognizing the
ideological power of consumerism in contemporary life. Unpacking the citizen-consumer
hybrid, we see that the realm of citizenship tends to engage with collective responsibilities,
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civil-society activism, and state-sanctioned regulation; in contrast, consumerism privileges individual commodity choice, consumer pleasures, and underscores market-based
solutions to social problems.
4. Community Food Centres Canada is calling for an annual basic (or guaranteed) income.
Narratives of justice and inequality are present but underutilized in the food movement
and seem to appeal to the leaders of the movement rather than the ‘‘rank-and-file’’
members (http://cfccanada.ca/news/5-conversations-we-need-have).
5. We wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for calling our attention to this point.
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Author Biographies
Emily Huddart Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology
at Washington State University. Her research interests are focused on sustainable
consumption and environmental concern, with an emerging focus on the ways
social class and gender inform these areas of social life.
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John R. Parkins is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Resource
Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta. Other
research on the food and agriculture includes an assessment of sustainability narratives in the beef industry, and a case study of alternative beef production as
agricultural transition. His research on democracy and public engagement extends
to forestry, energy, and land use planning institutions in Canada.
Josée Johnston is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.
She is the co-author of Foodies (2nd edition, 2015) with Shyon Baumann, as well as
Food and Femininity (2015) with Kate Cairns. She has published articles in venues
including American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Consumer Culture, Signs,
Theory and Society, and Gender and Society. Her major substantive interest is the
sociological study of food, which is a lens for investigating questions relating to
consumer culture, gender and inequality.
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