Can Consumers Shape the Food System?
Environmental Engagement / Spring 2019 / Portfolio
In Environmental Engagement, or ENVS 295, students plan, develop, and carry out their own engagement projects. Through engagement with the stakeholders they find, 295 students explore nagging questions and themes they find interesting or are concerned about.
This page contains all the pieces of the engagement project Treasure and I completed. I documented the development of my project in posts that can be found here.
Project Goals
- To understand how people perceive their role as a consumer and to explore opinions on the power of consumers to make changes within the food system.
- To explore the applicability of the “shrinking environmental imagination” to the food system.
Scholarship & Motivation
Before we began our project, Treasure and I wanted to ground our thinking in scholarship. The research we did is a mixture of contemporary environmental scholarship and sources more specifically related to our project. These two types of research created a blend of sources that guided our thinking as we carried out our project.
Beginning our exploration of scholarship broadly, Treasure and I revisited an LC ENVS favorite, Steve Rayner’s “Wicked Problems”. Our global food system and grocery stores, in particular, qualify as wicked environmental problems by Rayner’s (2014) definition; they have as many stakeholders as there are people on the planet and their interests, values, and concerns are diverse and conflicting. This guarantees that any (clumsy) solutions to these problems will engage many “strange bedfellows”.
We also found Bruno Latour’s “Love Your Monsters” applicable to our project. Latour (2011) reminds us that the “sin” in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was not Frankenstein’s creation of the monster, but his abandonment of it. Supermarkets are one way we’ve dealt with the issue of feeding ourselves, but they, alongside the food system, are monsters we’ve failed to update.
When it comes to righting wrongs in the food system, some have taken the path Maniates outlines in “Individualization: plant a tree, ride a bike, save the world?” Maniates (2001) explains that in addition to a shrinking “environmental imagination,” individual environmental actions are products of the widely, and perhaps subconsciously held belief that environmental degradation is the product of individual shortcomings. This belief places the guilt and responsibility to right wrongs on the individual.
Getting a little more specific, we found a piece titled “On Individualism in the Neoliberal Period” by Dr. Matthew Eagleton-Pierce. Eagleton-Pierce examines what choice-making means in a neoliberal context, and how “‘the category of ‘the consumer’ has now traveled into other fields that were relatively insulated from capitalist forces, such as politics, education, and health,” (Eagleton-Pierce, 2016). Even before we began our project, Treasure and I have observed the way that free markets place remarkable responsibilities on individuals. It seems to us that through grocery stores, environmental stewardship/responsibility is a field that the “category of the consumer” has traveled to. We believe that neoliberalism is a driver of the “shrinking environmental imagination”.
We also read Gail Hollander’s “Re-Naturalizing Sugar: Narratives of Place, Production and Consumption.” Hollander’s piece explores how competition within the sweetener industry, “as shaped by the material qualities of sweeteners, has given rise to supermarket narratives that seek to differentiate sugars on the basis of ideas of place, freshness and environmental sustainability,” (Hollander, 2003). Although centered on the sugar industry, many or most goods found in supermarkets use this strategy, which means the analysis can be applied widely and contrasted with goods produced at different spatial scales.
Finally, we read parts of Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival by Daniel Jaffee. The book’s first chapter was most applicable to our project. Jaffee (2007) applies Polyani’s continuum of marketness and embeddedness as well as Block’s “instrumentalism” (how strong a role of individual economic gain plays in transactions) to fair trade certification systems and certified goods, farmers’ markets and CSAs. The continuum is important to our project because it provides a way to measure and gauge motivations behind economic behaviors, and explores of choice-making is affected by wealth and values.
Our project is based on all of the above ideas; we are curious about individualization as a phenomenon and the “shrinking environmental imagination.” Though these are widely applicable to many areas of life, we decided to engage with them by narrowing our focus to the food system and grocery stores in particular.
Food has a unique role in environmental action because it is a place where people can make changes to their lives quickly and with relative ease. It is much easier to switch brands, boycott products, or shop at different stores than it is to alter transportation methods or energy sources for example.
People
We engaged with the following “stakeholders”.
- 45 grocery shoppers responded to an online survey we put out. Their ages ranged from 18-60, and they were from 16 different states and 4 different countries.
- Jay Odenbaugh, professor of philosophy at Lewis & Clark College teaches courses such as Philosophy of the Environment which investigate the meanings of individual and collective environmental actions. He is a nice guy who has devoted a significant portion of his life to thinking carefully about the themes of our project.
- Bob Goldman, professor of sociology at Lewis & Clark College taught courses such as the Political Economy of Food and Green Capitalism. He too has devoted much time and energy to the themes our project touches on.
- Robin Teater, Executive Director at Healthy Democracy. As a professional facilitator of dialogue, Robin is an expert on “identity-protective cognition“. As our project developed, we discovered that the phenomenon is central to all consumption choices.
- Julia, an LC student, and fruit and nut farmer from California. Julia’s perspective was unique amongst our stakeholders as the sole representation of the production side of the food system. Her experiences growing food influence her consumption choices in a way that set her apart from our other stakeholders.
Action & Engagement
Our consumer survey asked participants to rank and assess various grocery stores and explain their reasoning, to articulate the factors (such as cost, selection, accessibility, perceived environmental impacts, nutritional value, etc.) that influence their consumption decisions, and finally to share their opinions on the efficacy of both individual and collective actions.
In our discussions with Jay, Bob, and Robin, we went back and forth about issues like food systems, scales of action, identity-protective cognition, tribalism, and brand identity.
Additionally, we engaged in dialogue with Lewis & Clark student, Julia. All of us shared our views and, most importantly, listened to those of others. Some of the main themes of our dialogue included transparency and responsibility in consumption and agricultural practices.
Findings
- Participant responses indicated a belief that collective/institutional action is more effective than individual action in making lasting environmental change.
- Creating environmental change through consumption is possible and necessary, but it isn’t sufficient.
- Participant responses indicated that consumption decisions are motivated by
factors such as price, nutritional value, and convenience. - Consequences are not the biggest motivator behind consumption choices. Instead, “tribalism,” brand-identity, and ideological concerns are most salient.
Assessment
- We successfully engaged with numerous consumers with varied backgrounds.
- We created opportunities for individuals to reflect on their consumption decisions.
- Our engagement with our stakeholders as well as the evolution of our project and thinking about individual action in the food system evidence the “shrinking environmental imagination”.
Poster
After months of planning and work, Treasure and I created the poster below. We had the opportunity to present it at a poster session of LC’s annual Festival of Scholars. I wrote about the experience here.
Bibliography
Eagleton-Pierce, Dr. Matthew. 2016. “ON INDIVIDUALISM IN THE NEOLIBERAL PERIOD,” 11.
Hollander, Gail M. 2003. “Re-Naturalizing Sugar: Narratives of Place, Production and Consumption.” Social & Cultural Geography 4 (1): 59.
Jaffee, Daniel. Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2007.
Latour, Bruno. 2011. “Love Your Monsters.” In Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, edited by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, 256-425 [Kindle]. Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute.
Maniates, Michael F. 2001. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics 1 (3): 31–52.
Rayner, Steve. 2014. “Wicked Problems.” Environmental Scientist 23 (2): 3–4.
Grace Anderson 