Food activists,consumer strategies,and the democratic imagination: Insights from eat-local movements

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 citizen-consumer 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 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 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.

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, 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 fast-growing 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 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.

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. In the first example, Alison, a 32-year-old employee of a non-governmental food-assistance 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.

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

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-year-old 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 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 “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 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.”

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 eco-social 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 Hayes-Conroy 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 shopping-for-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 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.