How ‘Ethical' Is Ethical Consumption? Self-Interest and Activism In Organic, Local, and Farmers' Market Food

The theoretical literature on the citizen-consumer conceptualizes ethical consumption as a spectrum of behaviors and attitudes that vary in the extent to which they are civic-minded or focused on self-interest and maximizing consumer choice. Although each act of consumption allows for a range of activist and self-interested motivations, there has been scant empirical work investigating how these motivations factor into everyday consumption habits. This paper seeks to improve our understanding of ethical consumption through an analysis of consumer behaviors and motivations as measured through their self-reported consumption habits. Using survey data (N=1200), to explore patterns in organic, local, and alternative (e.g. farmers’ markets) food procurement, we show the conditions under which ethical consumption is more self-interested or more civic-minded. We find that organic food consumption is more self-oriented than are local or farmers’ market food consumption, which are more other-oriented. We further complicate a binary analysis of ethical consumption as self-interested or activist by showing that it can also manifest as “caring consumption” (Miller 1998; Thompson 1996) or “precautionary consumption” (MacKendrick 2010). In these instances, specifically for mothers shopping for young children, ethical consumption is neither straightforwardly self-interested nor civic-minded.