Abstract
This study explores how ethical food consumption is framed in the accounts of ordinary people living in affluent societies, with a particular focus on income differences. Research on ethical consumption often associates ‘ethical’ with the consumption of certain predefined products. This study leaves the question of the content of ethical consumption open for empirical investigation. Further, instead of focusing only on the moment of purchasing, this study considers how people with different income levels relate to both food consumption and waste. The analysis draws from qualitative interviews with 60 people living in Canada and Finland. The analysis identified the techniques, subjects and norms through which the question ethical food consumption is posed by the informants and how they framed these issues with regard to income. The findings underline that ethical consumption is a socially constructed, contested and even internally contradictory discourse. Differences in income do not only mean differences in the role that money plays in food choices but also in what kind of consumption people consider worth pursuing. Further, differences in income dictate differences in how people are morally positioned vis-à-vis abundance. For people with a higher level of income, moral blame is asserted on wasteful consumption habits. For the people with a low income, in turn, it is ethically condemnable to refuse to rejoice at the abundance around us. The findings indicate that even in a society where the rhetoric of choice is prominent both as a right and as an obligation by which people ought to display ethical agency, the ethics of choice is tied to the resources available for consumption. People with a severely low income occasionally enjoy the trickling down of abundant treats and surprises. However, for them, occasional indulgence causes not only pleasure but also trouble.
Highlights
Today’s Western countries can be regarded as affluent societies that provide people with opportunities beyond the basic necessities
This study explores how ethical food consumption is framed in the accounts of ordinary people living in affluent societies, with a particular focus on income differences
This study adds an important contribution to the existing body of ethical food consumption research by showing that what is counted as ethical is structured by economic privilege, and that this applies to both purchasing and wasting food
Summary
Today’s Western countries can be regarded as affluent societies that provide people with opportunities beyond the basic necessities. Grauel, 2016; Varul, 2016; Baumann et al, 2017; Kennedy et al, 2019; Oke et al, 2020) Ordinary people and their individual views and practices have been given pivotal positions both as sources of social and ecological problems and as drivers of societal and environmental change (Barnett et al, 2011: 1). The findings complicate what we mean by ethical consumption by showing that income does affect people’s ability to engage in predefined forms of ethical eating It affects what kind of food products and consumer behaviour people count as worth pursuing, what kind of expectations they encounter in terms of their consumer roles and how they frame ideal food consumption
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