In my academic experience there are two words that, if used unwittingly, will get you hopped on faster than a flea onto a coon hound. Tantalizingly, they appear to be the bookends of a spectrum with great applicability to the lived experience. Determinism on one end and Choice on the other. That’s pretty simplistic of course, and you never want to be simplistic when operating in the academic realm. Nor do you really want to be inaccurate when analyzing the constraints of policy.
As it applies to the topics of this site, policies and campaigns to alter social and environmental problems through consumer decisions regarding food, choice is the dreaded term upon which it is all hinged. Choice implies a certain level of free will, agency and empowerment. On the other hand, determinism suggests that the actions and options available to people are pre-determined and limited by forces outside their control. Determinism gained notoriety through its pairing with the word environmental in a highly controversial term indicating that people are inherently limited by the environments in which they find themselves and they are virtually powerless to change these conditions. This theory, while it might seem reasonable in some circumstances, had pretty disastrous implications for social justice.
In short, to say that people are limited or their actions are pre-determined by some imposition is unjust and potentially inaccurate, but to say that they are actually pretty empowered and capable of making choices for themselves is also frowned upon because there is concern about the illusion of personal agency. Oh dear, I think I’m choking on my tail. Maybe it’s not exactly circular logic, but it can bring you to an intractable screeching halt pretty quick.
But seriously, supposing people have both less and more agency than they, or anyone else, thinks, where does that leave activist campaigns that rely on consumer choice? What are the implications for Buying Local (as opposed to some other choice).
If someone is financially unable to purchase a certain food item, it is not accurate to say that they made the choice not to do so, even though the ultimate outcome is that they did not purchase that item. Rather, most people would agree that his/her structural situation determined the outcome. The somewhat less obvious counter-point to this example is to question how much that same structure contributes to the illusion that someone, who is financially viable and makes a choice to purchase a certain item, is really acting through pure personal agency. In other words, all things being equal, where does that leave choice; or rather, how different would choice look. Not the individual choices that people make, but the very notion of choice itself. Newt Gingrich, for one, is not going to like this line of thinking one bit. Matthew Hilton, however, is definitely interrogating at least the economic aspects of what this might look like. Kent Greenfield illustrates the difference between blaming it on biology and blaming it on structure; in some circles, one is definitely more acceptable than the other.
* “Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America” by Lawrence B. Glickman (2009) provides a good context for the idea of buycott (buying certain things to support people or causes) vs. boycott ( not buying things to protest certain people or causes)
