Should I be checking whether the new TV I’m buying is made in China, in case Uighur slave labour is part of the supply chain? Does Amazon’s tax avoidance and indirect decimation of the high street mean I should boycott the company, or merely reduce my dependence on it? And if I’m only putting milk and dairy made from high-welfare cows in my fridge, should I avoid flat whites and feta pies from cafés that aren’t doing the same?
It’s easy to mock the worry lists of dedicated ethical consumers. What was once a fringe kind of shopper has now proliferated, with a variety of recognisable and often comical sub-species: anti-capitalist market refuseniks, greener-than-thou eco-warriors, insincere virtue-signallers, self-righteous bores.
It’s easy to laugh, but no one who complains about the sins of big business can spend their money without any thought as to where it will end up. Only the most selfish and callous reject the basic principle that we ought to think about the impact of our shopping choices on other people, animals and the planet. The question should not be whether to aspire to be an ethical consumer, but how to become the right kind.
Achieving this is mainly a matter of avoiding the obvious pitfalls. Some of these are simply fact-based. Too many people opt for arbitrarily selective indignation, boycotting obvious targets and not worse-behaving competitors. Why single out McDonalds, for instance, when it has a better record on animal welfare than most fast-food outlets? Other decisions are plain inconsistent: shunning any trace of palm oil, no matter how sustainable, while guzzling an environmentally ruinous brand of almond milk, made from unsustainably irrigated and heavily chemically treated nuts.
But there are other, more subtle pitfalls than can undermine the laudable aims of the ethical consumer. Even when we have identified the right issues to focus on, the products to buy or avoid, we can still wind up misdirecting our ethical energies.
The first is the tendency to elevate subjective feelings of purity over genuinely ethical outcomes. This is a particular danger with food, because once we start to think of a product as being morally tainted, we easily slide into treating it as though it were contaminated and that by ingesting it we will be soiling the temple that is our body.
The primal fear of contamination can lead us to make pointless ethical gestures. For example, if you avoid all or some kinds of animal food but have mistakenly been given some—because you forgot to order your airline meal in advance, for example—what ethical good do you achieve by refusing to eat it? The animal is dead (or milked), and so the benefits of protecting your purity are zero, while you create the harm of unnecessary food waste. Similarly, when we refuse food given in hospitality because it fails to meet our standards, we achieve nothing for the planet or other animals while offending our hosts.
Such empty gestures can also reveal our delusions of autonomy. Few individual choices by themselves have any significant impact. What matters is what you mostly do, not what you actually do on any given occasion. For example, by always requesting vegetarian meals, you help reduce demand for meat. But by leaving a pork sausage on the barbecue when all the free-range ones have gone, you’re not improving the lot of a single pig.
If we really want to make an impact, what we say can actually sometimes be more important than what we do. By asking questions of food retailers, cafés and restaurants, or requesting ethical options, we help to create a culture in which such factors are thought about a lot more. In contrast, silent refusal often leaves everything as it is.
A third pitfall of ethical consumerism is that it plays into the idea that we should think of ourselves primarily as consumers rather than citizens. This is a drum The New Citizenship Project has been banging for years, along with the Food Ethics Council (of which I am a member). The consumer mindset leads us to believe that the main way to achieve change and assert our power is through our consumer choices.
In the consumer mindset, we focus too much on our daily personal choices and too little on the kind of collective civic action that has historically driven major political change. For example, if you really care about animal welfare, it’s more important that the government avoids signing standard-lowering trade deals than you eat seitan rather than sirloin. Pesticide reduction is driven more by regulation than it is by shoppers looking for the organic label. Supporting campaigns on these and other issues is much more important than personal eating decisions.
Of course, there is no either/or here. We should live by our values and make the best choices we can. But if we focus too much on our roles as consumers, we risk overestimating the importance of our own choices, basking in a bogus sense of virtue, and neglecting the legal and policy changes that are really required to make a difference. Ethical consumerism matters, but not nearly as much as many of its most zealous practitioners believe.
