Food Citizenship

Abstract

Spend time exploring the ways and means of food production, packaging, and retailing in the 21st century and you’ll often come up against that brick wall statement: “That’s what the Consumer wants.” We allow sugar content to remain high, compromise on wage levels and environmental impact for price, focus our best innovation brains narrowly on convenience, all because that’s what the Consumer wants. In that phrase is a logic that seems inescapable, an apparently fundamental truth about human motivation and the limited role people are capable of playing that quietly restricts and governs the decisions we make.