Some Are Reflecting on Ethical Consumption – Are We Still Buying, Buying, Buying?

Foodthink Says

Paying for a clear conscience, spending on the causes and values you believe in – this is ethical consumption, distinct from the traditional shopping spree. It embodies the consumer’s wish to support their ideals through purchasing: organic certification, Fairtrade certification, zero-deforestation certification, 100% made from renewable materials… But when we trust the promises on product labels, have we not fallen into yet another consumption trap?

Is this just another snare set by capital? How can we avoid falling for it and practise truly responsible consumption? Foodthink has been granted permission to translate “A Manifesto Against ‘Anti-Capitalist Consumption'”, an article from The Jester, the student newspaper at Wageningen University, in the hope of offering some food for thought.

Anti-capitalist shopping takes many forms. Common examples include supporting small businesses and “responsible baking”. It also manifests as product codes and labels – think Fairtrade, zero animal cruelty, and ethical product certifications – targeted at the anti-capitalist Generation Z shopper.

Though Generation Z is wary of greenwashing and the “woke” brands flooding social media, they have forgotten one fundamental truth: “Under capitalism, ethical consumption does not exist.”

I used to treat shopping as a form of self-care. After school, wandering the aisles of Jumbo or Albert Heijn (both popular Dutch supermarket chains) was a fine way to unwind. Forget the chaos, and let the magic of tempting dinners and delicious food breathe life back into my soul. But slowly, the shelves began telling me things about this world.

At first, it was nutritional labels whispering in my ear. They told me that everything I’d grown up eating was anything but healthy. Then came the Bio label (European organic certification) or the organic label. I had to know whether the products I was buying were truly natural and organic or the dreaded synthetics. Visions of microplastics overflowing into rivers steered me towards organic choices.

Then a “V” appeared – the vegetarian product label. I was astonished to discover that many products that seemed animal-free actually contained animal-derived foods. Why is there milk powder in crisps? Now, every single item passes through my four-stage check before it goes in the basket.

But then, on some shelves, I spotted another label. The “Fairtrade” label implied that the conventional trading system was unjust. The entire shop began to come apart before my eyes. Now, perhaps only three products in the whole store could make it into my trolley.

All these labels function as product codes. Behind each code lies a story. Fertilisers harm biodiversity and the environment; we need to develop more organic farming. Animal-derived foods are not only cruel to the animals bred for slaughter but also unsustainable, driving up global greenhouse gas emissions. Products like chocolate, avocados, and coconut milk mostly come from every corner of the world, where workers at the source endure brutal and terrible exploitation. We need to find ways to ensure exploited workers receive the fair value their labour deserves.

These product codes expose the injustice of the capitalist production system while simultaneously carrying a vision – that a just world is possible. If Tony’s Chocolonely (the Dutch chocolate brand beloved for its slave-free products) can do it, why can’t all chocolate production be free from slave labour?

Ethical product coding requires a degree of consumer awareness to work. Take the Saturday market in Wageningen, for example: Fairtrade means nothing unless you take a minute to find out where this Colombian coffee actually comes from. Each idea behind such product labels has a long history; the struggles, violence, and activism intertwined with them have pushed these dreams of liberation before Western consumers, so that a mere label can tug at their conscience.

All these dreams carry a longing to transcend the limits of capitalist production – a longing for a world free from slave labour, environmental destruction, animal cruelty, and climate change. This is an anti-capitalist longing.

Yet this raises a new question: dressing up eye-catching designs so that slave-free labels sit as prominently as caramel or hazelnut flavour labels—Is it not deeply disrespectful to reduce human stories that intertwine suffering and revolutionary hope to a mere product label? But this is the logic of ethical production under capitalism. Yet how can we turn liberation into a business? How can we monetise revolution?

Quite a few companies have already started doing just this, promising revolutionary change within the framework of capitalism. Fossil-fuel cars are a problem, so let’s build an electric vehicle that changes the world. And so a proliferation of electric vehicle companies appeared, manufacturing these vehicles at great cost in natural resources and materials – doing little good for the planet. But once share prices rise, the planet ceases to matter.

Purifying our longing for change and liberation, repackaging it, and embedding it back within the very structures that bind us is one of capitalism’s great sleights of hand. It converts these anti-capitalist movements into coded commodity entries. The result is that, to some degree, consumers are made to shoulder the blame for capitalism’s ills. It falls to us to make the “right” choice, to stand up, to be grown-ups, and to put this broken world back on track.

The absurdity of ethical marketing should be obvious – surely no one at Wageningen believes that buying organic food can repair our food and agriculture system? Or that if everyone went vegan, Albert Heijn’s plant-based aisles would solve the climate crisis?

And yet ethical marketing still draws us in, because deep down we long for the same world – an ideal world where the food system causes less harm, where animals are not born to be slaughtered. This pull works even on issues we don’t know about, issues we know nothing about. All this responsibility lands squarely on our shoulders, demanding we become ethical consumers facing impossible choices.

And so the great cycle of consumption continues. When iPhone, Oreo, and Coca-Cola sales plateau, they simply invent new products – old sugar water in new flavours. The ethical goods that promised to right the wrongs are reduced to product categories struggling to stay relevant.

Perhaps the pragmatic approach is to do our best to make the most ethical choices we can, so that even without broader systemic change, we can push capitalist production to become more ethical, less harmful, and less oppressive.

Making ethical consumption choices demands extensive knowledge – understanding both the processes behind the labels and what the labels leave out. Imagine doing this while stocking up on daily essentials and making every purchasing decision. If our knowledge were systematic enough, if we paid premiums for products and brands driving change and penalised those companies that refuse to correct their behaviour, if we maintained ethical consumption over the long term and drew more people into doing the same, then changing the system with our wallets is possible.

This strategy echoes boycotts, calls for divestment, and “cancel” campaigns – like boycotting Shell or pressuring Nike to pay sweatshop workers a better wage.

And yet, this obscures the nature of capitalism today. It assumes that getting one company right will solve everything. But that isn’t how it works. From smartphones to water bottles – most products you can buy have between ten and a hundred companies spread across the globe involved in their production. That is the nature of the global supply chain. The same supply chain infrastructure supplies both so-called “ethical” products and unethical ones.

We live in a world full of platforms and virtual marketplaces. From virtual bookshelves to server clusters on the ocean floor, these all-encompassing markets peddle computing power across every industry on the planet. Amazon sells everything. Under Unilever’s umbrella, brands range from The Vegetarian Butcher (the plant-based meat brand) to frozen meat producers with appalling animal welfare and production costs squeezed to the absolute minimum.

Here, there is no room for choice or taking sides. On both the ethical and unethical sides of an industry, it is the same technology, the same operational methods, the same people, and the same marketing playbooks at work.

The problem still lies in production. The commodity production system has grown so vast and globalised that individual companies exist merely as fictions in the stock market. Every stage of manufacturing and producing goods requires people, industries, and capital to flow across the world.

This is why tokenistic attempts to hold companies accountable are so powerless.

When Nike is accused, it simply outsources garment production to another company. At the end of the day, Nike is not the manufacturer of its clothes – it merely holds the trademark rights. When you boycott Amazon to support your local bookshop, those shops are still supplied by Amazon-owned companies. Almost everything we do online runs on server clusters owned by Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.

Within the broader framework of financial capitalism, even these giants cease to exist as such; they are owned and operated by investment funds worth billions of dollars. These funds invest in revolutionary start-ups while hedging their bets by also pouring money into traditional “oppressive” companies. Whichever brand consumers choose, the net effect is a rising return on capital.

In this way, we are faced with a glut of essentially meaningless choices. They do little to affect the existing system or the change it promises, yet they inevitably affect our state of mind. They nibble away at our energy bit by bit, preventing us from contributing to change in any meaningful way. The grand narratives they offer – convenient and feel-good – are, at their core, a form of false fulfilment. We must not fall for this. We must conserve our energy to bring about truly meaningful change.

The illusion of having choices is capitalism’s lifeblood. Not because it transforms capitalism, but because it perpetuates its existence. We let capitalism govern every sphere of our lives, because it promises this mythical choice. Choosing food, choosing what to study, choosing our room and our job. (A nod to fans of Trainspotting.)

But this choice has never been real. It is an illusion manufactured by ad agencies. Even a sunset can be put up for sale, as if a natural landscape could truly be ours to own. Only when we abandon the illusion of choice can we see capitalism’s shackles. Strip away the illusion of choice, and much of the “freedom” in our lives begins to evaporate. The truth is unbearable: people do meaningless work solely to fuel consumption.

Only by abandoning anti-capitalist consumption can we begin to ask the real questions about anti-capitalist production.

Editor: Shitong Jun

Design: Z X