Can the Consumer Speak?: How Policymakers (Have) Imagine(d) the Consumer in Food Politics

• In Event: Governing Food - I

Abstract

Clearly there are real, actual consumers who are people and who make choices and have agency in the supermarket. However, this is not a paper about them. Playing on Timothy Mitchell's question, "Can the Mosquito Speak?," this paper looks at the consumer as a kind of generic agent and policy construct whose "agency" is mediated through a variety of social science theories, research techniques, and political platforms. Drawing from my research on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), I illustrate some past ways public and private policymakers have imagined and invoked different “consumers” to shape food markets or implement public policy.

From these examples I will make two arguments. First, I will catalogue a variety of modes through which this kind of generic consumer can “speak” in food politics. Different modalities for representing consumers involve significantly different degrees of agency, yet their rhetorical use in consumer politics has often been quite unreflexive. Second, I offer a periodization of who FDA regulators imagined to be an ideal consumer for their evolving policy tools: the “ordinary consumer” in the 1950s, an informed consumer in the 1970s, a distributed consumer in 1990s. I argue these different imagined consumers reflected changing political ideals about the responsibility of the state to its citizens and changes in the infrastructures for consumerism.

I conclude by offering this study as a cautionary tale to STS scholars on some of the traps we fall into when we, intentionally or not, invoke consumers in our narratives about a better food politics.

Author

• Xaq Frohlich, Auburn University