Building community,benefiting neighbors: “Buying local” by people who do not fit the mold for “ethical consumers”

Abstract

According to nearly all studies, ethical consumption is a regular practice mainly of people who are well educated and politically active in conventional ways. Buying local has also recently been portrayed as part of an “eco-habitus” associated with ecological thinking, cultural capital, and the desire for more “authentic” things. In this article, I challenge both these notions. Specifically, drawing on Holt’s model of the relationship between cultural capital and consumption, I make two arguments. First, while relatively few people have access to robust local food systems, buying local by supporting businesses in general, and not just food producers, seen as rooted in regional economic and civic life, may be widespread even among people lacking in cultural capital, economic capital, or interest in conventional politics. Second, buying local among people who do not fit the mold of the “typical” ethical consumer is not consciously connected to concern for environmental problems. Rather, the buying local practiced by this understudied group is motivated by the desire to directly benefit community members and secure public goods such as good jobs, and safe streets. The findings of this article matter first for how social scientists understand who engages in buying local, as a form of ethical consumption. But this article also raises the question of what the real-world impacts of buying local might be, when some practitioners are relatively unguided by signals from social movement organizations and other entities that might establish firm criteria for what counts as “local” and what does not.