How social problems become consumer choices

Alternet talks to Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, which looks to be a very interesting look at the global food industry and how awful it is. The most interesting part of the interview is when Patel explains how the rhetoric of personal choice hides the societal realities that create obesity in America:

RP: The first edition of the Atkins diet had a long tirade against the sugar industry. Atkins was saying that we’re being poisoned by the sugar industry — they’re putting sugar in everything. But then Atkins makes the turn that is very common in America: It’s a problem of the industry, it’s an economic problem, it’s a political problem, and the solution has to be individual. The solution is not to confront the sugar industry, not to legislate, not to use government to change that, but to exercise an almost Puritan control over the will as a way of getting out of a situation that has everything to do with politics.

[…]

All of the reasons I’ve given for why people are forced to eat bad food have nothing to do with choice. Choice is almost entirely absent from any of these calculations. Yes, you can choose between Burger King or McDonald’s, but you don’t get to choose to have time to have a healthy meal. You don’t get to choose to have time to sit down with your family and cook a decent meal, to really enjoy food, savor it, and connect with it. What we’re left with is this poor simulacrum of choice — constrained between two options that are equally bad for you. Individualizing this is a case of blaming the victim. When we say that it is your fault because you’re choosing McDonalds rather than the Whole Food’s salad, that’s bollocks because people couldn’t choose the Whole Food’s salad. The choice is Coke or Pepsi, Burger King or McDonalds, either because people don’t have the time or the money.

In a nutshell Coke or Pepsi is what all choices in a capitalist society come down to. We can “choose” to eat junk food or we can “choose” to go on a diet by buying from a range of brand name health food products and the same company can provide both to us. And because we have this choice, the system need not be changed. In the same way we can chose to buy the cheap coffee or the fair coffee, but because we have the choice it’s up to us as consumers to make the right one, while the producers are only delivering what the market wants.

Consumer choice campaigns putting pressure on one company to e.g. stop using child labour therefore helps legitimise the choice of other companies not to offer child labour free clothing, as it becomes just another option on the consumer menu, while the idea that the whole system needs to change, or even that there are other choices than Coke or Pepsi, is lost.