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Reflexivity and the Whole Foods Market consumer: the lived experience of shopping for change

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Abstract

There has been widespread academic and popular debate about the transformative potential of consumption choices, particularly food shopping. While popular food media is optimistic about “shopping for change,” food scholars are more critical, drawing attention to fetishist approaches to “local” or “organic,” and suggesting the need for reflexive engagement with food politics. We argue that reflexivity is central to understanding the potential and limitations of consumer-focused food politics, but argue that this concept is often relatively unspecified. The first objective of this paper is to operationalize reflexivity and advance understanding of reflexivity as an important tool for understanding the lived experience of food shopping. Our second objective is to explore the range of reflexivity observed in a mainstream “shopping for change” market sector. To do this, we draw from in-depth interviews with shoppers at Whole Foods Market (WFM)—a retail venue with the stated goal of making consumers “feel good about where [they] shop.” This group is chosen because of our interest in investigating the reflexivity of consumer engagement with the corporatized arm of ethical consumption—a realm of concern to food scholars as alternative agricultural initiatives are absorbed (both materially and symbolically) into corporate institutions. Our analysis suggests that shopping at venues like WFM is primarily motivated by traditional consumer pleasures, even for politicized consumers, a finding that poses serious limitations for a consumer-regulated food system.

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Notes

  1. We use the terms “ethical” or “ethically” throughout this paper to describe practices or products which our research participants believed promoted social justice and/or environmental sustainability.

  2. WFM executives are well aware of the potential contradictions of their broad consumer offerings. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, CEO John Mackey announced a new initiative to promote health, and candidly admitted, “We sell all kinds of candy. We sell a bunch of junk” (McLaughlin 2009).

  3. As opposed to the value-neutral term “consumption,” consumerism is understood here as an ideology and refers to the belief that “consumption far beyond the satisfaction of physical needs is, literally, at the center of meaningful existence” (Sklair 2001, p. 5). Consumer societies valorize an ideal of consumer sovereignty where individual choice is prioritized over collective action to combat social problems and the ideals of citizenship are minimized.

  4. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. We coded the transcripts according to recurring themes using the qualitative data management software AtlasTi and examined the coded data according to practices of the extended case method (Burawoy 1991, 1998).

  5. Eighteen of the participants were Caucasian (two among these identified as Jewish) while the remaining two were Chinese–Canadian and Lebanese–Canadian, respectively.

  6. Median family income in Toronto is $62,800 (Statistics Canada 2006, p.10). In our sample, 17/20 participants had a household income above this median. Eleven of 20 had a household income of at least twice this average.

  7. These facts in themselves do not suggest that low income consumers are not interested in “ethical” consumption (Lockie 2009) and indeed, three of our participants had incomes below the city average.

  8. Our interviewees typically talked about the WFM they frequented in Toronto, but several had experience shopping at WFM in other North American cities.

  9. To be clear, our focus was on how participants understood their shopping practices and described their shopping practices to us. We asked participants what they typically purchased at WFM, but we did not attempt to reconcile participants’ reflexive values with an audit of their grocery store purchases.

  10. Our documentation of consumer priorities, such as convenience, is intended as an empirical contribution, rather than a normative judgement. The conclusion to our paper explores our position on consumer practices and responsibilities for regulating the larger food system.

  11. The resource-intensive nature of North American lifestyles has been well documented. For example, ecological footprint analysis estimates the US per capita footprint at 9.7 hectares, and the Canadian per capita footprint at 7.5, even though the global biocapacity is just 1.8 hectares per person (Global Footprint Network n.d.).

  12. These views inspired a Facebook-organized WFM boycott in 2009 (Hickman 2009).

  13. While the chain now heavily promotes local produce and farmers in shopping spaces, it is estimated that no more than 30% of its produce is grown locally (Gandel 2007). The store also stocks a wide variety of products that are out of season, shipped transnationally, produced using industrial monoculture, and deemed problematic on specific environmental grounds (e.g., bottled water). While local eating is clearly not a food-system panacea (Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2003), critiques of locavorism do not negate all of the environmental and social consequences of globalized agricultural trade (e.g., Clay 2004; Shrybman 2000).

  14. There is some debate on whether WFM’s popular nickname, “Whole Pay check” is warranted. While this study is far from comprehensive, Alternet journalist, Stan Cox, compared a basket of monthly food goods (based on the a minimal, USDA-recommended “low-cost food plan”) required to feed a small family, and found that the basket would cost $232 (USD) at Wal-Mart and $564 (USD) at WFM (2006). CNNMoney.com published a story entitled, “Whole Foods: The whole truth—how to get the biggest bang for your green buck when shopping at the pricey chain” (Gandel 2007), which noted that some house brand items are competitively priced, but that the specialty or unusual items that draw people to the store are typically quite expensive.

  15. Symbolic boundaries are used to monopolize status and resources based on “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices”; the concept of boundaries has been widely employed by sociologists to better understand how symbolic resources define lines of exclusion and exclusion, and legitimate social difference (Lamont and Molnár 2002, p. 168).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON, M5S 2J4, Canada

    Josée Johnston

  2. Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, HNES 109, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Michelle Szabo

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  1. Josée Johnston
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Correspondence to Josée Johnston.

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Johnston, J., Szabo, M. Reflexivity and the Whole Foods Market consumer: the lived experience of shopping for change. Agric Hum Values 28, 303–319 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-010-9283-9

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