As the food movement took shape about two decades ago, so did one of its many pieces of advice: \u201cvote with your fork.\u201d The idea was simple and seductive. Three times a day, you could decide what to eat, consistent with your values and aspirations for the food system. Slowly but surely those decisions would sync up with other \u201cconscious consumers\u201d and aggregate into a food system that could become good, clean, and fair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With a healthy amount of hindsight, many who work in food systems change now understand the shortcomings of this way of thinking.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, the reporter Sarah K. Mock offers a succinct summary<\/a> for why voting with your fork is \u201ctotal nonsense.\u201d Ethical shopping is expensive and inaccessible, requires an impossible amount of information, is easily co-optable by corporate interests, and is not scalable in ways that compete with the biggest of Big Food players. In the end, Mock advises to \u201ckeep going to your local farmers market\u201d if you want, \u201cbut not just as a shopper\/consumer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That advice is sound because, as much as our current food system would have us believe that we are all primarily and merely consumers, other roles we play \u2014 as workers, advocates, and community members \u2014 offer much more effective avenues<\/a> we can take to organize for a just food system.<\/strong> Further, the focus of the food movement on consumption, particularly regarding the environmental and public health harms of the food system, the role and experiences of workers in the food system \u2014 who are also consumers \u2014 is made invisible. In fact, ever-consolidating corporate actors benefit when we passively accept the idea that we are solely consumers, so resisting that frame \u2014 or at least engaging with it strategically \u2014 is important to our work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the Food Project, we\u2019re working to critically engage with the idea that ethical consumption is all it takes to transform the food system.<\/strong> We use legal tools designed to protect consumers in a way that also protects workers<\/a>. We frustrate the vote-with-your-fork logic and push back against narratives that pit consumers against workers, particularly as such a false binary persists in food movement efforts. Addressing corporate consolidation in the food system requires undoing this false binary; this blogpost offers some ideas and examples from the Food Project\u2019s work to help us get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biologically speaking, we have always been consumers<\/a>. But the \u201cconsumer\u201d at the center of the universe in which voting with your fork makes sense is a relatively recent invention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Critiquing the idea of \u201cthe consumer\u201d in 1850, the philosopher Karl Marx wrote about<\/a> how the consumer identity makes it harder to observe power dynamics in society. He used the grocery store as an example. A business owner enters the grocery store and pays for food with money that came from his profits, while a worker enters the store and pays with money she got from her wages. Since they\u2019re buying similar things at the same grocery store, they both appear to be consumers. As the scholar Michael Denning<\/a> summed it up, \u201cthe class division between them is erased because they all seem to be consumers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What might it mean for the movement against industrial animal agriculture to see consumers and workers as one and the same?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Throughout the twentieth century, the figure of the consumer would only get stronger, as many people in the U.S. came to see themselves first and foremost as consumers, obscuring their roles as workers.<\/strong> This would have important consequences for organizing, as consumer movements of the 1960s and \u201970s took political action through boycotts and other means of consumer activism through newly founded organizations like Public Citizen, the Consumer Federation of America, and eventually even Public Justice. As organized consumers, these groups made demands for product safety, worker safety, and environmental protection, at once strengthening government regulations while being skeptical about the role of government in society. (The historian Paul Sabin argues that this very skepticism<\/a> has hamstrung bringing about ambitious, big-government visions like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All today.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all interpretations of the consumer identity have been as positive. One example from the law is the concept of \u201cconsumer protection\u201d in antitrust. Since around the 1980s, whenever the government has had to decide to intervene in big business mergers, it has been guided by a goal to keep the price of goods low for consumers<\/a>.<\/strong> This idea of \u201cconsumer protection\u201d being equated with low prices has shaped regulatory bodies like the Federal Trade Commission, and is the historical product<\/a> of collaboration between economists and a well-organized business lobby. We see this logic appear in debates about consolidation in the food system, where a few firms can produce great quantities of cheap food and evade antitrust enforcement, despite all of the environmental, labor, and social harms of consolidation. While the food movement has historically demonized \u201ccheap\u201d food and the people who eat it, it is decades of agricultural exceptionalism<\/a>, union-busting, and militarized immigration policies<\/a> \u2014 abetted by consolidated corporate interests \u2014 that keep wages low and make cheap food necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But a narrow definition of consumer interests, and what\u2019s beneficial to workers, need not be at odds.<\/strong> \u201cThe idea, beloved by mainstream economists, [is] that the interest of workers and consumers are essentially a seesaw: for one to gain, the other must lose,\u201d Christine Berry wrote last year<\/a> in the Guardian. This is certainly the case in the food policy arena, where worker pay and protections are frequently met with warnings of higher food prices for restaurant-goers, or where ideas about food safety or various environmental certifications narrowly focus on product quality and not occupational health. Berry continues: \u201cThis conveniently ignores the third actor in the equation: the owners,\u201d who have the power to set both wages and prices, handed that power by decades of deregulation and union decline. Yet we know from Marx\u2019s grocery example that \u201cworkers and consumers remain the same damn people,\u201d as reporter Sarah Jaffe once proclaimed<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what might it mean for the movement against industrial animal agriculture to see consumers and workers as one and the same?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It can be easy to write off \u201cconsumer\u201d as a category, especially since \u201cthe consumer\u201d and preserving consumer choice has been weaponized by all kinds of industrial titans to evade regulation. The scholar Luke Herinne offers a crucial reminder: \u201cthe consumer interest is always a matter of interpretation, and interpretation is always embedded in history. Workers are also consumers, and vice versa.\u201d In this spirit, looking at some of the Food Project\u2019s docket helps us see how the creative use of what looks and feels like consumer law can support fighting for worker rights and breaking up Big Food.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Twice now, the Food Project has used a District of Columbia consumer protection law to hold meat companies accountable for misleading advertising claims. The Food Project sued both Hormel<\/a> and Smithfield<\/a> for deceptive claims about \u201cnaturalness\u201d and meat shortages, respectively. In either case, and especially in our case against Smithfield, how workers get treated by these highly-concentrated companies has been an important part of the litigation in different ways and at different steps<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Litigation that marries concerns about (often consumer-focused) food safety and worker safety have also been a mainstay of our work.<\/strong> While food safety has historically been concerned with food quality, fears of food fraud, and illness that results from contamination, our work recognizes that worker protections help keep food safe in important ways. Our work to fight back against the meat industry\u2019s and government\u2019s push to speed up production lines accounts for the effects such speed ups have on food quality and worker safety. For example, the inspection reports that we uncovered in our Hormel case<\/a> illustrated how undue pressures on workers to work more quickly resulted in food safety violation after food safety violation. The amicus briefs we filed on behalf of elected officials that clarified the public health threats of ramping up linespeeds<\/a>, and in the Supreme Court in support of Proposition 12<\/a>, both illustrated how focusing on worker protection issues \u201ctrickle down\u201d to protecting public health more broadly.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This has only become more important with COVID-19. At the outset of the pandemic, meatpacking workers were not given adequate protections against COVID-19 throughout the pandemic in pursuit of corporate profits, and those plants became supercharged engines for community spread of disease. More broadly, environmental litigation we\u2019re developing that takes full account of how slaughterhouses affect workers not only where they work but where they live and play too is especially sensitive to how \u201cworker\u201d and \u201cconsumer\u201d are roles one plays throughout the day as opposed to rigid and competing interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our ag-gag work<\/a> has also creatively frustrated the consumer-worker binary.<\/strong> Laws that penalize people for entering and filming meatpacking and other animal agriculture facilities in an effort for transparency are often couched in consumer-centric ideas about having a \u201cright to know\u201d what\u2019s in one\u2019s food. Agribusinesses lobby for these ag-gag laws to maintain secrecy around how food is produced. And while ag-gag litigation itself has a complicated history that has at times pitted precarious workers against animals \u2014 with little to no accountability for meat company executives in the C-suite \u2014 these moves toward transparency can help galvanize pro-labor organizing akin to the muckraking journalism of The Jungle. In this vein, the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) has been a plaintiff on our ag-gag case<\/a> in Arkansas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, where our work aims to make markets fairer and more competitive, we move well beyond the threshold of \u201cconsumer protection\u201d as equated with keeping meat prices low, especially since farmers, ranchers, farmworkers, and others are uniquely harmed by consolidation in the food system.<\/strong> In the chicken industry, whose tournament system pits producers against each other in a modern-day version of sharecropping, we represent producers harmed by the anticompetitive practices of corporations like Tyson<\/a> who are calling for more vigorous enforcement<\/a> of our country\u2019s antitrust laws. In the beef industry, whose consolidation and market power has made it harder for specialty, high-quality ranchers to distinguish their product from generic, commodity beef, we have represented independent ranchers<\/a> through the Ranchers and Cattlemen Action Legal Fund fighting against the Beef Checkoff program that tilts resources away from a system that disincentivizes high-quality production methods. Consumer interests are vast and varied beyond low price, and our work reflects that expansiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reclaiming more progressive interpretations of consumer protection is not to say that a consumer-based prescription like \u201cvoting with your fork\u201d is automatically a pro-worker act because consumers are workers. Rather, it\u2019s an acknowledgement that focusing so much on consumer rights and protection as the central concerns of decision-making in how the food system should work draws attention away from thinking about forms of collective action \u2014 political advocacy, labor organizing, building and expanding localized systems of growing and distributing food, etc. \u2014 that have the potential to transform food systems. Collective action addresses the very structural imbalances of power that make food systems so harmful in so many different ways, while improving consumer behavior does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of our partner organizations sprang up in the prime of the mainstream, consumer-focused food movement from which the perspectives and demands of workers were excluded, despite having long been the vanguard of positive food systems change. For example, the Food Chain Workers Alliance<\/a>, which we\u2019ve represented in court, and the HEAL Food Alliance<\/a> (the \u201cL\u201d stands for labor!), of which we are a member, both critically center the importance of building worker power to taking on corporate control of food and land.<\/strong> In their recent report Procuring Food Justice<\/a>, FCWA and HEAL talk about how grassroots organizers can push institutions to buy food based on community values, channeling funds into suppliers that advance racial equity, workers\u2019 rights, climate justice, and transparency and away from those that don\u2019t. In other words, demand-side interventions can go hand-in-hand with workers\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other groups have creatively expanded what consumer-driven change might look like, beyond the quiet choices we make in the supermarket aisle, bringing demands for change to the streets, college campuses, and communities. In response to dubious self-regulatory schemes like corporate social responsibility, in which corporate actors set their own internal benchmarks, metrics, agendas, and strategies for doing the right thing, organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers<\/a> and Migrant Justice \/ Justicia Migrante<\/a> have developed their own models under the banner of \u201cworker-driven social responsibility\u201d<\/a> (WSR) to reflect the knowledge and needs of those closest to corporate harm. This model activates consumers in ways that build solidarity across the food supply chain and politicize the otherwise apolitical identity of \u201cconsumer\u201d to generate collective action like boycotts and other attention-grabbing campaigns that exert pressure on corporate actors.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n These groups draw on longstanding movement tactics that aim to redeem the role of the consumer in food systems change. Check out their work and ours to see how blurring the lines between worker and consumer offers effective routes to food systems change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As much as our current food system would have us believe that we are all primarily and merely consumers, other roles we play \u2014 as workers, advocates, and community members \u2014 offer much more effective avenues we can take to organize for a just food system.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[63,64,41],"issue":[19,17],"class_list":["post-821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insights","tag-consumers","tag-movement","tag-workers","issue-consumer-rights","issue-worker-justice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nConsumers Above All<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Post-Consumer Food Movements<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/farmstand.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hormel-e1719605836211.webp\")
Corrective Action Towards Collective Action<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/farmstand.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Procuring-Food-Justice-e1719605954259.webp\")