A (Short) Manifesto For Ethical Consumption

by Jamil Fiorino-Habib

THIS MANIFESTO WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRINT IN DECEMBER 2020, IN ISSUE TWO

Where does our food come from? That’s the perennial question that continues to evade us. Farm to table movements have done their best to educate and inform us as consumers, but when most of our experience with food is mediated by corporate bodies like supermarkets and fast food chains, the entire lifecycle of our food becomes far more opaque.

Every time we enter the grocery store, we expect our favourite ingredients to be in stock, to taste the same year round, and to cost the same. We find ourselves attracted to well-designed products with overstated labels that help us be “conscious consumers.” “Sustainable,” “all natural,” “ethically sourced”––none of these terms tell us anything significant about what’s in our food or how it arrives to us. They’re merely slapped onto packages to make us feel decent about our choices.

Unfortunately, most urbanites have a dwindling vernacular knowledge of farming and harvesting practices, accumulating most of their information from food docs on Netflix and YouTube. Food appears on store shelves like magic, replenished from the seemingly endless cornucopia of a back storage room. As our magicians, these supermarkets work fastidiously to conceal the labour of food suppliers. Surely, they would never reveal their secrets, for if we knew how their trick worked, the entire performance would lose its mystique. We would quickly realize that our satiation depends on being placed in a state of ignorance.

I’m not proposing that the solution is to go off the grid and buy a parcel of land for a quarter of a million dollars just so we can learn how to grow potatoes. Rather, I’m hoping to ignite a spark in you, a curiosity to know more about modern food trends and to encourage you to critique the status quo as new terms and food items quickly become a part of our everyday reality. We should be focused on making the entire system more transparent, more traceable, more tangible.

Let’s start asking some difficult questions: How does the agro-industrial food complex obfuscate its system of production? What kinds of players are involved in bringing food to your plate? What financial and environmental costs are incurred for your enjoyment?

The most important question still remains: What can we possibly do to enact change? While I wish I had a simple answer, my best advice would be to go back to basics and look deeper into the past in anticipation of a challenging future, one that will inevitably be dominated by questions of food security in the wake of climate crisis. Be critical of your consumption habits. Vote with your dollar, and prioritize using local and seasonal ingredients whenever possible. Engage with farmers, bakers and chefs—experts who possess an unparalleled depth of specialized knowledge. If we continue to look solely at conglomerate bodies for our sustenance, we will soon come to know very little about one of the most essential processes that makes us distinctly human: agriculture.

It’s time to reconnect with our food.