Stop Trying to Vote with Your Fork
Why We Can’t Consume Our Way to a Better Food System
Being an agriculture reporter, I hear a lot of speeches, decrees and diatribes about why people eat organic, vegetarian, or vegan, when they started avoiding gluten or dairy, or how they got turned on to pickling or kombucha. One element that drives many of these food awakenings — people saying they “realized the need” to vote with their fork. That somewhere along their path, they learned that they personally could and must act as a change agent to make the American food system safer, more just, and more beneficial to farmers and the environment, and they took pride in doing it on every trip to the grocery store or their favorite local farm-to-table restaurant.
This idea is not new. For over two decades, the idea of “eating for change” has been floating around, with it’s greatest proponents being the likes of Michael Pollan, who summarized the idea in a 2006 NYTimes article:
“You can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day.”
If you don’t like something about the way a food/beverage/really any kind of consumer item is made/distributed/sold, just…
