From consumers to citizens

I was born in 1956, a year after Victor Lebow proclaimed the gospel of consumption.

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate. (From A Brief History of Consumer Culture, Kerry Higgs)

So for my almost 70 years on the planet, I have been exposed to the work of some of the brightest minds doing their best to turn me into a consumer. The industrial food system influences our food choices every day.

Climate Action Tai Tokerau has a current focus on food systems as they are both the cause of most environmental degradation, while also offering us massive agency for healing the climate.

Even a cursory examination of the food system reveals a focus on the mass production of industrial food. While we live in a fertile abundant climate here, we still import a lot of food from distant countries. Much of it will be heavily processed to enable a long shelf life, and probably formulated to achieve the bliss point to keep us coming back for more.  

The food system is dominated by large commercial entities that clearly want to dominate and monopolise. Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance points out the dynamics of consolidation in the Great Simplification pocast in the U.S. context.

… one of the reasons I focused a lot of my research on the retail and distribution level is that’s where we’ve seen some of the most extreme consolidation. When you have consolidation there, it affects the entire supply chain, so as Walmart has grown to dominate, Walmart now captures one out of every $4.00 that Americans spend on groceries, and it’s much higher in certain states. There are some states where it’s one out of every $2.00. In certain metro areas, it’s 80% of grocery sales. When you have that kind of consolidation at the grocery level, it causes consolidation among the food processors, so the dairy and the meat and all the companies that manufacture the food they merge and get big because Walmart only wants to deal with other big companies, and those companies in turn want to deal with giant farmers… concentrated agriculture in giant feedlots …

When you have that kind of concentration in one part of the sector in the supply chain it tends to … cause concentration in the others. I say that because I think there can be a lot of focus the need to have local food systems, local farms and that sort of thing and yes, but if we don’t actually deal with the consolidation at the retail level those farms face a dead end when it comes to how their production actually get distributed.

The same dynamic is evident in Aotearoa. The supermarket duopoly is frequently in the news. If a third chain were introduced, it is likely to be an international chain, further squeezing out local suppliers through consolidated supply chains. We emailed many MPs about this in an open letter. And the iconic Watties brand is sourcing fewer local crops in favour of cheap imports from overseas.

Becoming citizens again

We were never meant to be mere consumers. Consumption is an activity, not an identity. Yet over decades, it has come to define our place in the world – what we buy, where we shop, what brands we trust. The result is a hollowing out of citizenship. We lose the sense that we belong to one another, to our communities, and to the places that feed us.

To step out of the consumer role is to remember that we are participants, not just purchasers, people with responsibilities and rights, with the power to shape the systems we depend on. And few systems invite this rediscovery more directly than food. In our gardens, farmers’ markets, and local supply networks, we can move from being consumers of food to being citizens within food systems reconnected to land, growers, and one another.

Citizenship begins when we see ourselves not as isolated shoppers, no longer needing to even speak to anyone at the supermarket, but as neighbours, co-creators, and caretakers of the commons. Food, because it connects us daily to land, labour, and community offers a natural path back to this deeper identity. Through local food systems, we can re-learn what it means to be citizens again: to share responsibility for what sustains us, and to take joy sharing food together.

From awareness to action

Citizenship, though, is more than a mindset – it’s a practice. It shows up in what we choose to support, but also in what we stand up to change. When citizens engage, systems shift. The local food movement isn’t only about fresher produce or shorter supply chains; it’s about reclaiming democratic power over what sustains us.

As Stacy Mitchell notes in The Great Simplification podcast, the transition from industrial food to local food mirrors the long campaign to reduce smoking. Public awareness was vital, but the real breakthroughs came through policy. Successful change requires both personal and political commitment. That is what citizenship looks like in action.

Development thinker Duncan Green describes this as the interplay of four forces that drive complex change: shifts in consciousness and capability, access to resources, and an enabling environment of laws and social norms. Transformation happens only when all four move together.

Citizenship in practice: our food systems focus