“Critical consumption movements” strongly contest the consumer society but promote “individual choice” at least as much as the capitalist market and advertising campaigns they oppose. On one side, the access to the freedom to consume is one of the core promise of the 20th century modernity. On the other, activists consider that food policies and food movements need to empower consumer choices both by providing them with reliable information (including their consequences on health and the environment) and by protecting them from the hold of agribusiness corporations, lobbies and marketing. The interviews analyses notably emphasize a structural tensions in their discourses between individual and collective dimensions and aspirations that seems inherent to alternative food networks. The paper will successively focus the set of values and meanings various categories of activists have attributed to individual choice in their relation to food (a) and fellow activists (b), in their form of (distanced) commitment (c), their vision of the current economic system (d), of alternative networks they wish to develop (e), and to their concept the concrete paths from individual consumer practices to a broader social change, which often remains a blind spot in their discourses (f). This analysis relies on three sets of qualitative data: (a) 60 interviews conducted with activists of the “Brooklyn Food Coalition” in 2010 and 2011 and 14 of members of two “collective purchasing clubs” in Belgium; (b) a discourse analysis of leaflets and workshops speeches at national and international gathering, notably the second US Social Forum (Detroit, 2010) and (c) a secondary analysis of data collected by a research network working on similar actors in France, Belgium, the UK, Italy and Canada (see Pleyers G. ed. “Consommer autrement”, Paris: DDB, 2011).
