In utilitarian logic, aggregate effects of consumption steer the way towards the “common good”: if individual consumers are able to maximize their desires, the end result will benefit everyone, and the aggregate of individuals’ actions will reflect what is valued and what is not. Simply put: if there is a market for a product, it must be valuable.

This is problematic in at least three ways: it ignores power asymmetries and social inequality, it does not account for information failures, and it makes naïve assumptions about economic behavior.

First, if consumers, and consumers only, determine the “value” of a product, those with more purchasing power will be more able to influence what is being produced and for whom. This view encourages the development of food value chains that are largely export-driven, as they can fetch a higher price and, in this understanding, value. It also implies that the choices of people who cannot consume, i.e., non-market stakeholders such as subsistence-oriented farmers or future generations, are not considered. Neither are the needs of non-humans such as animals or ecosystems.

This conception of “value” is thus fairly undemocratic and apolitical: value is not a matter of political debate (what goals do we want to achieve for whom?) but based on the ability to pay. This relegates social-political issues that should be publicly debated by citizens, i.e., questions related to sustainability and food, to the purview of market actors, i.e. consumers – particularly those with the greatest purchasing power. Some critics have called this the “commodification” of politics and sustainability.

Second, and based on insights from behavioral economics, psychologists and social anthropologists, consumers are in most cases not able to obtain and process all the information needed to judge if a product is actually “sustainable” (‘bounded rationality’). For example, many consumers are not aware of the long-term health impact of their consumption choices, or that child labor or logging of primary forest was required to make their candy bar. Consumers are also easily influenced by marketing strategies and misleading labels.

Third, even if consumers were rational and had knowledge that was not influenced by merchandising, psychologists have found large gaps between consumer awareness, behavior, and impact. For example, a study on ecological footprints of different consumers found that while ecological footprint increased with income, pro-environmental behavior and awareness for it did, too – an apparent paradox (Csutora 2012). Other examples include the rebound effect, where efficiency or decreased costs often increase consumption, or the licensing effect, where supposedly “virtuous acts” such as buying green lead to subsequent antisocial and unethical behavior.

A consumer driven understanding of “added value” therefore has unrealistic expectations about consumers’ ability to make the “right” choices, i.e., to contribute to the common good through their consumption (“making the world a better, more sustainable place”). In other words, a consumer-driven understanding of value depoliticizes sustainability and food – and if consumption is indeed understood as a social “vote”, it excludes both large segments of humans (including future generations) and virtually all non-people.