Consumer exit, voice, and loyalty: Indicative, legitimation, and regulatory role in agricultural and food ethics

Disputes over agriculture and food production have occurred against a background of disputed authority with regard to governments, experts, and single issue pressure groups. Consumers have intervened in quite significant ways with many altering their buying patterns. The conventional assessment of consumer "preferences" through aggregated purchases fails to reflect the ethical nature of significant numbers of purchase decisions. Nevertheless, consumers seem to offer a wider basis on which to consider ethical issues. The author proposes that a valuable inclusion of consumer opinion in the debates would require a move away from neo-classical economics and the selective inclusion of consumer opinion to unravel the complexity of (aggregated) consumer behavior. It is argued that Hirschman's framework of "exit, voice, and loyalty" is a more appropriate tool for the understanding of ethics in food consumption.