Poor choice? Smith, Hayek and the moral economy of food consumption

Abstract

This paper explores the moral economy of food in the United Kingdom via discourses on food bank usage and obesity. It argues that both of these markers of malnutrition were interpreted under the Conservative-led governments of David Cameron (2010–2016) as failings of personal responsibility and identified primarily with the working class, advancing the assumption that poor people make poor choices. Based on a critique of this account, our wider contribution is two-fold. First, we identify the Hayekian lineage of the discourse of personal responsibility, highlighting its utility in facilitating a form of neoliberal market consent through its insistence on self-reliance. Second, we stake out an alternative to this conceptualization through a discussion of Adam Smith’s notion of self-command, which we call interpersonal responsibility.

Keywords:

• Adam Smith
• Friedrich Hayek
• moral economy
• food banks
• obesity
• personal responsibility

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, the Economy and Society Editorial Board and Matthew Watson, Liz Dowler and Iain Pirie for their comments on the paper. Thanks are also extended to participants at the New Directions in International Political Economy conference (University of Warwick, May 2015), the Annual PAIS Research Conference (University of Warwick, June 2016), the Annual SPERI conference (University of Sheffield, July 2016) and the Birkbeck Food Group seminar (Birkbeck, November 2016) at which the paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Glaze

Simon Glaze is Director of 2 + 2 and Part-time Degrees in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. His research interests centre upon the politics of economic psychology, the history of the social sciences, and articulations of the self therein.

Ben Richardson

Ben Richardson is Associate Professor in International Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the political economy of food and agriculture. His latest book is Sugar (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press).