Paper short abstract:

Telling others about one's own food practices as 'correct' and arguing why they are considered better than others plays an important role in ethical consumption. I explore the functions of doing so and which narratives and figures of knowledge are powerful in such speech acts.

Paper long abstract:

There is a joke one of my interview partners told me: «How do you know someone is a vegan? - Don't worry, they'll tell you.» This exaggerated representation symbolizes one of my findings in the field of ethical consumption. There is importance placed in conveying to others what one considers the right way of consuming. It's not enough to show it in action (shopping, eating, drinking etc.); it needs the act of speaking to generate attention and to connect the practice of knowing to doing. Talking about food ethics in everyday life is not only an interface between what one knows and what one does; it also reveals narrative patterns whether it is the story of chick culling or Nestlé stealing water, talking of the effective power of ethical food practices in the plural or arguing with the ecological footprint - all these motifs belong to a palette of standardized narratives that were told and retold during my fieldwork.

The presentation raises the general question how food ethics are communicated. It emphasizes (based on narrative interviews) the performative language use in everyday food ethics and asks how such dominant narratives and figures of knowledge work.