Eating Cheetos in the Anthropocene: Governing the Good Life at a "Whole of Consumption" Scale

Cheetos are undeniably yummy—so much so that I walk quickly past their section in the grocery snacks aisle, eyes locked on the cart. It’s not a pretty picture once I succumb and rip open a bag, the Puffs being my variety of choice.

Why do I deny myself Cheetos? Calories. Fat. Salt. Sugar. Let’s face it, Cheetos are not a healthy snack! But they are soooo tasty. A lot of Americans agree with me. Cheetos are the second most popular salty snack in the nation, behinds Lays and ahead of Pringles. Cheetos may not be good for you, but they are for millions of Americans part of the good life. An indulgence. A taste sensation.

You may ask, how is this discussion going to get from Cheetos to the Antropocene? The connection is what goes into defining “the good life.” We can mean “good” in a material way—as in living large, having fun, nice cars, feeling good—or in an ethical way—as in being and doing good. Having established that Cheetos are a bullseye on feeling good, let’s think about the ethics of Cheetos. The next time you try a Puff or Flamin’ Hot, take a good hard look at it before you pop it into your mouth. Where did that tasty morsel come from? How did it make its way to you? In short, what is the supply chain of a Cheeto? What is its impact on the world?

In the case of Cheetos, this question came up in a big way in 2014 when environmental and social justice organizations challenged PepsiCo’s use of palm oil from unsustainable sources and called for consumer bans, leading Cheetos to commit to sourcing palm oil from managed plantations. Of course, there’s nothing new in suggesting that we should interrogate product supply chains for their environmental and social impacts. Cheetos are not alone in that respect.

As consumers, though, we are at the end of hundreds if not thousands of supply chains daily. My grocery cart may not have bags of Cheetos in it, but every other item in the cart also has a supply chain about which I know very little. It’s easy as a consumer to think of your personal supply chain as starting at the grocery store (or, increasingly, Amazon), then you walk the cart to your vehicle, then you drive home, then you unpack the bags. But isn’t our true supply chain the supply chains of all the items in the cart? Your Cheetos supply chain begins with palm oil trees, not the grocery store.

Cheetos and palm oil are not the only instance of people discovering a bad link in a supply chain and going after it. We can blame corporate supply chains for bad practices, and we can shame consumers for choosing products from those supply chains. But the concept of the Anthropocene—a new geologic period defined by the aggregate of human impact on the planet—brings into focus that consumption is the root of the problem. Consumption is why supply chains exist.

Thinking this way can be overwhelming. What am I supposed to do? How much and what should I consume? Questions like these bring us back to the good life. If all consumption leads to the Anthropocene, how does one live a good material life that is a good ethical life? Less impact is better, but zero impact isn’t possible. We’re stretching the planetary boundaries and the planet doesn’t distinguish between good Cheetos and bad Cheetos. I’ll leave the ethical dimensions of that hard question to ethicists. My more practical interest is in putting consumers and consumption into the center of the conversation about the law and policy of the Anthropocene.

We need to take the relationship between consumption and the Anthropocene seriously. We tend not to, though. We govern consumption indirectly by regulating industries and products, or through taxes and other price controls. A concern with putting the spotlight on consumers may be that doing so obscures the responsibility of corporate actors. It also requires us to look at ourselves in the mirror. With the Anthropocene staring back at us, however, it is time to take a “whole of consumption” approach that demands consumer agency across the board.

Yet it is not at all clear how to get a governance handle on consumption at that scale, particularly in affluent nations with high expectations of what a good material life involves. Even during the palm oil controversy, most Americans did not give up their Cheetos. Maybe PepsiCo has improved its sourcing, but even if so, going after and improving supply chain defects doesn’t put consumption at the center of responsibility. Even if all past consumption and the supply chains making it possible had been ”good,” however we define that, we’d still find ourselves in the Anthropocene.

Boosting the law and policy focus on consumers raises many hard issues with no easy solutions. With few exceptions—Jim Salzman (here) and Mike Vandenbergh (here, here, ) being early and notable examples—legal scholars have not ventured far into the consumer side of the Anthropocene problem. Even when sustainable consumption has been the target, the focus usually has been on supply chains and product regulation, such as “take back,” “right to repair,” and other “circular economy” initiatives. These may be all well and good, but they continue to deflect attention away from the contribution of consumption to the Anthropocene. Picking up where authors like Salzman and Vandenbergh started, this is a call for legal scholars to weigh in by exploring how institutions and instruments can be designed to more robustly govern the whole of consumption, ideally without taking all the fun (like Cheetos) out of the good life in the Anthropocene.

-- J.B. Ruhl