ABSTRACT
Economics is about scarcity, and consumer theory addresses how scarcity affects the individual consumer’s choices. The theory focuses on the purchase decision, the outcome of the consumer trying to attain the most preferred selection of goods, given a set of constraints. For the most part no distinction is drawn between purchase and consumption. Indeed the distinction is only important for the economist when dealing with a durable, storable good (such as a refrigerator), in which case we distinguish the purchase of the good from the consumption of its services. We are also not concerned with desire or need per se, but rather with effective demand in the market place, i.e. the quantities of goods and services that the individual consumer is willing and able to purchase per unit of time under given market conditions. As will become clear, the economist’s approach to consumer choice, of food or other products, is defined within very narrow bounds. This lends the theory predictive ability but at the expense of some generality and perhaps of meaningful interaction with the other social sciences.
