ABSTRACT
One of the greatest stimuli to the consumption of the Caribbean has been the voracious pursuit of food, drink, and stimulants. This chapter explores the relation between consumer, producer, and the fruits of labour that flow between them within a transatlantic economy in which a Northern taste for tropical produce was created and incited. My aim is to show how interventions by ‘consuming publics’ in the provisioning networks of particular edible products such as sugar, coffee, or tropical fruit rest on a moral deployment of the body of the ethical consumer, from anti-slavery ethics to fair trade ethics today.1 These ethical interventions in global trade are achieved by the framing of moral economies of the sensuous body in which the ethical consumer is produced via a direct identification with the suffering body of the labouring producer, whose blood, sweat, and tears are imagined as literally infusing the commodity. Ethical consumer movements ranging from the sugar boycotts of the anti-slavery movement in the eighteenth century to current debates over global trade liberalisation have attempted to bring these two bodies into closer proximity, even solidarity, by reflecting on how they directly touch each other through the commodity. In detailing some specific cases of the alignment of Northern consumers with Caribbean producers, I explore both the transformational potential and limitations of such strategies, and the ways in which our bodies remain ethically implicated in the contest between free trade and fair trade.
