ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the private and social lives of ethical consumers. It describes the theoretical account of ethical consumer identity, into relationship with the concrete, the subjective experiences, feelings, and thoughts of self-perceived ethical food consumers, in order to empirically illustrate the inner psychological process via which the ethical consumer identity comes into being. The chapter demonstrates the idea of internal conversation to explain why and how emotionality interacts with reason in the process of consumer moral conversion and, drawing on empirical findings and insights, demonstrates the indispensable role of reflexivity in enabling agents to evaluate the social world and their subjective relationship to it. It shows that by designating the morality of consumption as their ultimate concern and by committing themselves to more ethical consumption behaviour, individuals decide not only "how to act, but who to be", that is they define themselves, privately, but also inevitably socially, as ethical consumers.
