Careful choice and choiceful care: digital marketplace platforms, food safety and the redistribution of care

Eating is becoming platformised as consumers increasingly choose food using digital marketplaces. Platformisation promises expanded consumer choice, but online food safety scandals have raised questions about whether this comes at the expense of carelessness towards consumer health. This paper draws upon interviews with representatives of platform firms to explore how they reconcile the pursuit of consumer choice with care for food safety and for consumers. It argues that digital marketplace platforms’ food safety initiatives mobilise two contrasting logics of conduct, which valorise different ideals of ‘good’ choice and pursue them through different care practices. Platforms operating ‘curated’ marketplaces follow a logic of ‘careful choice’ which protects consumers from making ‘bad’ choices by presenting only foodstuffs and vendors which have been qualified as ‘good.’ Meanwhile, ‘uncurated’ platforms follow a logic of ‘choiceful care’ which admits all possible vendors to their marketplaces so that consumers may compare the widest possible range of goods. Each logic of conduct cares for food safety through different practices and directs this care towards different objects, meaning that the pursuit of different ideals of consumer choice produces contrasting distributions of care. As a result, reconfiguring consumer choice becomes an important site of ethico-political intervention under platform capitalism.