Mica broccoli

The Mica-Scope: The Revolutionary Broccoli

This month, Mica finds herself having an imaginary debate with the ghost of Tom Paine while buying an organic broccoli. She’s forced to confront what her favourite slogan “vote with your wallet” really means, and why some of the most important shopping decisions are made long before we reach the checkout. 

It is not every town where a broccoli becomes a political statement.

But then Lewes has always had grand ideas about democracy.

July 2026 marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, and I’ve found myself conjuring Lewes’ most famous revolutionary. Tom Paine spent six years living at Bull House on Lewes High Street before sailing to America and helping light the fuse of a democratic revolution.

Which is not, admittedly, where you might expect a broccoli to enter the story.

I’m standing in The Seasons Wholefoods in Lewes, looking at an organic broccoli and feeling quietly pleased with myself. Disclaimer: I work with The Seasons and shop here most weeks, which makes me about as impartial as a Labrador reviewing dog biscuits. There are plenty of other places to find excellent local food in Lewes. But today, I’m here.

The broccoli grew nearby. It hasn’t travelled halfway around the world. It isn’t wrapped in plastic. It was grown in healthy soil by someone who chose a harder path than industrial agriculture.

My wallet, I think, is staging a tiny revolution.

Then the ghost of Tom Paine clears his throat.

Tom Paine ruins my favourite slogan

For years I’ve told people to “vote with your wallet”. Spend money with businesses whose values you share. Support local shops. Buy from people trying to do things differently. Clean, democratic-sounding, morally loaded in exactly the right direction. A phrase I’ve used so often it has started to sound self-evidently true.

Paine disagrees.

Democracy is one person, one vote, he reminds me. “Vote with your wallet” is one pound, one vote. And some people have more pounds than others.

The writer Jason Hickel (who I think gives modern-day Paine vibes) has done the arithmetic, which I can’t unsee. A single individual with a billion dollars, he calculates, has more voting power in the marketplace than 66,000 workers on minimum wage.

Point to Paine. But he isn’t done. As he clambers onto his soap box, he quotes Hickel again, “Capital determines production,” Hickel writes, “and we only get to ‘vote’ among the things that capital is willing to produce.” Capital decides what exists. We choose from what it has decided to offer.

Hickel’s Substack feels like a political pamphlet circa 250 years ago, I can see why Paine’s ghost likes him He argues that wealth doesn’t just buy marketplace votes. It buys influence. It shapes investment, ownership, development and political power. The people with the deepest pockets don’t just get more votes. They help decide what’s on the ballot paper.

At this point, I have to admit Tom Paine is winning the argument.

The broccoli fights back

But then I look at my broccoli.

Because it shouldn’t exist. Not according to that logic.

This broccoli exists because the farmers who grew it paid a small fortune to certify that broccoli and the soil it grew in. Then The Seasons made a choice too. To sell organic produce, they also have to pay for certification, meet the standards, do the paperwork and absorb the costs. They have chosen to create a place where people like me can buy food grown in a way that cares for the soil and doesn’t need to be wrapped in plastic.

Only then do I get a vote.

The broccoli and I arrive embarrassingly late to the revolution.

Here I call on Mary Portas. Less lofty than Hickel, true, but what I love about Portas is that she asks us to think differently about the purpose of a high street. Not as a place designed to extract as much money as possible, but as a place that creates connection, belonging and community.

You don’t have to work hard to persuade a Lewesian that place matters. We love local. And we’re not wrong. Research by the New Economics Foundation found that £10 spent with a local food business generates around £25 for the local area. The same £10 at a supermarket generates just £14. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies puts it another way: 70p of every £1 spent with an independent stays local.

Point to me and my locally-grown broccoli.

Quiet revolutions

OK, a broccoli from The Seasons isn’t going to change the world. But it might remind us that the biggest decisions are often made long before we reach the checkout.

And in Lewes, there are quite a few quiet revolutionaries making exactly these choices. At Flint Owl Bakery, surplus bread goes to the Community Fridge at the end of each day. Ovesco builds community energy without waiting for distant institutions to decide it’s worth doing. Barcombe Nurseries has been growing organic fruit and vegetables just a few miles away for decades.

None of these are grand revolutions. But they are all answers to the question Tom Paine spent much of his life asking: who gets a say in shaping the world around us?

Two hundred and fifty years later, we’re still working on that one.

Voting with your wallet is not democracy. Not really. But perhaps it was never the point.

If Paine were walking up this High Street today, I suspect he’d still stop at the market, buy a loaf from Flint Owl and pick up an organic broccoli on the way home.

Just like me.

Where I vote with my wallet:

A few of my favourites, if you want to cast a ballot:

The list goes on. Lewes is full of independent businesses doing things differently. These are simply a few of the places where I spend my own pounds.

Where do you spend yours?

Sources and further reading

Mica Janiv is a sustainability consultant based in Lewes. She works with businesses navigating the transition to a greener future. Find more of her writing at micajaniv.com