Abstract

Should you attend to the relevant published literature on perceptions belonging to consumers of ecological products, it can be easily noticed that, as a rule, the interpretation insists heavily on the analysis of an error: the consumer’s confusion about the ecological product. The official concept of an ecological product does not overlap with the idea of an ecological product at the mental level of the consumer. Most studies, if not all of them, tax this confusion and analyze it as a deviant phenomenon. The starting point for this study was based on this very confusion: If there is so much confusion, it most likely means we are dealing with a symbolic projection at a social level. We found intriguing the idea of trying to understand what exactly are the mechanisms behind the ideological forming of this symbolic projection and their impact upon the decision of purchasing ecological agroalimentary products. The study was based on a nationwide questionnaire conducted in Romania in 2016. The collected data were employed in an anthropological analysis of the phenomenological approach to further understand the concept of ecological agroalimentary products as it appears in the mentality of the contemporary Romanian consumer.