Use Truth Labels so carnivores know where their meat comes f

[Alan H]

In today's Herald:

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The Herald : Features: MAIN FEATURES
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/fea ... 96.0.0.php
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Use Truth Labels so carnivores know where their meat comes from
Mark Smith November 12 2007
Comment | Read Comments (3)

We present you with a radical idea. Then you tell us whether it's a winner

By the end of next year popping into the newsagent to buy a packet of cigarettes will be a distinctly different experience. From October 2008, every pack will feature a picture, in gruesome, bloody Technicolor, showing exactly what cigarettes can do to the human body.

Nobody knows whether this horror-movie tactic will reduce smoking in Britain or whether the denial neurone that exists in every smoker's brain will simply take in the new information and move on (probably). Whatever happens, it is a sensible effort to tackle Scotland's high rates of stroke, heart disease and cancer.

There is another place, though, where such honest and shocking labelling could be effectively used: the supermarket aisle. Most shoppers are in denial about an important issue: where their food comes from. They may buy pieces of meat shrink-wrapped in plastic, yet all but the most well-informed are largely unaware of what happens to the animals they are about to fry or bake or slice. A change to the way food is labelled to reveal the truth might just change that.
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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is someone who might subscribe to such an idea; he is an evangelical among carnivores but he also believes in telling the truth. In his tome The River Cottage Meat Book he explains every step of the slaughter process in all its gruesome reality; Gordon Ramsay did something similar on one of his television programmes.

Fearnley-Whittingstall, in particular, has been highly critical of the conditions in which animals are bred for food. "The vast majority of our food animals are now raised under methods that are systematically abusive," he has said. "For them, discomfort is the norm, pain is routine, growth is abnormal and diet is unnatural. Disease is widespread and stress is almost constant."

Yet shoppers do not see any of this; in fact, they are deliberately detached from it by supermarkets that fill the shelves with ready meals, mostly packed with cheap chicken. Buy such a meal and, unless it specifically says organic on the packet, the chances are the poultry will have been intensively farmed. Some 96% of the chickens in the UK are raised in factory farms - in other words, windowless barns full of thousands of other chickens. It will be so crowded that the birds will be unable even to spread their wings.

Hattie Ellis, in her rather brilliant and rather frightening book, Planet Chicken, described one such farm she visited: "The whole shed was full of whiteness and dust and a motion that was a slight half-shuffle, muted and unreal. They were a carpet of semi-animated matter. It couldn't be further from a storybook farmyard image. It was closer to an image from a spooky fairytale; a supernatural sight from another place, from Planet Chicken."

Shoppers should know this. In fact, they should be shown it with what might be called a Truth Label, not only on every bit of chicken, but every bit of meat sold in the UK. Like the diseased lung on a packet of fags, food shoppers, too, should be shown the reality of their choices. Why not slap pictures on every leg of lamb or pack of sausages showing the truth of the conditions in which the animals have been kept?

In a way, how individual shoppers react to such a picture doesn't matter - what's more important is that they see the reality and then make a judgment. If you see all the facts and decide to buy the meat anyway, fine. If, instead, you take the moral decision to buy some other type of meat - or, better still, no meat at all - great. But we can only make the right ethical decisions when we have the facts and, at the moment, those facts are hidden from us. Indeed, we are actively misled by words such as "natural" and "fresh" - can someone please tell me what these words are supposed to mean?

What these diversionary tactics used by producers and sellers mean is that shoppers are being allowed to avert their eyes from what is really going on; a Truth Label would force them to look reality in the face. An independent agency would have to be in charge of the pictures to ensure they reflected the truth - after all, we all know how misleading packaging can be. Perhaps it will only be after a fundamental change to the way food is sold that shoppers will begin to question the practices they have been contributing to for generations. Just like those smokers who might think twice about tobacco after October 2008, meat-eaters might finally become better, more moral citizens.

Gandhi said the greatness of a nation and its morality could be judged by the way it treats its animals. With a Truth Label, we could all see how right he was.

# What do you think of Mark's proposal? Comment below or e-mail [email protected] (with the subject line Think Tank). We'll bring you the best responses later this week.

[Captured: 12 November 2007 12:42:15]

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[Alan C.]

Good idea, they could also put labels on all the fruit and veg stating which herbicides and pesticides they have been treated with.

The above comment isn't meant to be flippant, some folk would be horrified if they knew half the stuff they are ingesting.

I have said more than once before, we (myself and Mary) know the provenance of ALL the meat we eat, even down to the croft it came from, we see the animals all around us every day, they are not "factory farmed" and have as good a life as is possible for a farm animal.
Now I know this isn't possible for everybody, and I regard us as fortunate in that respect, but surely in the rest of the UK cows and sheep are out in fields grazing and not crammed into sheds?

If the issue is with the method of slaughter, I am confident it's done in the most humane way possible in our abattoirs, and what we SHOULD be lobbying for is a ban on Halal and Kosher slaughter (which I've also said before)

There is no more chance that everybody is going to stop eating meat, than their is of eradicating religion, so let's just make sure the animals are well treated, and despatched quickly and painlessly.

I know there is factory farming with Chickens and Turkeys and I think it's scandalous and should be outlawed, ditto the battery hens kept for the eggs.

Edited to add,
While we're at it! How about lobbying against this insane and cruel practice.

Jewish chicken-killing ritual "Kapparot" is "illegal, inhumane and unnecessary. It is animal cruelty."

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 28, 2006 -- Every year for six days before Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement on October 2) some Jews perform the ritual "Kapparot." Kapparot is a custom in which the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to a fowl. The fowl is held above the person's head and swung in a circle three times while certain words are spoken. The fowl is then slaughtered so that the person may have a good, peaceful life. Sometimes the chickens are given to the poor as food but unfortunately the chickens are not always cared for or killed humanely.

Full article here.