Misinformation in the food chain: how it affects animals and consumers
When it comes to displays of animal farming the public is predominantly shown happy and healthy animals, what they are almost never shown is the reality for most farmed animals in the UK.
This appears to be a deliberate attempt to play on the importance the majority of the public place on animal welfare. Research shows that over 75% of UK consumers care about animal welfare in food production, and many are willing to pay a premium for higher-welfare products.
The problem, however, is that these depictions are not only false, but impact decisions the public make as consumers of these products.
We investigated the websites, advertisements and products of 47 producers and processors of dairy, eggs, and chicken, duck, turkey, pig, and lamb meat. Only three producers did not feature animal imagery on their websites or products. Of the 44 producers that used images of animals,we found that 84.09% used imagery, videos, or drawings of animals living outdoors. Whilst 61.36% showed images of animals indoors, all of the animals appeared healthy, 29.63% showed spacious conditions and 48.15% used blurry, cropped, or unclear imagery. The investigation also found that all major supermarkets feature images of healthy animals outdoors on their corporate websites.
The investigation also covered 30 random episodes of animal farming programmes across five UK channels: BBC 1, BBC 2, CBEEBIES, ITV, and Channel 4. Whilst all programmes showed animals both outdoor and indoor, all the indoor conditions were high welfare without the standard treatment experienced on intensive farms, such as prolonged confinement and mutilations.
The Animal Law Foundation has also identified that major British supermarkets are using “British made” claims to market meat and fish products that are largely made outside the UK, for example Aldi’s Crestwood Bacon and Cheese Wraps claim to be Made in Britain, but are made with EU pork.
With dairy, consumers are also largely unable to detect where their milk comes from, due to dairy pooling, where milk is processed using milk sourced from multiple farms, which means unless milk is labelled organic a consumer is unlikely able to know if the cow has ever grazed on grass or not. With eggs, the law in England, Scotland, and Wales is due to be amended due to avian flu to allow producers to continue using the free range label regardless of the duration of the mandatory housing measures imposed on hens. This means that a free range hen could be spending all of her life indoors.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 Act, due to come into force in April 2025, prohibits unfair commercial practices, which is where a practice that is likely to cause the average consumer to take a transactional decision that they would not have taken otherwise, as a result of a misleading action or omission, which can include false or misleading information. The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 are currently in force and are largely the same regarding this prohibition.
You can read more of our findings and the laws that protect the public and consumers in our report here.
