A couple years ago I read a novel called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. It picked apart the culture of food (for the most part focusing on meat) and explored the vastly under-scrutinized way in which companies are feeding it to us. And by that I don’t just mean their product, but their marketing ploys and schemes.
See I’m still an active carnivore so the meat on my table doesn’t bother me. But when I sit down with fork in hand, there is a moments hesitation where I wonder how it got there. But I remind myself of all the labels on the packaging. These chicken were free-range! And I can stop worrying about my health because my bread is multi-grain and pretty much everything else was organic!
With books like Foer’s and new op-ed pieces/studies/blogs/tweets churned out daily about green eating, consumers are starting to see value in healthy and sustainable food options. From this turn towards conscientious consumerism, comes value for the food companies, but only by a label. That’s all they need! ‘Organic’ has a wide variety of definitions so your food may still not be 100% organic. And multigrain only means that your bread has multiple grains so has basically no meaning.
So here’s the ethical dilemma: Should companies be accountable for their labelling or is it just good marketing? The way I see it is that companies selling meat or animal bi-products have very little brand loyalty. Can you remember the brand of meat product you last bought? Probably not. So ethical business practices are not even necessary, much less a priority. Companies will spend money on finding a label loophole before they’ll make an operational change.
Is ‘value’ only a matter of perception? Is it unethical if we’re none the wiser? Basically I’m asking if a tree falls…