Tell it like it is: the case for honest labelling
Could the number be up for misleading labels on animal product packaging?
It’s all about labels. Earlier this month, the EU banned the use of 31 traditional meat terms such as bacon, beef, steak and chicken from use on plant-based products. part of stated efforts to support animal farmers and reduce consumer confusion.
Climate and animal rights groups are furious, claiming that the decision will create more confusion, not less, around the purpose of plantbased products - just as people are trying to eat less meat for ecological wellbeing, human health and animal welfare. “Consumers know what vegan steak means,” stated Pascal Bieri, founder of food tech innovators Planted, on Linkedin. [1] “These words tell you how something cooks, how it tastes, where it fits on a plate. They're useful. Stripping them away doesn't create clarity, it creates friction.”
“Restrictions on plant-based terminology risk doing the opposite of helping consumers,” agreed The Vegetarian Society’s Deirdra Barr, in the Guardian. “They create barriers to innovation and make it harder for people to find familiar alternatives to foods they already know how to cook. For someone beginning to incorporate more plant-based meals into their diet, familiarity matters. Language helps people navigate change, and banning familiar words only makes that transition harder.” [2]
But a parallel movement around labelling may be gaining traction - and this time, it’s targeting animal products themselves. Advocacy groups Compassion in World Farming, Animal Law Foundation and Humane World for Animals have teamed up to draw focus to the ways in which animal products are offered to consumers: ways that hide, very deliberately, the reality of how most animals are kept and killed today, moving people away from the kinder farming they say they want. They are not without support: the launch, Animals Farmed, at the Houses of Parliament, attracted 60 MPs from across parties.
Make your way along most meat and dairy aisles and you’ll see images of animals looking healthy and happy, running about outdoors, watched over by kindly farmers. Packaging assures us that the animals have led ‘healthier, happier lives’; that the meat is ‘welfare assured’; that the brand works with ‘trusted farmers.’
If only. “Our recent polling reveals a disturbing gap between what people THINK has (or hasn’t) happened to animals on farms and in abbatoirs, and the grim reality,” posted Claire Bass from Humane World. “The liberal use of phrases like ‘welfare assured’ by big names like Tesco on products from animals who have been gassed, caged and mutilated is clearly misleading consumers. The meat industry’s propaganda has created an Orwellian dystopia, where animals suffer under a veil of marketing doublespeak that comforts shoppers that all is well down that the farm. It is not, and we need Governments to force the meat industry to put truth on the label, just as they did the tobacco industry.” [3]
The contrast between images of animals joyfully inviting their own consumption and what actually happens to them is so violently incongruous that academics Matthew Melsa and Kate Stewart coined a term for it: “‘suicide food.” Its ubiquity, they say, “highlights the extent of cultural estrangement from real exploited animals, who are anything but suicidal.” [4]
The NGOs are calling for the introduction of a single system of mandatory ‘honest’ labelling. “Consumers deserve to know the truth,” actress and comedian Diane Morgan said, atAnimals Farmed. “People care. They just don’t stand a chance when every message they get, every label, advert, website is designed to make them feel fine about something that they might actually not be fine with at all.” Assurance schemes exist but they vary in focus. LEAF Marque focuses on environmental stewardship; RSPCA Assured concentrates on animal welfare. The Soil Association highlights organic certification. Red Tractor (“farmed with care”) is the largest but provides no more than the bare minimum of assurance, if that, selling itself as protecting British farmers. Few shoppers are getting what they think they’re paying for.
Campaigners have sought to alert the public to intensive animal agriculture for decades. New generations actively seek to challenge cognitive dissonance. In 2023, Animal Aid and British vegan food company VFC unveiled a high profile billboard campaign “A Good Life?”, which set idyllic British countryside scenes against farming realities. Animal Justice Project’s current poster campaign across the London Underground network shows a mother pig in a farrowing crate, a dominant system in pig production around the world. The caption: “if she were a dog, we’d call it abuse.” The pig industry is said to be “frustrated” by the images.
Researchers from TU Delft's Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering placed a photo of caged battery chickens on a pack of chicken breasts.
Without a doubt, the landscape for advocacy is challenging. Alongside fossil fuels, plastics and pharmaceuticals, animal agriculture is one of the most ecologically and socially damaging - and one of the most resource-intensive - industries on the planet. It is also one of the richest, making it keen to maintain business-as-usual-but-bigger-cheers. It is led by monstrous conglomerates and slavishly coddled by governments. In 2020, beef and lamb were subsidised 580 times more in EU subsidies than legumes; pork was subsidised nearly 240 times more. Dairy, meanwhile, received 554 times more than nuts and seeds: all via the Common Agricultural Policy, which absorbs around a third of the EU’s budget. [5] A fair chunk of that money appears to be going into, not into animal welfare, but into wars around narrative.
In its new report Dangerous Distractions: How agribusiness narratives continue to undermine climate action, Changing Markets Foundation revealed co-ordinated efforts between major livestock groups to downplay emissions from the industry, attack independent science and frame rising meat production as compatible with climate goals. Most damning is the report’s analysis of conversations from the World Meat Congress and COP30. “The Food and Agriculture Organisation is your friend”, Thanawat Tiensin, FAO Assistant Director-General and Director of the Animal Production and Health Division and Chief Veterinarian told meat producers. “The world needs more animal protein.”
At least seven of the nine nutrition experts who wrote the scientific foundation reviews for the US’s recently released Dietary Guidelines for Americans have ties to the meat, dairy, packaged food, and supplement sectors including National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the Texas Beef Council, the National Dairy Council, and the National Pork Board. No surprise then that the new guidelines nearly double the protein target currently eaten by Americans, already one of the highest meat-consuming countries in the world: to 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. [6] As if to prepare for this uptick in meat consumption, the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture is putting forward a Farm Bill that will undermine state bans on cruel farming practices, hurt farmers who have invested in better welfare and remove from animals the bare minimum that they already endure that makes hellish lives just a bit more bearable. [7]
Meanwhile, the industry works extremely hard to make sure that what happens in factory farms - the very things that could jolt consumers awake to the horror on their plates - stays in factory farms. In Australia, the copyright of undercover footage of bad practice, collected by Farm Transparency Project, was handed to the very slaughterhouse it had exposed. The move sets a new legal precedent likely to have wide-reaching ramifications for press freedom and political discourse over public interest matters. Now that’s power. [8]
Not hedgerows and happy cows
But, hard as the industry tries to steer conversations, the links between animal agriculture and some of the world’s most pressing global concerns are becoming too apparent to ignore. Animal agriculture is now clearly identified as the single largest driver of environmental breakdown, public health crises, global inequity and grinding animal cruelty. It contributes at least 30% of global direct GHG emissions to the climate emergency. This month, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change called for more stringent measures to strengthen climate adaptation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions - by slashing food waste, cutting meat-eating, scrapping subsidies for climate-damaging practices, and taxing farmers for planet-warming pollution. As the urgency of developing food resilience in the face of climate breakdown emerges, the Board framed change as safeguarding food security and protecting farmers’ livelihoods.
Meanwhile, thanks to the relentless work of groups such as AJP and its gut-wrenching investigations, people are starting to understand that animal farming is not the hedgerows and happy cows whose they’re bombarded with at the meat counter. Till now, most shoppers have possessed only a baseline understanding of the brutalities meted out of farm animals on a daily basis: the caged mothers, dehorning without pain control, the culling of male calves, the chucking of male chicks into macerators, the castration of piglets without anaesthetic, the repeated impregnation of young females to build stock sizes. When AJP surveyed consumers about the production of milk earlier this year, 83% were surprised to hear that a cow and her calf had to be separated within the first 24 hours for humans to take her milk. This is a practice that has gone on for hundreds of years. Have we been sleeping? [9]
“Without exception, the gap between the two was yawning.” Image: Bryant Research
When they find out, they are horrified. Last February, Bryant Research set the results of one survey measuring the acceptability of UK farming practices against the prevalence of those practices. Without exception, the gap between the two was yawning. Over three quarters of those polled disapproved of removing calves’ horn buds with hot irons; 90% of UK herds in the beef industry are disbudded in exactly that way, Almost 85% disapproved of killing newborn chicks with CO2 gassing or meat-grinders; all newborn male chicks in the UK are slaughtered in one of those ways. Over 96% disapproved of keeping mother pigs in farrowing crates. But 205,261 - 60% of all mother pigs - are kept in exactly that way every year. [10]
Even when judging the farming landscape in the UK, consumers got it wrong. When asked what percentage of animals raised for food lived in factory farms, survey respondents guessed 53%; the figure is, in fact, 93%. It’s not surprising that, in another study, 91% of the 1,000 shoppers surveyed wanted that information printed on their food. [11] Or that animal agriculture has thrown a hissy fit and banned the word ‘bacon’.
Follow the Swiss
The UK coalition will be looking to Switzerland for inspiration. Since last July, with a two year roll-in, a new law in Switzerland will require that, from restaurants to retailers, companies selling animal products disclose whether they have come from animals who were mutilated without anesthetic. By the standards we see today, this is a bold move but it remains beyond sobering to know that procedures such as castration, dehorning in cows, beak searing in hens, and the severing of legs from frogs ever occur without pain relief. The law is designed to support Swiss farmers who always use painkillers - but it still lifts the curtain on terrible things. Advocates are waiting to see what the labelling looks like in practice.
Given the urgency, what should we show on animal products? Campaigners frustrated by the slow pace of change have ideas. “Maybe we should have photographs of the conditions that the animals are kept in on the food when you’re buying it,” snapped conservationist Chris Packham. “That would change people’s shopping practices instantaneously.” Soil Association’s head of food policy Rob Percival added: “I’d like to see mandatory CCTV in industrial pig units … and a QR on products allowing a consumer to tune in and watch the shed and the processing plant in real time.” [12]
What if animal products were stamped with a photo of the animal they came from with a description of their life? Would this shift perspectives? The answer is an unsurprising yes. When the cafe at a British University placed images of living animals alongside corresponding meat-based dishes (e.g., a cow next to beef bolognese), sales of vegetarian meals increased by 22%. [13] Researchers Anne-Madeleine Kranzbühler and Rick Schifferstein from TU Delft's Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering found the same response when they stuck a photo of caged battery chickens - and the message 'eating meat makes animals suffer' - on a pack of chicken breasts. [14]
Why stop at plantbased foods, asks Barr, drily? “If lawmakers want absolute transparency in food naming, then meat products could just as easily be required to use their literal descriptions. After all, beef steak is cow muscle.” The options could go one: veal is baby cow; black pudding is pig’s blood and pork back fat. There are no dogs, hot or otherwise, in hot dogs; no shepherds in shepherd’s pie (although there are often parts of exhausted dairy cows). Burger was named after a German city. And someone needs to sue the milk thistle for misrepresentation. “Food names have never been strictly literal. If they were, a lot of them would need a serious rethink,” continues Barr.
Drawing the line
When the Government explored food labelling in 2024, they proposed a system of five tiers, with tier 1, the highest, tier 5, the lowest. Tier 5 would indicate products that are not verified as even meeting baseline UK welfare regulations. At Tier 1, chickens for example, would indicate more space, outdoor access, slower growing breeds, covered outdoor area and a minimum slaughter age of 81 days. Still a fraction of the five to ten years they could live, if undisturbed, but better than the industry standard of 35 days. [15] Government discussion on labelling has all but stalled; CIWF et al want to kickstart it again.
Will labelling work? Depends. Humans have an uncanny ability to normalise difficult information. The effectiveness of graphic health warnings on cigarette packs pale over time. But another case offers hope: in 2004, mandatory labelling for all eggs was introduced across Europe. Egg producers and retailers now have to clearly label whether hens have been raised in cages, barns, free range or organic systems. Once 'eggs from caged hens' were labelled too, cage-free egg production nearly tripled, from accounting for 32% of the market in 2003 to around 82% today.
So far, eggs are the only animal-related product that features such clear information. Philip Lymbery, CIWF’s chief executive, president of EuroGroup for Animals, and a UN Food Systems Advisory Board member wants to see the same on animal products: “Mandatory method-of-production labelling would allow shoppers to see instantly whether their meat and dairy came from intensive indoor systems, higher-welfare indoor set-ups or farms providing outdoor access.” [16]
Advocates for animals, for nature, for food resilience and for climate adaptation hope for three results from honest labelling. Firstly, that the public will be informed enough to choose better welfare animal products. Secondly, that producers still invested in archaic practices may be encouraged to shift up a gear (Will Swiss pig meat producers who honestly label their sausages about castrating piglets without anaesthetic face declining sales and change their practices?)
Animal Justice Project’s current poster campaign. The pig industry is said to be “frustrated” by the images.
Finally, advocates hope that consumers may become informed enough for some, at least, to question the necessity of animal products themselves. Meanwhile, Bryant Research has tips for advocates. As well as demanding mandatory (not voluntary or self-governed; hello, Sustainable Chicken Forum) labels that help consumers make informed choices, the insight lab advises calling for higher welfare alternatives to painful practices; supporting farmers trying to do the right things and focusing activism on ending caging, particularly farrowing crates, as easy wins. But the strongest recommendation of all? Encouraging moves - and sharpish - towards plantbased food systems.
Because, really, the most effective way to get around the question of whether an animal has been humanely treated before slaughter or not is to stop eating them. “Mutilating animals like debeaking chicks and docking tails of piglets are standard industry practices, not fringe abuses,” pointed out Canadian vet Dr Judith Samson-French, angrily. “Most people aren’t trying to cause harm. But maybe that’s the hardest part — how easy it is to look away when suffering is built into the system, and distance is by design (try filming a kill floor). Is there a line beyond which you will not go? What are you choosing? And what are you turning away from? Really — where is your line?” [17]
Bieri, Pascal. "#Hotdog Contains No Dog." LinkedIn, 23 March 2026, www.linkedin.com/posts/pascalsbieri_hotdog-burger-peanutbutter-activity-7435630672574173185-23gU.
Plant-Based Foods Honest? Meat, Cow Muscle and EU Rules Ban Veggie…” The Guardian, 11 Mar. 2026
Bass, Claire. “Welfare Washing.” LinkedIn, March 2026,https://www.linkedin.com/posts/claire-bass-31656612_welfare-washing-truth-on-meat-labels-matters-activity-7415710263582400512-a5kP?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAANaw08BleR422NV93BuYJnkmGqXhs8fYQw
Cole, Matthew, and Kate Stewart. “The Distance between Us.” British Psychological Society, www.bps.org.uk
Beef, Lamb and Legumes: EU Subsidies Study.” The Guardian, 19 Feb. 2026, www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/19/beef-lamb-legumes-eu-subsidies-study.
“US Dietary Guidelines.” The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2026, www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/03/us-dietary-guidelines
ASPCA, “Farm Bill Moves Forward with Mixed Results for Animals, 13 March, 2026, https://www.aspca.org/news/farm-bill-moves-forward-mixed-results-animals
Farm Transparency Project, Major loss for press freedom: Federal Court grants injunction to block slaughterhouse cruelty footage, 13 Aug 2025, https://www.farmtransparency.org/media/87-major-loss-press-freedom-federal-court-grants-injunction-block-slaughterhouse-cruelty-footage
Animal Justice Project, “The Public Know Arlarming Little About Dairy”, 7 March 2025, https://www.animaljusticeproject.com/post/the-public-know-arlarmingly-little-about-dairy
Bryant Research, “Prevalence of ‘Unacceptable’ UK Farming Practices,” February 2025, https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/unacceptable-farming-practices/
Bryant Research. “UK Consumers Seek Transparent Animal Product Labels,” March 2024, https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/transparent-animal-labels/
Cutcher, Nicola. “No More Porkies.” New Humanist, 30 Jan 2024, https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/6230
Murray, S. “Seeing animals, choosing plants: Evidence from a cafeteria field study on food choice,” Journal of Environmental Psychology, May 2026, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494426000897
TU Delft, “Meat shaming may reduce meat purchases,” 2 March 2023, https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2023/io/march/meat-shaming-may-reduce-meat-purchases
DEFRA, Consultation outcome: Summary of responses and government response, 12 June 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/fairer-food-labelling/outcome/summary-of-responses-and-government-response#summary-of-consultation-responses-method-of-production-labelling
Lymbery, Phillip. “Food labelling can be confusing for ethical consumers. Here's what to do,” The Scotsman, 19 March 2026. https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/food-labelling-can-be-confusing-for-ethical-consumers-heres-what-to-do-6028436
Samson-French, Judith. “Think Before you Eat’, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-judith-samson-french-06641a31a_thinkbeforeyoueat-questionthesystem-foodchoicesmatter-activity-7359232600827203586-_dPB?
