GARRICK BATTEN
Packaging sends messages about the product it wraps with images, words, colours and links to other messages. Those may be specific or presumed. Are we becoming so used to extravagant and misleading claims that they are now accepted, and worse still exaggerated in various media or by personal agendas?
What does “clean” actually mean to describe a product or the result of using it? Other words are misleading such as the various forms of fake meat and milk proclaimed as needing 45% less energy or 76% less water or generating less emissions. Less than what? Or having more nutrients than what?
Apparently Einstein's lessons of relativity no longer apply. Or maybe fake meat is being compared with real actual meat but even that needs to be quantified. Is it pork or chicken from so-called industrial production, beef from feedlots, or lamb from free-ranging Merinos that all have different production bases and effects?
We have various media shouting similar proportionate comparisons to criticise New Zealand's methane reduction target as being only 10% compared with UK 30%, EU 30% and Ireland 25%. But the reduction must be related to the total and also the proportion of total emissions. And then further considered from our point of view compared with subsidised food production systems in those other countries.
Other packaging words carry emotive messages based on questionable facts. Farmers have their own names for livestock young such as lambs, calves, fawns, foals, kids and chickens. Calling them babies not only demeans human youngsters but conjures an image unlike real farm animals.
And calling children as kids mislabels both. It has probably gone too far from finger lickin’ to remind people that eggs are produced by hens not chickens. But not too far for farmers to remind consumers they are eating meat produced by animals, not humans. And meat that really is gluten free, GE free, nuclear free, and more free range than from your average human using plant foods.
People who sell real meat know customers buy on price, taste, tenderness, succulence, flavour, consistency for great eating.
When we look at the packaging of fake meat itself, an example is Boer Free Bacon with a misleading image of a large pig on front, repeated on the back. But it isn't made from a pig at all.
It is made from peas in a secret industrial system and claimed to be lean and clean from a process with different clean standards. Why not an image of a pea plant? And made from imported products so the carbon emissions to produce and ship them here and soil carbon loss and emissions to grow the peas are ignored.
Why should we be importing food products to make fake meat when our farmers already efficiently produce real meat products that help feed the world?
The breakfast team verdict? - “That ain’t bacon.” They were peaed off.
