Welfare Washing: Disseminating Disinformation in Meat Marketing

Bjørkdahl, Kristian; Syse, Karen Lykke

doi:10.1163/15685306-bja10032

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Furthermore, much of the advertising focuses on (government financed) animal welfare and 'consumer conscience'. The combination may be well suited to increase meat consumption [42,43] and therefore increase the gap in Switzerland between official dietary recommendations and actual food intake [44]. According to estimates, closing that gap could reduce the environmental footprint of the Swiss population by 36%, food expenditure by 33%, and adverse health outcomes by 2.7% compared with the current diet [45].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking Subsidies for Agriculture and Food to Dietary Styles: Estimates for Switzerland

Schläpfer

Lobsiger²

2023

Sustainability

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Agriculture contributes substantially to global greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. Current agricultural policies tolerate these impacts and sometimes even aggravate them through subsidies for unsustainable production systems and products. Against this background, we explore the resulting transfers to agriculture and food associated with different dietary styles. Using data from Switzerland, we consider both direct transfers through government subsidies and indirect transfers through toleration of environmental impacts and costs. Gross transfers were quantified based on existing studies that (i) define eight dietary styles in terms of the quantity of the different product groups, (ii) allocate subsidies for agriculture to product groups, (iii) allocate environmental impacts to product groups using life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, and (iv) estimate external costs of agriculture using politically endorsed expenditures for damage avoidance. To quantify net transfers associated with the dietary styles, we subtracted individual tax contributions from the subsidies received and average external costs individually suffered from external costs caused. We found that the gross transfers from government to agriculture range from about CHF 500 to about CHF 2000 annually per taxpayer/consumer depending on dietary styles. Net transfers per taxpayer/consumer range from about CHF −1000 to about CHF 1000 depending on dietary style and income. The estimates highlight that current policies strongly privilege and thereby also endorse environmentally problematic dietary styles over more environmentally friendly ones, contradicting official strategies and targets in the domains of environment and public health.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking Subsidies for Agriculture and Food to Dietary Styles: Estimates for Switzerland

Schläpfer

Lobsiger²

2023

Sustainability

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“…For this reason, it is possible for stakeholders and consumers to perceive an organization’s degree of reporting as lacking transparency if either vague or ambiguous language is used or fully or partially information remains undisclosed. Consequently, this may give the impression that sensitive corporate information may be being withheld from the discourse provided to or with external stakeholders, providing concerns over greenwashing or ‘welfare washing’ [ 109 ].…”

Section: Dialogue As a Methods Of Resolving Contested Positions On An...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Construction of Narratives and Arguments in Animal Welfare Discourse and Debate

Muhammad

Stokes

Morgans³

et al. 2022

Animals

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Stakeholders can hold conflicting values and viewpoints, on what animal welfare is and how a good life is achieved and can signal different problems, or problematize specific aspects of farm animal welfare, and propose different actions or interventions within food supply chains. The aim of the study is to explore the contribution of narrative and argumentative discourse to the social construction and framing of animal welfare and its implications. The methodological approach in this research is composed of two phases with phase 1 being the foundational structured literature search in both academic and grey literature. Phase 2 was the analysis of the secondary data from the literature review to develop a synthesized iterative paper and in doing so develop a typology of five narratives: the ‘farming as a business’ narrative, the ‘religion-based’ narrative, the ‘research, legislative and political based narrative’, the ‘higher welfare’ narrative, and the “animal rights/power-based” narrative. Our findings demonstrate the contestation within the stakeholder discourse of the articulation of why farm animals should have a good life. Performance-related perspectives are rooted in the value-laden language and narratives that shape the arguments regarding notions of good and bad welfare; the emergent positioning of positive welfare for farm animals as well as how to achieve a good life in practice. The novel contribution of this review is the application of an explanatory word-language-discourse-person-situation-environment framework in this specific context to inform future research on animal welfare discourse analysis.

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“…AAT is also working with the Raman-spectroscopic method, currently in research, a technique that can be considered semi-invasive. 6 According to the AAT (2021), these 'technical solutions (…) build on the results of basic research and use the practical know-how of hatchery specialists from its affiliate companies', a dynamic that again reveals the public-private economy of repair at work. Indeed, a 2016 article in the magazine Physics World described the advances by researchers at the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Leipzig in Germany to use laser spectroscopy methods to determine egg sex, a technique that the magazine forecasted, 'which will soon be applied commercially' (Physics World, 2016).…”

Section: Present and Proposed Ways Of Tackling The 'Brother Layer Pro...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As such, they preclude the much more expansive ethical dilemmas stemming from how humans predominantly engage today with other species and the rest of nature (Gjerris, 2015). Echoing and merging terms such as 'green washing' and 'welfare washing' (Bjørkdahl and Syse, 2021), we suspect that the term 'ethical sustainability' could join what Leary (2019) calls 'the new language of capitalism', a lexicon of ambiguous words co-opted into the service of profit-making.…”

Section: 'Ethical Sustainability': Another Fix In the MIXmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The ‘brother layer problem’: Routine killing, biotechnology and the pursuit of ‘ethical sustainability’ in industrial poultry

Rutt

Jakobsen

2022

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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The global poultry industry culls approximately seven billion day-old male layer chicks annually. Superfluous to both egg and meat, male ‘brother’ layers constitute a momentous problem, simultaneously economical and ethical, to the poultry industry. In this article, we scrutinize present and proposed alternatives to routine killing involving multiple biotechnological innovations, including novel methods for fetus sexing, genome editing technologies and re-sexing. We utilize a political ecological perspective that views attempts to solve the ‘brother layer problem’ as discursive and techno-scientific ‘fixes’ to problems of the capitalist poultry industry's own making and to rising demands for ethics and environmental-friendly animal agriculture. This context opens new avenues for profit-making by and for an expanding matrix of actors we view as an evolving ‘economy of repair’ that is built in part by public resources. Further, these fixes constitute an ostensible ‘ethical sustainability’ meant to signal both animal welfare and environmental improvements, which seem to work towards stabilizing agro-industry, thereby foreclosing alternatives to agro-industrial intensification.

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Welfare Washing: Disseminating Disinformation in Meat Marketing

Cited by 6 publications

References 19 publications

Linking Subsidies for Agriculture and Food to Dietary Styles: Estimates for Switzerland

Linking Subsidies for Agriculture and Food to Dietary Styles: Estimates for Switzerland

The Social Construction of Narratives and Arguments in Animal Welfare Discourse and Debate

The ‘brother layer problem’: Routine killing, biotechnology and the pursuit of ‘ethical sustainability’ in industrial poultry

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