The animal industries

As soon as they run an ad on TV, they seem desperate. The animal industries are trying to sell something that has always been staple, like milk, eggs and meat, that once, never needed to be advertised at all. Now they have to use all sort of advertising gimmicks and dress up their products to be convincing, although, bottom line, they always know they have a powerfully addictive product on their hands.
These days the social acceptability of their products is coming into question. Animal products are on the nose ethically and health wise because conditions on farms are both unhygienic and uncaring. (Pharmaceuticals fare no better, since they are often closely associated with vivisection.) All this is becoming a big turn off to many customers.
Most people want to do the right thing. Most of us would like to think well of ourselves and we want to be seen as intelligent and humane, but that clashes with the ugliness of the animal products we’re consuming and the stupidity of letting them make us fat and ill. Our suspicion about them is only heightened by over-the-top advertising. We like to believe in our autonomy and discrimination but, against this impression, we still buy the food we know we shouldn’t buy. We can’t help it, because it’s addictive. It always comes back to our own decisions – we know that no one tells us the truth about these foods and the industry is allowed to push it as hard as they like. If we eat animal foods there a chance we may be dicing with the threat of future illness but certainly we are dicing with our ethics.
Whenever we buy an animal product we give the nod for the industry to get away with murder, literally. It’s always been so … until recently where the levels of awareness have become far greater. Now there’s a growing number of well qualified scientists pointing out disease associations with animal foods, and this, along with TV footage of the grim conditions on factory farms, has had the effect of making vegetarianism more attractive. For instance, in UK amongst young adults, vegetarianism has risen from less than a few percent two decades ago to over 25% now. And in Britain, parts of Europe and USA, veganism isn’t uncommon, and the up-front labelling on food packaging saying “suitable for vegans” is familiar to most shoppers in those countries.
If the writing is on the wall for the animal industries and they’re beginning to feel the pinch, they are showing it in their expensive advertising campaigns. Current and former customers are more likely to see the nervous approach of the ‘industry’ and gravitate towards plant-based products. And that might mean that veganism isn’t so very far from being the fashion . . . and then to become just the normal, accepted diet for savvy people.