Abstract
In this article, our starting point is that people who are plagued by the so-called meat paradox must find ways of making meat consumption safe from the realities of meat production. They do this by way of various mechanisms of denial, which obfuscate contemporary industrial meat production. We focus on how advertisements become one notable vehicle of such denial, and select three examples for close reading. Focusing on the rhetorical techniques employed in three Norwegian ads for meat and how they mediate meat production to consumers, we argue that these ads all present an image of meat producers as progressive and caring proponents of animal welfare. This leads us to suggest that they exemplify a variant of greenwashing that we dub “welfare washing”—the main message of which is to keep calm and carry on consuming meat.
Introduction
In the last 50 years, global meat production has more than quadrupled, while worldwide per capita consumption has more than doubled (Ritchie & Roser, 2019). This dramatic growth would not have been possible without the industrialization of nonhuman animal agriculture, a development that provided consumers with cheap, plentiful, and (mostly) safe meat. Nor would it have been possible if those consumers did not, for a number of reasons, crave meat (see Fiddes, 1991). Our current meat culture relies on factors of production as well as consumption, but also—crucially—on the communication between these two spheres (see Buller & Roe, 2018, p. 99ff).
An emerging literature on the psychology of meat-eating suggests why this communication is so central. While most people still stop short of becoming vegetarians, psychologists have shown that many express discomfort with the idea of consuming other sentient creatures, and hence struggle with a form of cognitive dissonance dubbed the “meat paradox”; this refers to the fact that most people both eat animals and profess to care about them (Loughnan et al., 2014, p. 104; see also Loughnan et al., 2010). Obviously, this paradox represents a threat to the culture of carnivorism, and hence, it becomes imperative—not just for the meat industry, but also for meat-eating citizens plagued by the meat paradox—to find ways out of the discomfort, to find ways, one might say, of making meat consumption safe from the realities of meat production.
The psychological research on the meat paradox can, at this juncture, helpfully be connected to the work of the sociologist Stanley Cohen, who was arguably one of the foremost theorists on denial as a social phenomenon. Denial takes place, Cohen (2001) argued, when “information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged [is] repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted,” or when the implications of such information “are evaded, neutralized away” (p. 1). Cohen conceptualized denial as a complex socio-psychological phenomenon, which requires an ongoing collective effort for its maintenance.
More recently, research under the heading of “agnotology” has focused even more squarely on the mechanisms that go into producing and reproducing “strategic ignorance” (see Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008; McGoey, 2019). As we have argued elsewhere (Bjørkdahl & Syse, 2019), this perspective allows us to understand the spatial, social, and cultural processes that cause or accommodate denial of the animal origin of meat, which all combine to create what Chiles (2016) has called “suppressive synergy.”
In this article, we focus on what we believe is a central driver behind this sort of denial, namely advertisements. This focus is justified by the fact that, over the course of several decades, the distance between consumers and the production sites, skills, and values that transform animals into meat has increased significantly; we argue that this has created an informational vacuum, which is filled largely by advertisements or ad-like informationals issued by the meat industry. This creates a need for critical studies of the rhetorical techniques that ads employ to fill the informational vacuum between producers and consumers of meat.
Taking our cue from rhetorical studies of advertising (see e.g., McQuarrie & Mick, 1996; Slade, 2002; Ripley, 2008; Kjeldsen, 2012; Miles & Nilsson, 2018), we turn to a close reading of the textual and visual rhetoric employed by advertisers in three Norwegian ads for animal products. We focus especially on how these ads try to persuade consumers about the state of the welfare of the animals who become their meat. In short, we seek to understand how they attempt to persuade consumers that animal welfare has been prioritized and that consumers hence have no reason to worry.
What we find is that these ads employ a series of rhetorical techniques that tell the consumer, in effect, to keep calm and carry on consuming meat. We argue further that these ads are instances of a genre which is analogous to “greenwashing” (see Porter, 1992; Orange & Cohen, 2010; and DeJong et al., 2018). According to one definition by Vos (2009), greenwashing refers to “disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image” (pp. 673-74). The main function of greenwashing is to divert audiences’ attention from the environmental consequences (or even malfeasance) of a company’s business, by issuing a counteroffensive that presents the company as a frontrunner in environmental affairs. In rhetorical terms, greenwashing is a specific type of euphemismos, a euphemism which substitutes a delicate or even blameworthy entity with something (more) acceptable.
Adding to a number of studies on similar phenomena (see Molloy, 2012; Buller & Roe, 2012, 2014; Borkfelt et al., 2015; Petitt & Bull, 2018; Miele, 2010; Miele & Evans, 2017), we want here to draw attention to how techniques akin to greenwashing are used to sell meat by beautifying what meat production looks like. Building on the aforementioned definition of greenwashing, we define “welfare washing” as disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present a public image in which the organization appears to take responsibility for animal welfare.
We suggest that welfare washing techniques used in ads for meat and other animal products are a significant driver of our culture’s denial of the realities of contemporary meat production. If consumers have no personal experience from the sites where animals are kept or killed, no specialized skills or knowledge about how that killing happens, and increasingly, a lack of cultural resources with which to justify meat-eating (as the meat paradox literature has pointed out), the industry’s welfare washing is often what passes for “information” or “knowledge” about these things. Because these ads’ welfare washing techniques beautify the situation so consistently, they aid and support consumers’ inclination to avert their gaze from how animals are made edible (Vialles, 1994).
Co-Modifying Animal Welfare—Norwegian Style
In a series of publications, Buller and Roe (2012, 2014, 2018) have shown how animal welfare has come to be part of what they, following Caliskan and Callon (2014) call “economisation,” described as “an active process involving various market-based technologies that enrolls farm animal welfare and farm animal bodies together into consumer lifestyles”—or, to put it differently, what animal welfare “‘becomes’ within the food market context” (p. 142). They see this process as an “entanglement between scientific knowledge-making practices, civil anxieties and the integration of farm animal welfare values into how the market performs,” an entanglement they, with a pun, refer to as “co-modifying” (p. 142). In this article, we start from Buller and Roe’s (2012) concern that “what welfare is depends increasingly on how we market it” (p. 131), and hence, we focus specifically on marketing campaigns.
However, while many aspects of the economization of animal welfare cut across national borders, there is, at the same time, great variety in how this happens in various places (Neo & Emel, 2017). Since the cases we draw on in this article all emanate from Norway, we provide a brief sketch of some relevant peculiarities of how animal welfare has been rolled into the “co-modifying” process in this country.
The question of how the industry addresses “communities of concern” (Mouat & Prince, 2018) with meat advertisements is especially pertinent in Norway, since Norwegian consumers’ trust in the authorities, and by extension, in the agricultural sector, is so high (Berg et al., 2005; Kjærnes, 2006). While meat consumption in Norway has historically been fairly low, it has recently been approaching the average European level, a change that sociologists Vittersø and Kjærnes (2015) attribute to the political economy of meat in Norway. The main components of this system, they argue, are “concrete political measures combined with extensive marketing,” which has led to a “politics of meat promotion” that perhaps surprisingly, “has not been met with broad [counter]mobilization, either from the environmental or consumer movements” (p. 74).
The distance between the sphere of production and the sphere of consumption is very much present in Norway. According to Vittersø and Kjærnes (2015), “Most people lack knowledge about [the] consequences of growing meat consumption, and do not consider reducing their own meat consumption as a relevant … measure.” Instead, the “role of meat production for the agricultural economy has dominated the political debate” (p. 74).
Until very recently, many agricultural commodities were approaching monopolies. Powerful co-operatives (eggs, dairy, meat, etc.) were more or less the sole actors within their markets (Almås, 2002). These co-operatives were by necessity tightly tied to the state, and commentators talk about the political “iron triangle” of the Norwegian agricultural sector, consisting of the parliament, the ministry and agricultural organizations, as well as experts. For consumers, issues of agricultural policy have been seen as technical questions, as a concern for producers, politicians, and bureaucrats, and they have consequently come to believe that agricultural affairs can safely be left to the actors of this triangle (Vittersø & Kjærnes, 2015, p. 82).
This assumption is taken advantage of by the industry, which routinely underlines how Norwegian agriculture is best in class when it comes to the use of antibiotics, food safety, and animal welfare. One consequence of this is that any problems “are poorly communicated in the public sphere, [where] they are made invisible and trifling” (Vittersø & Kjærnes, 2015, p. 91). In response to the relative apathy of Norwegian consumers in this area, the industry has enacted a supply-side driven increase in meat consumption, what Vittersø and Kjærnes call “meat-promoting politics” (p. 74).
At the same time, the responsibility for the increase in meat consumption has often been outsourced to the consumers (Austgulen, 2014, p. 61). So although the agricultural authorities have enacted an “active strategy to increasing meat consumption” (Vittersø & Kjærnes, 2015, p. 88), the response to the problems caused by this increase is left to consumer choice. This is paradoxical, considering that consumer studies reveal a significant gap between believing that animal welfare is important and actually incorporating that value in their shopping decisions.
A cross-national survey of this discrepancy in seven European countries found that Norway had the largest gap of all: 84% of the respondents thought animal welfare was important, but only 26% considered it while shopping for meat. In trying to make sense of that discrepancy, the authors of the study state that, in Norway, “although many see problems, including those of animal welfare, with how food is produced today, they nevertheless trust that the authorities, experts, market actors and farmers have the will and the ability to improve conditions” (Kjærnes et al., 2009, p. 99).
Differentiation of products along the lines of different production methods has traditionally not been a prominent part of the Norwegian agricultural system, which insisted that “Norwegian farmers’ access to the market should be the same.” Thus it became unacceptable if “systems … rested on different standards of animal welfare: All animals are equal! Policy should be universal” (Kjærnes et al., 2009, p. 105). Improvement on animal welfare is stuck in a catch-22 that serves the industry: Norwegian consumers leave animal welfare to the experts within the iron triangle, trusting the authorities to take responsibility according to legal guidelines (Kjærnes et al., 2009, pp. 107-8). Meanwhile, the authorities have already outsourced this responsibility to the consumers themselves.
In what follows, we take a close look at three Norwegian advertisement campaigns for meat that we argue all exhibit “welfare washing.” There was no systematic rationale behind our choice of cases; they were stumbled upon (Syse, 2014) as part of research we have been doing for a book project. Our cases, then, are randomly chosen, and we make no claim about how much their rhetoric is representative of meat advertisements more generally. We propose these cases rather as model cases—as illustrations of a particular genre of meat advertisement rhetoric. More research will have to be done to determine how common this category is and how it relates to other forms of meat advertisements.
In each case, we combine a reading of the context in which the ad appears with deciphering the text’s implied reader (Iser, 1974). Our central question is what kind of reader these ads posit, and more concretely, what these ads ask that reader to believe about the Norwegian meat industry. More specifically, we look at what these ads assume the reader must or should in turn assume, which is another way to say that we focus on what the philosopher and argumentation theorist Toulmin (1958) called “warrants.” Warrants point to whatever must be either said or implied for a particular argument to be found well-argued; they are what connects the claim being made to a set of supporting reasons or pieces of evidence. This focus highlights how the Norwegian meat industry attempts to retain the consumers’ trust, since it sheds light on what needs to be shared, what needs to be taken as a given, for the industry’s claim to be found credible.
We will argue that all three ads make use of the high level of trust Norwegians have in the agricultural authorities. They assume that the reader is inclined to trust and set out to confirm and cement it, by showing that Norwegian meat farmers are caring, forward-leaning progressives who seek to improve the welfare of their animals. At the same time, we find that the ads fuse this notion of progressivity with a form of conservatism, a sort of lapse to the status quo. They suggest that the reader can carry on consuming meat with a good conscience, since some other, responsible entity (the state, the co-ops, the farmers, the Norwegian agricultural industry) is already hard at work trying to improve things.
While the outward purpose of this communication is apparently similar to what Buller and Roe (2018) call “assurance”—that is, “to demonstrate regulatory compliance, to ensure product quality and to communicate information to consumers” (p. 99)—we argue it is a smokescreen for an agricultural sector that appears less interested in making animal welfare improvements than what the ads imply, which is why we believe welfare washing applies. Through the rhetorical technique of welfare washing, the Norwegian meat industry pacifies the consumer and citizen—counteracting any impulse to act politically to improve animal welfare—by telling them that the industry is already taking care of things.
While doing so, they exaggerate the degree to which they are doing just that. So while the purpose of this communication is assurance, we suspect that the actual effect is more like what Francione (2012) calls “false reassurance.” Ultimately, these ads might “make people feel more comfortable about continuing to exploit animals by reassuring them—falsely—that standards have been improved in meaningful ways” (p. 178).
Naturally Spoiled Food
In 2005 the Norwegian Agriculture Agency initiated a campaign to boost the production and consumption of organic food, which was co-sponsored by the supermarket chains. A motivation for the campaign was the government’s goal of increasing the consumption of organic products from 1% to 15% by 2015. In Norway as elsewhere, organic food is produced without pesticides, chemical fertilizers, insecticides, or harmful additives, while it provides more room, air, light, and movement for the animals involved. But these features presented the agricultural sector with something of a conundrum: How could they communicate these benefits of organic food production without implicitly accusing conventional, nonorganic, agriculture of being imperfect? Since 99% of Norwegian agricultural production belongs in the latter category, this was a real concern. The response of the campaign creators was to describe the animals (and foods) produced organically as “spoiled”—which in this context means “over-indulged” rather than “gone bad.”
During the first year of the campaign, huge cardboard posters dangled from the ceilings of supermarkets. One poster showed a hornless, brown cow being fed with a silver spoon. Another showed a brown chicken with silk cushions under her wings. The same imagery was reproduced in whole page ads in magazines and newspapers. In this context, the chicken poster read: “Some chickens are born with cushions under their wings,” reproducing a common Norwegian saying—to sew cushions under someone’s arms—used to describe spoiled children. The text on the cow poster read:
Some cows are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. The cows that provide organic milk get plenty of room to romp around in, both indoors and outdoors. They get plenty of recreational time outdoors and lots of fresh air. As calves, they stay with their mother for a long time, and they are served organic fodder throughout their life…. So one can safely say that the animals in organic farming are born to live the good life.
The ad uses humor to convey its message, but its intentions go beyond entertaining the consumer. It also wants to inform consumers that organic animals have led “the good life,” and in this way, it tries to entice the consumer to choose organic products. Although the ad grabs the attention of the consumer with the help of irony produced by humoristic hyperbole, these mechanisms are easily detected. The consumer’s good faith is thus kept intact. His or her attention is instead turned toward what the ad does want to convey: that these animals do in fact lead very comfortable lives indeed.
This surface-level irony arguably covers up an irony on a deeper level, however. Because of the absurd, hyperbolic situation in which these animals are placed—which is amply helped by the catchphrase of the campaign, naturally spoiled food—the ad can be seen to invite the reader’s scorn. The word “spoiled” and its connotations suggest children with an overly developed sense of self. A spoiled child is a child that has been socialized to feel entitled, and to act as if they are better than the average child. If these connotations carry over to the ad, the implication is clear: Consumers should think that organic animals are rather too well off, that these animals lay claim to something which they are not necessarily entitled.
Presumably, the campaign could not communicate the animal welfare benefits of organic production directly, as it could lead consumers to think that there were issues with animal welfare in nonorganic production. The ad could not indicate that animals suffer in conventional animal agriculture. The solution was to avoid offering any justification for organic meat. The ad suggested, in effect, that organic farming was better just because. The vagueness of the ad’s argumentation might be explained by the fact that the actors responsible for the campaign—the Norwegian Agriculture Agency and the major supermarket chains—are also responsible for marketing nonorganic food, which represents 99% of their sales.
Paradoxically, the ad’s apparent intention is to promote organic food, but upon closer examination, it works precisely towards the opposite end. When Kjærnes et al. (2009) argue that the Norwegian “supply system … does not make room for consumer choice,” this, at first, seems untrue—since the official aim of this campaign was to increase the sales of organic products. However, the ad suggests that organic animal products are really taking things a bit too far. This attitude is quite widespread among central actors in the Norwegian agricultural sector, and may in part explain why the market share of organic products is so low in Norway. Another part of the explanation is Norwegian consumers’ aforementioned trust in the agricultural sector, and their inclination to accept suggestions like the one made by the ad—that organic is somewhat excessive.
In a report written for the Norwegian Agriculture Agency, the campaign was dubbed a success, as it claimed that sales of organic food had a 33% boost between 2006 and 2009 (Pedersen et al., 2012, p. 91). The sale of organic food in 2006 was only 1% of the total food, however, so this “boost” was arguably less impressive than what the report insinuated (Pedersen et al., 2012; Virtual Garden, 2008). While the stated motivation for the campaign was to contribute to the target of 15% organic by 2015, actual organic consumption in 2018 was still below 2%. It might sound odd to report this as a success, unless the underlying objective to maintain is the status quo.
The Lift-a-Pig Campaign
In December 2017, public outrage erupted in Norway. The public broadcaster, NRK, reported that inspections of pork producers in Western Norway, carried out by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (NFSA), had revealed serious violations of animal welfare regulations (Morsund, 2017). The violations were so numerous and serious that the inspectors only had time to perform a small part of the inspections they had planned for this area. In those producers they did inspect, as many as 73% were found to violate the animal welfare regulations (NFSA, 2018).
The Norwegian meat industry is aware that consumers are growing more skeptical of industrialized animal farming. When a scandal like the one described here surfaced, the meat producers’ co-op, Nortura, responded quickly. Their response consisted of updating and boosting a campaign called Griseløftet (“Lift-a-Pig”), in which pig farmers made a pledge to the consumer: to lift pigs to a more elevated state of welfare. (The Norwegian word “løftet” means both “to lift” and “the pledge,” so the campaign title suggested both the pledge and the elevation.)
The campaign included a TV ad which announced a new category of pork products called Edelgris (“Noble Pig”). Quite obviously an attempt to erase the stain left on pork meat by the NFSA’s inspection, the Lift-a-Pig campaign was a confident counteroffensive to rehabilitate the reputation of Norwegian pork. The ad begins with a stalwart farmer, carrying a piglet in his arms, while he looks into the camera and tells the viewer: “We expect a lot when it comes to animal welfare.” Then he introduces the novelty: “For our new Noble Pig, we’re raising the bar even further. We promise to lift a pig.” The piglet couched in the protagonist farmer’s arms resembles a human infant, and the farmer reminds us, perhaps, of a kindergarten teacher. Just as experts on the care of toddlers, this farmer has a keen sense for the needs and interests of his pigs:
Pigs are social animals, so this new pig of ours will get more attention and care. It likes to play and snuffle, so now, it will have more stuff to snuffle about in. And it also needs enough room in which to play, so now it will have more room.
Approaching the end of his on-camera stroll across the idyllic farmyard, the farmer tells the viewer that, while they plan to lift some pigs now, the ultimate objective is to lift them all—and this is a cue for the camera to zoom out, to reveal a whole team of farmers, male and female, each holding a piglet. This visual suggests that the caring qualities of the protagonist farmer are not unique to him: All around this country, the ad suggests, you’ll find farmers who care for their piglets as though they were babies or pets (companion animals). Finally, to explain to the consumer what the “lift” entails, the image displays a graded scale of animal welfare categories, from “EU” to “Norwegian” to “Noble Pig” to “Free range.”
Our specific concern here is what this ad asks the consumer to think and do. Most notably, it asks her to forget all about the 73% of farms that, according to the NFSA’s inspection, did not actually live up to the official animal welfare regulations in Norway. The protagonist’s affirmation that, “We expect a lot when it comes to animal welfare,” is questionable. NFSA’s report revealed that almost three out of four pig farmers from this particular area did not expect a lot.
Next, the ad suggests that Norwegian pig farmers have a unique motivation to provide and improve animal welfare. The ad arguably plays on the well-established image of the agricultural industry in Norway, which is that it is trustworthy, and hence, that the consumer can continue to eat pork. And interestingly, while this campaign was launched in response to a rather a scandalous exposé of malpractice in the sector, the industry’s welfare washing counteroffensive was hardly met with criticism.1
This apparent blind faith in the sector seems, in this case, somewhat misplaced, for a number of reasons: First, as mentioned, statements to the effect that “we expect a lot” border on lies, given scandals like the one recounted. Second, the Lift-a-Pig initiative arrived only after the aforementioned scandal. Finally, the graded scale introduced towards the end of the ad unintentionally undermines the claim of the ad itself. It implicitly acknowledges that there is a scale of welfare, and that mainstream Norwegian ideals are lower than they could be. This is revealing, since what it actually says is that pigs have needs that will now be met, but which—it follows—are not met, or not as well, by the conventional form of pork production.
In our estimation, it is a good thing when the meat industry takes concrete steps to improve animal welfare, and to communicate those steps to the consumer, because it can add to a much-needed information flow between producers and consumers of meat. That being said, “communication” and “information” are no more than ideals, and what we have in this case resembles more closely what we would call “propaganda,” the manipulation of opinion with little regard to fact. What Norwegian consumers need in response to ads like these is the ability and willingness to question the claims of the agricultural industry. But because agriculture in Norway is so closely tied to the state, the trust that Norwegian consumers typically have in the state is extended to the actors in the agricultural sector, and for that reason, farmers and anyone associated with farming are seldom criticized.
The “In-Between” Chicken
In 1959, just under 3 million kilos of poultry was produced in Norway per year, and by 2019, that number had increased to almost 107 million kilos (NIBIO, 2020; Helsedirektoratet, 2018). This tremendous upscaling is in part enabled by developing more specialized, and hence productive, chicken breeds. As egg-laying hens were bred to specialize in laying, “broilers” were bred to withstand intense growth and industrial conditions. One part of this picture is the broiler Ross 308, distributed globally by the company Aviagen, and well-known to chicken producers worldwide. In less than 35 days, the Ross 308 can grow from an egg to a chicken ready for the filleting machine.
Chicken producers embraced this fast-growing bird, and today the bird is a staple “strain” for chicken meat. Norwegian animal welfare organizations have routinely pointed out the severe problems related to pecking and the crowding in industrial meat production, and also the nature of the bird: Ross 308 grew so fast, and the bird’s breast was so disproportionately large, that the skeleton could not keep up with the weight of the body. Ross 308 toppled over.
The Norwegian supermarket chain REMA 1000 already had economically painful experiences with consumers over the meat they sold in 2014, when the Norwegian media took up the issue of antibiotic resistance in chickens. One veterinary researcher told the media that she never touched chicken (Nordby, 2014), and the president of the medical association said that she had not eaten chicken for months (Larsen-Vonstett et al., 2014). The sale of chicken plummeted.
The supermarket chain apparently thought it would be better to invite the critics into the house than to let them stand outside and throw stones at the window. In collaboration with the Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance, they invested in a new chicken breed called Hubbard. To promote Hubbard chicken, REMA 1000 inundated Norwegian consumers with news about the revolutionary welfare ideals of this breed. The public was offered TV commercials and ads in newspapers and magazines. There were “inspiration and recipe” information booklets as take-aways in the stores, offering recipes and explaining what the Hubbard chicken was about. Printed ads were distributed with daily newspapers. Even personalized letters with information about Hubbard to “typical consumers of chicken meat” were part of the campaign.
In all of these outlets, including on the supermarket’s website, consumers were informed of the novelty. The Hubbard grows 30 percent slower than the regular Ross 308, they were told, and the bird lives for 20 days longer before going to slaughter. The breed can stand up without toppling over, unlike the Ross 308. On the REMA 1000 (2018a) website, consumers were told that,
Hubbard is very active, so it needs environmental enhancements such as hay balls, pecking blocks, climbing frames and perches so that it can play in the barn. Being active, healthy and lively, it behaves like a natural bird would do out in the open.
Interestingly, what the text fails to mention is that that these are universal needs for chickens and egg-laying hens, and not special needs for the Hubbard breed. Further, on the chicken producer Norsk Kylling’s website, consumers could read that:
Hubbard is a new chicken in Norway and both lives longer and grows slower than ordinary chicken. There are three categories of chickens: fast growing, slow growing and an in-between breed. The Hubbard belongs to the latter, as it lives 30% longer and grows 20% percent slower than fast-growing chicken, which is the most commonly produced chicken in Norway.
One TV commercial by REMA placed a white chicken on a stage, surrounded by stage lights and the luminescent words “Say hello to Hubbard” at the top of the screen, and accompanied by a country-western soundtrack. As the camera zooms in, we see five digitally animated square-dancing chickens, and as it zooms out, we see chickens playing and dancing with props like bales of straw and wooden ladders on a stage set to look like a nostalgic barn. After some more chicken dancing, the campaign slogan appears on screen: “We believe a chicken that lives better, tastes better” (Filmic Art, 2018).
The central rhetorical device of this ad recalls that of the previous two cases, as it uses humor and hyperbole: Hubbard chickens may perhaps be said to be happier than the conventional breed, but they are arguably not square-dancingly happy. The effect in this case rests on anthropomorphizing the animals; by presenting them in a characteristically human activity, the ad suggests that these individual chickens (there are in fact quite a few of them in each ad) are just that—individuals. What the ad silences is the fact that these Hubbards live in the very same production halls, eat the same feed, and have just as little space as conventional chickens do. Our point here is not to belittle the change implied by switching to less fast-growing breeds, which is a good thing. Rather, the point is that the ad frames this switch to radically overstate its importance.
Although the Hubbard is consistently hailed as a new breed, another central device in the campaign is nostalgia. Quite consistently, the aesthetic of the campaign works to encourage consumers to remember “the good old days,” when farm-life was small scale and a handful of chickens pecked around the yard. The birds are not the only ones to be presented in this small-scale manner; the campaign renders the chicken producers as multitasking smallholders and the production plants as “barns”:
Just on the outskirts of a housing estate is long red barn. Here the farmer [Name Omitted] has several tasks. He drives a snowplow and other farm machinery, he is a welder, he grows barley, and he cares for Hubbard chickens. The chickens are a day old when we visit him. They are curious and run around his legs.
These chickens are so healthy, active and lively. The Hubbard is fun to work with because it’s so energetic and playful. It uses all the toys we put into the barn, climbs on hay bales and platforms; it’s active and it dust bathes. It creates a very nice atmosphere in the chicken barn, he says.
REMA 1000, 2018b
This small-scale representation arguably betrays the economics underlying the switch to Hubbard. When the campaign states that the introduction of Hubbard promises to provide animal welfare “not just for a few but for all” consumers, the idyllic “red barn” is a somewhat misleading image. Although there is no further explanation of how this chicken is going to dissolve established class distinctions, the 14 million Hubbard chickens produced yearly covers somewhat less than a third of the Norwegian market. However, only 150 producers raise these 14 million broiler chickens, a number that also shows the immense scale involved in this production line. In reality, the switch to Hubbard does not involve an idyllic farmyard scene that allows free-range chickens to peck about among the perennial borders. In fact, it cannot look anything like that scene, if it is to be “not just for a few but for all” consumers. Hubbards live longer than certain other breeds, but are raised under the same—industrial—living conditions.
In 2018, the PR company behind the campaign won a retail award for their slogan “We believe a chicken that lives better, tastes better.” Seven out of ten people in their post-campaign poll agreed that the campaign gave the impression that the chicken brand took animal welfare seriously. But we think that they could do better.
The World’s Best Welfare (Washing)
The three ads we have looked at come from very different actors, but they nevertheless align in presenting an implied reader with a high level of trust in the central actors in the agricultural sector—the agricultural authorities (spoiled food), the co-operatives and their brands (Lift-a-Pig), and the supermarkets (Hubbard)—thus reflecting the close-knit structure of Norwegian agriculture. The implied reader of these ads might have heard something about some animal welfare concern, and now wants to have her concerns dispelled; she wants to be told that things are OK, to have her trust in the agricultural sector confirmed. And indeed, these ads tell the reader that the actors in the Norwegian agricultural sector are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve animal welfare. The consumer really has no reason for alarm, and can keep on consuming with a good conscience.
As we have suggested, however, this picture of progressiveness is often a cover for conservatism. In fact, such a tendency is ubiquitous in the Norwegian agricultural sector’s attitude to animal welfare. For instance, when Norway revised its Animal Welfare Act in 2009, the minister of agriculture boasted that Norway now had the world’s most advanced code. This statement appears to have made certain actors within the agricultural sector somewhat nervous, however, so the minister was quick to add that the new law was not intended to have any consequences for normal, Norwegian animal agriculture (Bjørkdahl, 2009). In a single discursive movement, the agricultural sector is saying, paradoxically: We are making progress, but things are already fine as they are.
This is precisely the sentiment expressed in these ads. The cow with a silver spoon in her mouth implicitly suggests that ordinary cows are well enough, and ditto with the chicken being mollycoddled with comforting pillows under her wings. The choice of the word “spoiled” is revealing, however, since it refers to someone who demands too much. This wording can hence be understood as the annoyed response from the agricultural sector in Norway to demands for organic or for welfare labeling, the implicit logic being that “conventionally farmed” animals already have sufficient levels of welfare.
A similar type of layered communication can be found in the Lift-a-Pig campaign, which, by blurring the boundaries between companion and production animal, suggests that this level of welfare is somewhat absurd, and hence superfluous. Meanwhile, the Hubbard presents a revolution where there was arguably nothing more than reform, and it does so by way of an absurd exaggeration that plainly covers up the fact that these chickens are also made for industrial production. The ads’ consistent use of humor similarly reveals a systemic failure to understand improvements beyond the status quo as necessary, obligatory, acute, or important. Rather, improving animal welfare beyond the current norm is voluntary and, one might say, just for fun.
What, then, are the implications of this? While we are certainly not the first to point out ways in which the meat industry tries to make its products morally safe to consumers by way of labeling and marketing (Miele & Evans, 2010, 2017; Miele, 2011), we believe our framing of this type of rhetoric as welfare washing can add a certain structure to the critique of the phenomenon. The usefulness of this concept is not, we should point out, predicated on a commitment to animal rights. Our point, in other words, is not to suggest that all attempts to label or market animal welfare are malign propaganda, and that our only hope is to opt for abolition of animal use (Francione, 2012).
As Miele (2011) argues, even in cases of animal welfare labeling and marketing where “many important areas of animals’ lives remain opaque,” there can nevertheless be “important effects,” and one can be to “[suggest] a more complex moral relationship between human and nonhuman animals” (p. 208). But while we agree that such effects are indeed possible, the value of the welfare-washing concept is to highlight that propaganda, smokescreens, cover-ups, and denial-by-way-of-marketing indeed do exist—and that the consequences of these practices are clearly detrimental to the cause of animal welfare.
The importance of the phrase, then, is that it confronts us with a call to separate the good from the bad in what now appears as a field “fraught with ambivalence and ambiguities” (Miele, 2011, p. 208). Welfare washing raises more clearly the question of what constitutes responsibility in the marketing of animal welfare; it prods us to figure out where to draw the line between productive communication and propaganda; and it calls on us to keep this work up for the sake of real and meaningful change.
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This changed in June 2019, when the public broadcaster, NRK, aired a documentary based in part on the same material, after which the industry—again—responded with welfare-washing ads. In this case, consumers reacted far more strongly. It is too early to tell whether this will affect the industry’s advertising strategies over time.