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Vox
10-07-2025
- General
- Vox
Would this food label change how you eat?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. Imagine, for a moment, that you're seated and ready to dine at one of Switzerland's many celebrated high-end eateries, where a prix fixe meal can run around $400. On the menu, the slow-cooked Schweinsfilet, or pork tenderloin, comes with a bizarre and disturbing disclosure: The pigs raised to make that meal were castrated without pain relief. Would it change what you order? That's a decision Switzerland's 8.8 million residents and millions of annual tourists will soon face. Effective last week — with a two-year phase-in — a new Swiss law requires food companies, grocers, and restaurants selling animal products in the country to disclose whether they came from animals that were mutilated without anesthetic. That'll include mutilation procedures like castration in pigs and cattle, dehorning in cows, beak searing in hens, and even leg severing in frogs. This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect's biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@ The law will also require disclosures explaining that foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks and geese. Horrific as these procedures are, especially when performed without pain relief, they're standard practice in global meat, milk, and egg production. Male piglets, for example, are castrated to prevent their meat from giving off a fecal odor and taste — what the industry calls 'boar taint.' Piglets' teeth are clipped to prevent injuries to littermates or their mom's teats while nursing, but it can also cause painful dental issues and infections. Egg producers cut off part of hens' beaks because when they're tightly packed into factory farms, they tend to peck at each other, which can lead to injury and death. To make cattle easier for humans to handle, ranchers dehorn calves by sticking them with a hot iron or applying a caustic paste. A piglet being castrated at factory farm in Poland. The procedure is done without anesthesia, so one worker holds down the struggling, squealing piglet while the other makes an incision on the scrotum and pulls out the testes. Andrew Skowron / We Animals A calf with blood running down their face stands inside an individual enclosure on a farm in Czechia. This young animal has recently undergone a painful dehorning procedure. Lukas Vincour / Zvířata Nejíme / We Animals Meat production is a high-volume business, with tens of billions of mammals and birds — and over 1 trillion fish — churned through the system each year. Administering pain relief to the animals subjected to these painful procedures would be the least meat companies could do, but most don't because it would cost them a little extra time and money. And even when performed with pain relief, such procedures remain cruel — removing animals' tails, horns, and testicles, or shortening their beaks and teeth, reduces their ability to communicate or perform basic biological functions. Switzerland is one of a handful of countries where farmers are required to give animals pain relief before these painful procedures. But the small country still imports plenty of meat and other animal products from abroad. Swiss animal advocates have long advocated for banning imported products that come from animals mutilated without pain relief, but Swiss policymakers have rejected that idea and instead settled on increased transparency in labeling as a compromise. It's an unusual law, and although it falls short of what animal advocates want, it's refreshing to see a country take this step toward transparency. Switzerland's disclosure requirement pierces the veil of the shrink-wrapped slab of meat consumers see in the grocery store or prepared in dishes at restaurants, suggesting that meat is simply an inanimate product rather than the flesh of a once-living, feeling creature who suffered. A mere disclosure provides no respite from that suffering, but it's something. Because in the US and around the world, meat, milk, and egg companies go to great lengths to conceal the horrors of animal agriculture from the public. By requiring food companies and restaurants to slap what amounts to a warning label on their products, Switzerland is effectively treating meat produced with particularly cruel yet common practices as a vice — much like many countries do with tobacco products. Whether or not these labels steer consumers away from meat or push meat producers to change their practices might hold important lessons in what works to reduce animal suffering. The double bind of the meat industry's concealment and consumers' willful ignorance Mutilation without pain relief is, of course, just one of a litany of welfare issues that farmed animals suffer from birth to death. Animals raised for food are often overcrowded, forced to live in their own waste, exposed to disease, confined in cages, violently and artificially inseminated, roughly handled, inhumanely transported, and bred to grow bigger and faster, causing health and welfare issues. Problems at slaughterhouses abound, too. 'Significantly more products and production methods should be subject' to Switzerland's new labeling regulations, Vanessa Gerritsen, a lawyer for the Swiss animal advocacy organization Tier im Recht, told me in an email. The vast majority of the world's farmed animals are raised on factory farms with standard practices that would be illegal animal cruelty in many countries if done to a dog or cat. Yet most consumers — at least in the US — believe they don't buy animal products from factory farms. Cows stand in the milking parlor at the Lake Breeze Dairy farm in Malone, Wisconsin. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images Turkeys in a Michigan factory farm. Rudy Malmquist Some of that disconnect can be attributed to industry deceit. Meat industry trade groups in the US and abroad have successfully lobbied for laws that make it a crime for activists to document animal cruelty on farms. And in the US, meat companies are allowed to claim just about whatever they want on their labels and in advertising. That's led to extensive 'humanewashing' in which brands mislead consumers into believing their animals are treated decently. But there's also the problem of willful ignorance: Some research has found that consumers prefer to avoid information about meat production. Switzerland's new regulation represents a massive experiment in pushing back against this inclination, forcing people to think about the cruelty that goes into their pork chops and egg omelettes at a particularly important time: the moment they're deciding what to eat at a restaurant or buy at a grocery store. But will it be enough to actually change what people eat? 'Hard to say,' Alice Di Concetto, founder and executive director of the European Institute for Animal Law & Policy, told me in an email. 'Studies tend to show that consumers base their purchasing choices almost exclusively on price.' But it could have an impact on the decisions of restaurants and grocery stores, she said, 'who might be reluctant to offer these products, anticipating that they won't sell well as a result of carrying a negative claim on them.' Switzerland implemented a similar law in 2000, requiring disclosure labels on imported eggs from producers that cage their hens (it was already illegal to cage egg-laying hens in Switzerland). After that law, Gerritsen told me, imports significantly declined. Di Concetto also pointed to a labeling law in the European Union, which requires that egg cartons on grocery store shelves include a code that corresponds to a specific production method, such as caged, indoor, outdoor, or organic. Di Concetto credits these egg-labeling requirements for helping initiate the EU egg industry's transition to cage-free production. But, she said, 'it's not so much that consumers wouldn't buy caged eggs. It's mostly due to manufacturers not liking the idea of selling products that indicated something so detrimental.' The new Swiss law, though, will require disclosures far more direct and visceral, and harder for the public to ignore. At bare minimum, for consumers to make more humane choices — whether that means eating less meat or buying from farms that avoid some of the cruelest factory farm practices — they at least need to be informed. Right now, meat, milk, and egg labels tell consumers little about animal treatment or actively lie to them. Switzerland's experiment will soon show us what happens when that's forced to change, if only a little.
Vox
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Vox
A newly surfaced document reveals the beef industry's secret climate plan
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. It's now well established that for decades, major oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming, and yet did everything in their power to obstruct climate policy. They intensively lobbied policymakers, ran advertising campaigns, and funded think tanks to cast doubt on climate science. According to two new papers recently published in the journals Environmental Research Letters and Climate Policy, another industry knew of its role in climate change decades ago and engaged in similar tactics: the US beef industry. The story begins in February 1989, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a workshop for a report on how to reduce livestock methane emissions. Experts at the time knew that cattle produce significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that accelerates climate change at a much faster pace than carbon dioxide. (Today, almost one-third of methane stems from beef and dairy cattle). This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect's biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@ There was also increasing awareness among scientists and environmentalists about livestock's impact on other environmental issues, like water pollution and biodiversity loss. A representative from the nation's largest and oldest beef industry group — the National Cattlemen's Association (NCA) — attended the EPA workshop, and soon after, an arm of the organization began crafting a plan to defend itself against what they anticipated would be growing attacks over beef's role in global warming and other environmental ills. The Cattlemen's plan — an internal 17-page memo titled 'Strategic Plan on the Environment' — went unnoticed for decades until two University of Miami researchers, Jennifer Jacquet and Loredana Loy, recently unearthed the document in the NCA's archives. Notably, the beef industry plan had barely a mention about addressing cattle pollution. Instead, it centered around how the public and policymakers would perceive that pollution. 'Public relations activity directed toward key influencers is a fundamental thrust of this plan,' one part reads. Other goals of the plan: to positively influence legislation and regulations, and commission experts to write papers in response to critics as part of its 'crisis management' strategy. They hired one such expert to address the EPA's report, which came out in August 1989 and called livestock 'one of the larger' sources of methane. A cattle feedlot near Lubbock, Texas. Richard Hamilton Smith /Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images In 1996, the National Cattlemen's Association merged with another group to become the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The organization didn't respond to an interview request for this story. Looking back now, the plan seems to be the blueprint for how the beef industry, and the broader animal agriculture sector, would go on to respond to climate scientists and critics for the next 35 years. While these delay-and-obstruct tactics largely mirror those of the fossil fuel industry, there's one way the two sectors radically differ in their public relations wars: what role they say consumers should play to combat climate change. What polluting industries want you to do — or not do — on a heating planet Over the past decade, many environmentalists have become critical of focusing on individual actions — such as purchasing a hybrid vehicle, using efficient light bulbs, or flying less — as meaningful solutions to climate change. Critics argue that putting the responsibility of fighting climate change on individuals has been a tactic purposefully employed by fossil fuel companies to help them evade accountability. That's largely true. BP popularized the personal carbon footprint calculator while Chevron — which, to be clear, is an energy company — has run ads encouraging its customers to use less energy. A 2021 analysis of ExxonMobil's communications concluded that the company is 'fixated' on individual responsibility. But when it came to the meat industry, Jacquet and Loy found the opposite: It really doesn't want people to take the individual action of eating less meat. 'Rather than embrace notions of individual responsibility, the animal agriculture industry hired scientists, pressured the media, and formed business coalitions to obstruct' initiatives that encourage people to eat less meat, the two researchers wrote in the Climate Policy paper. Economist Jeremy Rifkin speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival in Ford One of the earliest examples of such obstruction occurred in the early 1990s, when economist and activist Jeremy Rifkin published the book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. Rifkin paired the book launch with a large coalitional campaign featuring advertisements, mass protests at McDonald's locations, and a book tour, all aimed at persuading people in 16 countries to cut their beef consumption in half and replace it with plant-based foods. A beef industry publication considered Rifkin's actions a declaration of war and the industry organized a 'determined counterattack,' according to the Chicago Tribune. That counterattack included an advertising campaign telling people not to blame environmental problems on cows and the formation of an alliance of 13 industry groups to push back against activists like Rifkin, which included tactics like handing out hamburgers at one of his events. Around this time, the Beef Industry Council launched the infamous but influential 'Beef. It's What's for Dinner' marketing campaign with a budget of $96 million in today's dollars. It was effective: According to a 1992 story in the Washington Post, people screamed at Rifkin on call-in radio shows, his publisher received angry letters and phone calls, and his book tour was canceled early on because people called event hosts to either disparage him or pose as his publicist to cancel. Rifkin chalked it up in part to aggrieved cattle ranchers, a claim that the National Cattlemen's Association fiercely denied at the time. This back-and-forth fight over the American diet has continued ever since: Meatless Monday: The Meatless Monday campaign rose to prominence in the 2000s with celebrity support, featuring dozens of large university cafeterias and school districts ditching meat on Mondays, all of which angered the livestock sector. Meat industry lobbyists sent Baltimore City Public Schools The Meatless Monday campaign rose to prominence in the 2000s with celebrity support, featuring dozens of large university cafeterias and school districts ditching meat on Mondays, all of which angered the livestock sector. Meat industry lobbyists sent Baltimore City Public Schools cease and desist letters for participating in the program, and an industry-funded academic at UC Davis named Frank Mitloehner called it a public policy tool to defeat animal agriculture. According to Jacquet, he also downplayed Meatless Monday's potential to cut greenhouse gas emissions. (Disclosure: From 2012 to 2013, I worked at the Humane Society of the US on its Meatless Monday initiative.) US Dietary Guidelines: In 2015, an advisory committee of government-commissioned nutrition experts recommended that the government modify the US dietary guidelines to encourage Americans to reduce meat consumption to make their diets more sustainable. In response, industry trade groups In 2015, an advisory committee of government-commissioned nutrition experts recommended that the government modify the US dietary guidelines to encourage Americans to reduce meat consumption to make their diets more sustainable. In response, industry trade groups aggressively lobbied Congress and launched a petition that decried the committee experts as 'nutrition despots.' Ultimately, the committee's recommendation didn't make it into the final dietary guidelines. The EAT-Lancet report: In 2019, a In 2019, a landmark report published by nutrition and environmental experts recommended that people in high-income countries significantly cut back on meat for personal and planetary health. Mitloehner, the UC Davis academic, coordinated massive '#yes2meat' counter-campaign that spawned millions of tweets. So why do fossil fuel companies and livestock producers seemingly have such a different take on personal responsibility? Jacquet says much of it comes down to the simple fact that consumers have relatively little flexibility in reducing fossil fuel use, so messages that encourage people to make lifestyle changes pose little actual threat to fossil fuel companies' bottom line. Individuals are 'locked into a fossil fuel energy system,' Jacquet said. But 'food is not like that,' she added. 'You really do have a lot of flexibility in your diet, and you make those decisions three times a day. … These are really dynamic decision spaces, and that's a threat' to the meat industry. To state the obvious, individual dietary change alone is insufficient to reform the cruel, polluting factory farm system. But it is a start. To pass even modest regulatory reforms, policymakers will first need to see public support, and one way the public can show it is by eating less meat. Not only is it considered one of, if not the most effective individual actions to reduce carbon footprints, but dietary change also has cascading positive effects. Animal agriculture is arguably the leading source of US water pollution, a major air polluter, and far and away the main cause of animal suffering — around 25 land animals are factory-farmed each year to sustain the average American's diet. According to agricultural economists Jayson Lusk and F. Bailey Norwood, eating less meat, milk, and eggs does affect how many animals are raised for food. It's not on a 1:1 basis, but if more people reduce their animal consumption, they'd collectively send a signal to the industry to raise fewer animals. 'It may be hard to see the consequences of our decisions,' the two wrote in their 2011 book Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare, 'but let there be no doubt, each purchase decision matters.'
Vox
05-03-2025
- Health
- Vox
Will warning labels on ultra-processed foods make America healthy again?
After decades of lobbying, the US government has finally started taking action to warn consumers about the hazards of ultra-processed foods: your potato chips, granola bars, cereal, frozen pizza, even many types of store-bought bread. As I reported last year, there is mounting scientific evidence linking such ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, to disorders that range from obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure to depression, anxiety, and autoimmune disorders. Precisely what is classified as a UPF isn't perfect and the category can sometimes be too broad, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova explained in December, but there's still a growing consumer desire for clarity about what we're buying and eating. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Earlier this year, in an effort to combat the rising burden of these chronic diseases, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under former President Joe Biden proposed a new policy that would require food producers to add new nutrition labels to the front of most packaged foods, warning consumers about the high fat, sodium, and sugar content typically found in UPFs. New Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr., will likely continue this work; he has called UPFs 'poison,' and has promised reform. A handful of countries in Latin America and Europe have already introduced similar front-of-package nutrition labels. In 2020, Mexico passed a law that required a variety of warning labels on all packaged foods and beverages; the labels include black stop-sign shaped figures that indicate if the product has excessive sugar, sodium, or saturated fats. Chile was the first country to pass such a law back in 2012. The UK has a similar system in place, but companies are not legally required to add the warnings to their products. The US may be late to the nutrition-warning game, but the good news is that similar efforts in other places have been effective in raising consumer awareness of UPF's nutritional hazards and in pressuring manufacturers to make healthier products. These labels enable consumers to make more informed decisions about what they eat without infringing on their rights to eat what they want. But while nutrition experts have welcomed the FDA's proposed policy change, the addition of warning labels to packaged goods hasn't been shown to reduce the very real burden of chronic diseases. For that, we'll need systemic change. Much of the real-world evidence describing the impact of front-of-package nutrition labels comes from Latin American countries. They have long been pioneers in UPF research and regulation, in part because of their high burden of chronic diseases linked to UPF consumption but also because of how the spread of UPFs pushed out traditional foods, explained Vanessa Couto, a public health nutrition researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In some 30 Latin American countries that have added front-of-package nutrition warnings, public health researchers have found that well-designed labels can help consumers be more informed about what's in the products they buy. 'We see people shifting toward healthier options, avoiding less healthy options,' explained Marissa Hall, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. 'We also see where labeling can help people understand what's in their food and which products are high in nutrients of concern.' One 2024 study of almost 3,000 households in Chile found that consumers purchased significantly fewer products labeled as high in sugar, calories, sodium, and fat, amounting to an estimated 36.8 percent reduction in sugar consumption, a 23 percent reduced calorie intake, a 21.9 percent reduction in sodium, and a 15.7 percent drop in saturated fat consumption. But not all studies report these impacts. Another study in Brazil, found that while a 'Warning: ultra-processed food' label significantly improved the ability of consumers to identify what products were UPF, it did not influence their purchasing intentions or perceptions of healthfulness. The other benefit of nutrition labels on packaged foods is that it creates a market pressure for UPF manufacturers to make healthier foods, Hall explained. After Chile implemented its warning label law, the proportion of UPF products that were high in sugar dropped from 80 to 60 percent while products high in sodium dropped from 74 to 27 percent. Similar schemes in New Zealand and the Netherlands that allowed companies to display a logo indicating a product's healthfulness if it met certain nutritional requirements also prompted companies to swiftly reformulate products. One study found that there was a 61 percent reduction of salt in cereal products in New Zealand while 20 percent of products were reformulated in the Netherlands after the labeling schemes were introduced. The FDA's proposed nutritional labels aren't the same as those used in Latin America. In Chile and Mexico, companies are required to use bold, black stop-sign shaped icons on the front of a package, which communicate whether the product is high in fat, sugar, or sodium. If a package has three stop signs, then it is high in all three. The FDA's version consists of small, black-and-white boxes similar to existing nutritional facts boxes that already appear on the back of packaged foods, though they'll be placed on the front. These boxes will indicate if a product contains low, medium, or high levels of saturated fat, sodium, and added sugar. So the US labels could show that a product is high in salt but low in sugar and then leave it to the consumer to decide if that is good or bad. Contextualizing percentages can be helpful, but comparing such trade-offs isn't always intuitive. 'I'm concerned that it might be confusing for people to understand an overall product's healthfulness when they're making sense of all these different nutrients,' Hall said. Others have been far more critical of the FDA's proposed nutrition labels. Sen. Bernie Sanders said the labels were 'pathetically weak and must be substantially improved.' He suggested that UPF warning labels should more resemble the FDA-mandated warning labels on cigarettes that explicitly state smoking causes fatal lung disease, heart disease, cataracts, bladder cancer, and a list of other conditions. (Earlier this year, a federal judge in Texas blocked an FDA mandate to require graphic warnings of smoking's health risks.) While warning labels improved consumer awareness in studies, this hasn't translated into overall improved health outcomes. Chile introduced nutrition warning labels in 2012, but obesity rates have continued to rise from about 68 percent in 2010 to 79 percent in 2022. The Chilean government even introduced other measures to reduce UPF consumption; for example, by increasing the tax on sugary beverages from 13 percent to 18 percent in 2014. In Mexico, which introduced labeling mandates in 2020, childhood obesity rates dropped slightly from 38.2 percent in 2020 to 37.3 percent the following year, but the number of people with diabetes increased from 15.7 percent in 2020 to 18.2 percent in 2022. It may simply be too soon for public health officials to observe improvements in obesity and other chronic disease rates. What's clear is that we will need more than nutrition labels to create a food environment that allows everyone to eat healthy nutritious foods. While studies in Latin American countries have reported that front-of-package warning labels on UPFs are effective at improving awareness among consumers, this is really only one small step in the right direction. To actually reduce UPF consumption and improve health, we would need true systemic change. More than 20 million Americans live in food deserts without consistent access to healthy foods. These areas tend to be low-income and rural communities where there is a shortage of food retailers and a lack of transportation to get there. Unprocessed or minimally processed foods are, on average, more than twice as expensive as UPFs per calorie, according to one study. True success would require improving health education in schools, raising the quality of school lunches, and ensuring that everyone can actually afford fresh, healthy foods — a tall order in a country that has long prioritized profits over health and safety. It remains unclear what might happen to the FDA's proposed legislation under the Trump administration. Kennedy seems keen to take on UPFs as part of his Make America Healthy Again crusade — he currently wants the FDA to ban certain additives, dyes, and chemicals currently used in UPF. What do experts recommend? Aside from mandating warning labels on packaged goods, the FDA needs to also regulate other marketing claims that UPF companies make on their products, Hall argued. For instance, many products claim to be '100 percent all natural,' which Hall's research has shown makes many consumers incorrectly assume the product has no added sugars. But this can be false because there is no standard or even legal definition of 'natural.' Nutritional labels on UPF, along with other policy changes such as banning certain food dyes, is just the beginning. 'It takes small steps,' Baker said. And while she and many are hopeful that Kennedy's 'food is medicine' outlook will usher in change, many fear that the Trump administration's federal staff and budget cuts will hamper efforts. You've read 1 article in the last month Here at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country. Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change. We rely on readers like you — join us. Swati Sharma Vox Editor-in-Chief See More: Future Perfect Health Public Health
