Many meat companies use fancy wording like “all natural” “wholesome” and “organic” to sell their products. Some go beyond that and put pictures of farmers to create the illusion that the meat came from some cute little family owned farm or use the color green on their labels to make consumers think they are environmentally friendly. This kind of advertisement is called “greenwashing”- making a product seem more enviromentally friendly than it actually is. Consumers lose in this situation, people go after these so called “environmentally friendly” products believing they are doing good when in reality, they are just getting ripped off.
These labels can be very misleading. Most of the time the meat is coming from a factory farm, which can be loaded with environmentally unfriendly activity making their environmental footprint insanely big. Activities on these farms include releasing greenhouse gases and producing a very large amount of waste that is polluting our land, air and water. An interesting fact about factory farms is that it takes about 1,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef when you add all the water used to water the crops the animals eat to water the animals drink to the water used to clean the factories machinary and transportation trucks.
But anyway, on most of these factory farms they feed the animals genetically modified food. And how one would know this gets a little bit tricky.
The USDA definition of “natural” is, “A product containing no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed.” However, the USDA definition of natural is only used to describe how the meat was treated after it was killed, not when it was still alive. So by reading the label, most the time it cannot be determined if the livestock were or were not fed GMO foods.
The USDA has a lot specific defintions for the labeling terms on meat packaging. “Fresh means whole poultry and cuts have never been below 26 °F” and “Free Range means Producers must demonstrate to the Agency that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside.”
A specific example would be Tysons Foods Inc., one of the largest companies in the meat industry globally. In 2007 they were labeling there chicken as “all natural” when actually their chicken was being treated with antibiotics, being fed GMO corn and inject the chicken with saltwater for a “plumping effect.”
Sources:
http://www.organicvalley.coop/community/beyond-the-plate/greenwash/#refs
http://www.businesspundit.com/the-top-25-greenwashed-products-in-america/
http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/factory-farming-and-the-environment/
http://www.naturalnews.com/024756_antibiotic_antibiotics_USDA.html
environmentalstudent 
Wow! I knew that meat companies were bad, but I didn’t know that they were this bad. It makes me not want to eat any meat from the store anymore.
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great post. this is an interesting example of how greenwashing can overlap with “healthwashing” and other kinds of sneaky advertising.
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I had no idea the impact a “factory farm” really has, yet alone that they even existed. I’m sure people aren’t aware about the amount of water used to make a single product. I defiantly think companies should be more specific about the care of the animal before and after.
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