That’s not exactly unique. Labeling is not great on anything. Even “pastured” and “grass fed”. All cows, whatever their purpose, are pastured and fed mostly grass for the bulk of their lives. Its just not an
animal you can raise entirely in confinement Even what they’re finished on isn’t the question. Cause you can grain finish with access to open pasture. The question is if they ended up in a feed lot, what kind, and for how long. And even then. Many 100% grass fed cows in the US aren’t neccisarily well off. Cause most breeds of cow require some supplimentation. Not much of the US has enough grass year round. And American farmers don’t seem to understand silage. That’s why American grass fed beef is noticably poorer quality than Irish beef, almost all of which is fed exclusively grass and silage. Cause the Americans try to go without supplimentation and the cows end up malnourished.
Without standards and regulations you have no way of really knowing what a given label neccisarily means. Which exact format, or which portion of the process it’s based on. Is the grass fed beef 100% grass fed, was the pastured meat never in a CAFO? We just assume it accords with the common understanding of the term. And even when it does, we have no way of knowing if it was done well or properly.
Veal wise if it has an American Veal Association logo its not crate veal. If it was produced in an EU member state its not crate veal. Milk fed veal will almost always have been raised in pens, and bottle fed for a portion of their lives. This is not neccisarily a bad thing in terms of humane treatment, it depends on how its conducted. AVA and EU standards on it aren’t bad. And almost all calves will be confined for a period and bottle fed to some extent. It increases survival rates and helps ensure the animals get enough nutrition, so you aren’t avoiding it entirely. Pink veal is potentially better, since as currently understood it involves nursing the calf on its own mother for an extended period, after initial confinement. But that basically requires the dairy itself to raise the animal. And pink veal is almost unavailable in the US as a result. Our veal farms are mostly dedicated operations, buying animals off dairies.
Short of that, which are pretty much rules of thumb. You have to go direct to a farm to find out how things are really done. But that kinda goes for any meat.
Well that’s sort of why veal is a great example for this subject. The approach was not to change the market. The approach was to remove it. The initial veal bad campaign smeared veal in general, cause baby cows are cute. Though the crates and other practices were the detail being pointed to. It was veal is bad, and crates are why. Not crates are bad and why use them. As a result people didn’t start looking for better veal, they stopped eating it entirely. Until fairly recently regulatory pushes weren’t to ban crates, it was to ban veal. And most Americans commonly assume all veal is crate veal and veal and crates are inseparable.
As a result we still have veal crates in a few parts of the US today. We took 25 years longer than Europe to move off the fucking things. And we started feeding instantly slaughtered veal calves to cows in pellet form. Bringing mad cow to the party. We’ve even apparently started exporting male dairy calves to Mexico. Where they will be raised in crates.
In all likelihood as a result of the veal campaign, no animal was actually treated any better. Many of them were treated worse then they could have been. And no fewer animals passed through industrial farms.
Where as in Europe the push was to regulate for more humane treatment. And they dealt with crates a long while back. And have gotten better veal out of it. Both better quality and more humane. And you don’t need to parse a label to figure it out.
The foie bans are mostly targeted at shutting down our few foie gras farms the same way. Activists even explicitly point at veal as a success. But we have among the most humanely run foie gras farms in the world. If we instead ensconced their standards in the law. We could improve the treatment of many, many more birds than the few raised for foie gras. And prevent industrial farms from setting up shop here. By blocking foie that doesn’t meet the standard from import you could even potentially impact practices elsewhere.
But that requires acknowledging that it is possible to do this properly.
