Mandatory method-of-production labelling could be the answer to falling consumer trust in food safety. By David Burrows.

The BBC “Countryfile” presenter Tom Heap has created a bit of a stir by suggesting children should visit slaughterhouses, intensive chicken barns and “crowded pigpens” on school trips. It could be a bit like the aquarium with see-through tunnels through the production units, he mused in an article for the Radio Times this month. “This may sound absurd, but at least install a webcam at every stage of production, put a hyperlink on the final package and brand it ‘The Visible Pig’ or ‘The Candid Cockerel’,” he wrote.

The Radio Times has long been a conduit for presenters to push their profiles with controversial ideas (who can forget Chris Packham’s “Let pandas die” interview in 2009?), but Heap has a point – trust in the food system could do with a bump.

A survey in September 2017 by NFU Mutual showed that 38% of consumers have confidence in the British supply chain. In August 2016, a NatCen poll found that only one in three people trusted the government to ensure food was safe to eat and only one in two had confidence in the quality of the food produced in Britain. Trust in supermarkets and food manufacturers was also low, the research showed.

Farmers seem to have a better reputation, with the NFU’s latest farmer favourability survey showing that 68% of consumers see UK producers in a positive light. However, they want higher welfare standards, which means farmers can’t rest on their laurels – according to research by McDonald’s published in April, two in five are planning to invest more in animal welfare this year due to rising demand from consumers and retailers. The 2018 Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare concluded: “Pressure from consumers, investors, the media and NGOs, is shining a spotlight on farm animal welfare, forcing it up the corporate agenda.”

This is good news. But ask farmers whether they want the attention, or for their farms to be put in the spotlight as Heap has suggested, and the answer is often “Get off my land.”

Consider the industry’s resistance to mandatory method-of-production (MoP) labelling, which would mean meat and dairy products coming with details of how the animals were reared (a bit like eggs do already). Descriptions that have been mooted include “zero grazed” for cows kept indoors year-round, or “higher welfare indoor” with more space and enrichment for animals.

According to Labelling Matters, a coalition including Compassion in World Farming, the Soil Association and the RSPCA, eight out of 10 consumers want to know how farm animals were reared. The current labelling system is also “confusing and misleading” (why else would there have been demand for free-range milk?)

“The time is right for this issue to be pushed forward into the public realm,” CIWF’s head of campaigns, Sean Gifford, told the Grocer in March.

In April, at a Westminster food and nutrition forum in London, the issue came up again. Stephen Pugh, an EU food labelling specialist and former head of food labelling at DEFRA, was asked by Farmers Guardian whether MoP could work. “Let’s see whether the British public want it. They did with eggs. Is there the same push for grass-fed beef or outdoor-reared pork? I suspect there might be. I feel it’s an untapped area of further labelling but whether it is mandatory raises all sorts of other problems.” Problems that the farming sector is only too happy to elaborate on.

Pig World recently carried a long article detailing why MoP should “come with a health warning”. Coming up with meaningful standardised descriptions of how a pig has been reared in a single label is “virtually impossible” because, unlike egg production, there are “numerous systems in place that a single pig can dip in and out of throughout its life – a single animal could, for example, have been born outside and raised indoors on straw and on slatted flooring at different stages.”

The bigger concern for the pig sector is the “unfair demonisation” of certain methods of production. “The campaign is, after all, being driven by those who want to drive consumers away from what they label as ‘cruel intensive factory farming systems’.”

Both are valid points. Intensively reared livestock, for example, can have a lower carbon and water footprint than their free-range cousins, but they do require higher levels of antibiotics. Outdoor isn’t necessarily always best for welfare, either: mortality rates in caged birds, for example, are around 2% to 4%; in free-range it’s 8% or even as high as 10%.

Consider the Netherlands, where all of the fresh retail market is likely to be “slow-growing breeds” come 2020. Pressure from animal rights groups drove this change, with a campaign against fast-growing birds called Plofkip – or “exploding chickens”. The campaign reportedly caught the imagination of the public so much that “plofkip” was named new Dutch word of the year in 2012.

However, as Dr David Llewellyn from Harper Adams University noted in his 2017 Templeton Fellowship report, concerns were also raised that “this approach can inadvertently offset gains in welfare and taste with environmental losses, including the need for additional feed, land and water, and increased production of manure”. As one expert told Llewellyn: “What we do know is that there are trade-offs and that it is important to take into consideration chicken welfare, sustainability and providing safe, affordable food for consumers.”

Pugh highlighted similar concerns at London’s forum: in the north of the country where it’s cold animals may also spend longer indoors – and it is caveats and discrepancies like that which need to be ironed out before heading down the mandatory MoP route.

So, farmers need flexibility to protect their livestock. But is it possible to square the ethics on one side with environmental concerns on the other? Not really. Eating Better recently tried to define “better meat”. As Footprint noted at the time: “When you set aside vested interests no one – not even the experts – can say for sure that one production system or label is inherently more sustainable than another.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Michael Gove, the DEFRA secretary, wants to develop a new gold-standard metric for food and farming quality, for example. He said: “There’s still no single, scaled measure of how a farmer or food producer performs against a sensible basket of indicators, taking into account such things as soil health, control of pollution, contribution to water quality as well as animal welfare. We’ve been in discussion with a number of farmers and food producers about how we might advance such a scheme and I think that, outside the EU, we could establish a measure of farm and food quality which would be world-leading.”

Like Heap, Gove could simply be pushing his own profile but the idea merits attention. Farmers have for years been saying that people are now disconnected from their food and how it’s produced, so perhaps it is time to engage and consider some of these ideas, however absurd or complicated they might seem.