In 2006 I had a paper published in the British Food Journal on ethical modelling of the food supply chain. The theme of the paper follows on very much from yesterdays post. The paper states that:
"Public concerns with issues including animal welfare and environmental management and stewardship have required organisations within the food supply chain to formally demonstrate their commitment to ethical issues... Legislation defines governmental policy but it does not define what is “good” or “right” and this is the role of ethics. In order to have ethic reasoning embedded in food policy either at governmental or at organisational level, policy makers must be able to understand and evaluate moral arguments, be fair-minded and make well-reasoned decisions. Consumers need to trust that both policy makers and those manufacturing and supplying food make decisions and provide information which is accessible, accurate and affords reasoned choice when purchasing food products".
I think this still holds true.
The accessibility of the information for the consumer is key here. Compassion in World Farming are campaigning for clear labelling, and there's information for interested consumers here: http://www.ciwf.org.uk/your_food/know_your_labels
Posted by: bethgranter | January 29, 2009 at 04:53 PM
Thank you for the comment - I will check out the link.
This week attention has been focused once again on food labelling, its clarity and whether the rules are potentially misleading for the consumer. I wrote about this in another post http://thehumanimprint.typepad.com/the_human_imprint/2008/12/food-labelling-does-it-inform-choice.html
It would be good to see clarity too in animal wefare claims. I would like to see measurable indicators of animal welfare being adopted i.e. quantitative rather than qualitative and I have written about this at http://animalwelfarechat.blogspot.com/2009/01/foot-pad-lesion-scoring.html
Posted by: Louise Manning | January 31, 2009 at 06:06 AM