Welfare Washing: Disseminating Disinformation in Meat Marketing

What is it about?

Many people report that they feel discomfort at the thought of eating animals, but still they remain meat eaters. In this article, we suggest that advertisements play a key role in helping people come to terms with their meat eating, but that they do so by giving a quite unreal impression of how well animals are cared for in contemporary meat production. We study three advertisement closely to understand exactly how ads manage to give this impression, and find that they, in various ways, try to persuade consumers that they need not be concerned, since the meat industry and government are already working for the good of animals and their welfare. The message these ads convey, in other words, is that consumers can safely "keep calm and carry on eating meat." We suggest this tendency in advertising can be called "welfare washing," as a variant of the more well-known phenomenon of "greenwashing."

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