Latest / Common Sense Health / Supermarkets Are Lying About Your Food
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello. Have you ever stood in a supermarket aisle, looked at a package of chicken from Woodside Farm, for instance, and there's a picture of a farmer named Arthur hand feeding his flock against a beautiful British sunset. That's a lovely picture. Arthur doesn't exist and neither does Woodside Farm. Basically your chicken has a fictional backstory. So welcome to the murky world of supermarket farm washing. Let's pull back the plastic. And look at what's actually happening to our food. Now back in 2016, Tesco shook up the grocery world by launching a whole fleet of new budget friendly brands. Suddenly names like Rosedine Farm, Woodside Farm and Boswell Farms appeared on the shelves. Shoppers thought they were getting traditional small scale farm produce at rock bottom prices. But if you read the very fine print on the back, those farms were completely made up by corporate marketing departments. this isn't just a Tesco trick either. Aldi has Ashfield Farms and Liddell has Birchwood farm. They are all what the food industry calls brands of convenience. People caught on to this pretty quickly. A major survey showed that a massive 70% of British consumers felt outright conned by these tactics. Shoppers made it clear they only wanted genuine farm or place names on their food. They were furious that mass produced, sometimes imported food was being wrapped in a cozy traditional British aesthetic. The backlash was so strong that Morrisons publicly vowed never to use fake farm names and Asda eventually dropped their farm stores line completely. Yep, many of these fictional farms still haunt the aisles today, banking on the fact that busy shoppers rarely look past the front label. But it does get sneakier. You've probably picked up a Packet of bacon, seen a giant Union Jack on the front and assumed it must be British. Supermarkets love to use a psychological trick called proximity placement. They will hang massive British flags from the ceiling over the loose produce, and your brain sees the flag and automatically assumes the Moroccan tomatoes or the New York New Zealand lamb chops sitting directly beneath it are from Yorkshire. When it comes from the packaging itself, supermarkets exploit a massive loophole. called the processed food rule. By law, supermarkets cannot put a union jack on completely raw single ingredient meat or eggs if they're imported basically. So British country of origin laws are very strict about that. But the exact moment that meat is processed, cured into bacon, chopped into a pie or breaded into a chicken Kiev, the rules completely change. If that processing happens in a British factory, the front of the box can legally scream. produced in the UK alongside a proud union jack. Meanwhile, the actual meeting side could come from Poland or Denmark or anywhere else in the world. Hidden in tiny print on the back, you will see that. Front of pack flags don't tell you where an animal lived. They're usually just telling you where it was sliced. So how do you find actual value and truth when the front of the packaging packaging is a minefield of marketing fluff? Your first line of defence in the supermarket aisle is the red tractor label. Now, unlike a traditional farm name, the red tractor is a legal guarantee. If you see the little red tractor shield, it means the food has been rigorously checked at every stage of its journey. Most importantly, it guarantees the food was farmed, reared and packed right here in the UK under strict standards of animal welfare and food safety. If you have a to buy from a supermarket that is, ignore the fictional rolling heels and the big overhead flags, look exclusively for the red tractor or the mandatory origin UK text on the back. But if you truly want to opt out of the supermarket matrix, the absolute gold standard is to buy direct from the farm. When you buy from an independent farm shop, a local butcher or a certified vegetable box scheme, for instance, all the corporate deception completely vanishes. You aren't paying for a marketing department's creative writing exercise. You're paying the actual person who raised the livestock or pulled the carrots out of the ground if you like veg. By bypassing the big supermarket supply chain, you ensure your money goes directly to sustaining real British agriculture rather than funding another clever supermarket ad campaign. So the next time you go shopping, remember, look past the flags, flip the packet over and don't go. Let a fake farm tell you any tall tales. Now here's a little bit of bonus information. Every single egg produced in the UK under food safety laws has a specific code stamped directly onto its shell in edible ink. The stamp completely bypasses the marketing claims on the box, telling you exactly how the hen was raised, which country it came from, and the specific farm it was laid on. The code always follows a standard formula. Number Country Farm ID. Here is exactly how to read it from left to right. Number one is the farming method. The very first digit is either a zero, one, two or three. The most important number for animal welfare as it tells you exactly how the hen lived. So zero is organic. The hens have continuous daytime access to outdoor pastures, are fed an organic diet and are kept in much smaller groups with more space than standard free range. One, free range. The hens have continuous daytime access to open air runs during their laying cycle. Number two indicates barn. These heads are kept permanently indoors but can move freely around a large barn floor with access to perches, nests and litter areas. Three, caged. The hens are kept indoors in enriched cages. Then you get to the second thing which is the country of origin. The letters basically. So immediately following the method number you will see a two-letter country code. This legally locks down where the egg was laid. Obviously UK is United Kingdom, IE is Ireland, FR France, NL Netherlands, and so on. If a supermarket box has a Union Jack on the cardboard but the eggs inside are stamped proof anything other than the UK, the eggs were imported. And number three, the producer ID, the final numbers. The remaining digits at the end. of the stamp or a unique registration number assigned to the specific poultry farm. Government inspectors use this specific code for complete traceability. If there is ever a food safety recall or contamination issue, officials can type this number into their database and instantly pin down the exact barn on the exact farm where the egg was laid. Now that's basically my little bit about farming and produce. If you enjoyed that please give me a like, share and subscribe. If you didn't like it, then drop a comment to tell me what you didn't like about it. I was trying to keep it simple today. Hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you on the next one.