Better Without Billboards presents: Gag Big Ag - Lifting the lid on factory farming and advertising
For this episode, Nicola speaks to Rob Percival, Head of Food Policy at the Soil Association, and author of The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy and the Future of Meat.
The meat paradox, Rob explains, is essentially that we continue to consume other animals despite our intrinsic empathy for them. Rob argues that like all societies we have evolved strategies to dissociate from the animals who become our food, and that advertising plays an important role here in enabling us to disconnect, evade and deny the real origins of the meat on our plates.
We discuss dancing chickens, Big Ag’s big players, and the pros and cons of banning all food advertising. We consider how ending advertising for industrially farmed meat could be a necessary step in delegitimising Big Ag and shifting not only demand, but narrative power, away from this industry.