Guest Lecturer Dan Severson & Mislabeled Product

On Monday, October 21st, Dan Severson came to the class to talk about predominately livestock in the state of agriculture today. He talked about a wide range of things, such as the normal meat animals (like cows, chickens, and pigs) and more obscure topics in livestock (like bees, and show animals).

An interesting thing was the statistic that he mentioned where the consumption rates of nearly every livestock animal went down except for poultry. This comes to no surprise to me for two reasons. The first being that poultry is arguably the most cost effective form of meat. The second is that poultry is generally viewed to be more lean and healthy, and there has been a recent rise in health consciousness in the western world.  The decreases in the other forms of meat are not surprising either, especially the decreases in consumption of veal and lamb. Alongside the rise of health consciousness came a shift in ethical standards with many people switching to vegetarian diets because they view eating animals as unethical. It goes without saying that this shift also put a slight taboo on eating young animals like you would when eating veal and lamb.

 

For the mislabeled product, I found a jar of peanut butter that was labeled gluten-free and vegan even though peanut butter is naturally gluten-free and vegan. This is just a case of advertising and appealing to a certain group of people through clever use of words. I do not think it’s unethical for companies to do this because they are not lying, however this type of advertising does get a tad bit annoying.

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