Springwatch star Chris Packham wants graphic, cigarette-style health warnings slapped on supermarket meat packs to expose the grim reality of animal suffering and push shoppers to rethink
Chris Packham wants to slap tobacco-style health warnings on packs of supermarket meat.
The Springwatch legend is calling for a radical overhaul of food labelling so shoppers understand the appalling conditions some animal are kept in.
He reckons if packaged meat had pictures similar to those that appear on fag packets, people would think twice about buying it.
Chris, who is also known for The Really Wild Show, said: “I often fantasise that I’m going to have a whole series of stickers printed of animals kept in appalling conditions, and then I’m going to go and stick them on the meat packets in the supermarket and see how people react.
“As they did when they were buying cigarettes and looking at diseased lungs, if they pick it up and see a pig in a farrowing crate covered in its own excrement, blood and rolling on its own piglets, then are they going to buy and eat that? A percentage of people would be sufficiently empathetic that they would change their habit.”
The TV star is currently promoting a hard-hitting documentary called Greenwashed and thinks focusing on health issues when it comes to a meat diet can drive the “environmental message in a different way”.
He added: “I think when it comes to getting the stick out to coax a change in public opinion, health is a good way to go because people do respond when you tell them that smoking tobacco will kill you.
“They do respond when they tell you that too much sugar is going to give you health issues.
“As much as we don’t want the nanny state, we do quite like being looked after.”
Chris also wants food labels to show if a product contains palm oil, as its cultivation has stripped rainforests bare and left orang-utans homeless.
Greenwashed’s producer Sofia Pineda Ochoa, said: “I’m going to try to do anything I can to help the situation.
“I started in my personal life – really beginning to read labels and avoiding palm oil. It’s kind of hard because it’s actually used in a lot of things.”
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