Voting With Your Dollars Only Works if Product Labels are Truthful
By Steve Roach, FACT’s Safe and Healthy Food Program Director
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is supposed to make sure that the labels on meats are not false or misleading. The USDA has found a high level of fraud in meat sold under a “raised without antibiotics” label but is not requiring businesses marketing under this label to test for antibiotics in the meat they sell. You can help by joining FACT in calling for the USDA to require testing through our action page.
When I purchase meat, I look for products that have been humanely raised without the routine use of antibiotics. This is known as voting with your dollars and can be an important tool for changing how our food is produced. Most of the meat my family consumes is from a local farm and we know the animals have been raised humanely without unnecessary antibiotics. Sometimes though it is not practical to buy from your local farm and for some people there are huge barriers to farm or even farmer’s market purchases. That is why labels are important. Labels allow you to make a purchase that better aligns with your values. At the same time, there is always the risk of “greenwashing” where a company pretends to make a more environmentally friendly product but it really is all just marketing. In other cases, there is outright fraud.
Fraud is what is happening in the market for “raised without antibiotics” meats. A lot of people are rightly worried about the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs that lead to difficult to treat and sometimes impossible to treat infections. Since a lot of the overuse of antibiotics that creates the resistance problem occurs in industrial animal raising facilities, people seek out products raised without antibiotics. FACT’s reports on the antibiotic use policies of restaurant chains and groceries are aimed at helping people make better choices with respect to antibiotic use when going out to eat. Fraud limits the impact of those well-intentioned choices.
A study in 2022, found that a significant portion of cattle in feedlots where the animals were “raised without antibiotics” had detectable antibiotics in their urine indicating they had received antibiotics at some point, so were not eligible for the “raised without antibiotics” label. In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began testing for antibiotics in beef intended for sale under the “raised without antibiotics” label at slaughter. The USDA found antibiotics in 20% of the samples of beef intended for the raised without antibiotics market. This was worse than in the 2022 study. The USDA has not looked at chicken, pork, or turkey sold under raised without antibiotics labels, but there is no reason to think they will be better.
The USDA is responsible for “ensuring that meat or poultry labels are truthful and not misleading.” In response to the earlier study and their own data, the USDA has updated its guidelines on what a company needs to do to show that an animal raising label claim, like raised without antibiotics, is truthful. The updated guidelines for the “raised without antibiotics” label claims state the USDA “strongly encourages establishments to support such claims by instituting a sampling program to test for the use of antibiotics in animals prior to slaughter.” Given, the high level of fraud detected by the USDA this language is not strong enough. Please join us in calling on the USDA to require, not just “strongly suggest”, testing for antibiotics in raised without antibiotics meat. People want to make healthier food choices, but fraud makes this difficult. The USDA has the authority and the ability to stop this fraud and they should do so by requiring testing so that people can feel confident when voting with their dollars.