My quart of fat free King Supers milk says right on the front label: “Our farmers promise not to use rbST. FDA has determined there is no significant difference between milk from rbST-treated cows and non-rbST-treated cows.”

Good for FDA. But the label still implies something must be bad in milk from rbST-treated cows.

Now Perdue Farms has come out with a new label that is FSIS approved and that they are hoping will appeal to the millennials. I assure you it does not appeal to an old baby boomer who looks for truth in advertising.

As Meatingplace pointed out on September 17, there are five statements that are made regarding Perdue chicken meat:

100% vegetarian fed
No animal byproducts
Raised cage free
No hormones or steroids, and
No antibiotics ever

Let’s take a look at those five claims before we look at the new picture on the label.

The label claim of 100% vegetarian fed and no animal by products implies there is something wrong with feeding animal by products to chickens, just like using rbST treated cows in your milk processing implies bad connotations.

This brings me back to the debate at USDA with FDA, consumers, poultry and beef organizations about whether or not animal by products from downer cows in chicken feed led to a human risk of variant CJD, or mad cow disease.

I guess they are assuming the vegans in the millennial population want vegetarian chickens, even if they are more expensive to raise.

Number 3 — raised cage free — may be a true statement, but then all broilers are raised cage free, right, so at best it is very misleading for those millennials five generations removed from the family farm.

Even more so when you look at the new picture on the label of “Pearl” the chicken, named after Jim Perdue’s Grandmother, standing outdoors, pecking for insects (OOPS, there goes the vegetarian fed only), under a bright sun with a barn, the old fashioned kind, in the background.

But the claim that always blows my stack is #4. “No hormones or steroids.”

We all know hormones are banned in poultry and swine, but we are all closer to the family farm than those millennials are.

My daughter-in-law, who is working on her PhD, does not believe me that no chickens are administered hormones. My goodness, how do I think those breasts have become so large in the last 20 years?

FDA makes milk producers point out that rbST is a non-issue. Why doesn’t USDA/FSIS make Perdue and others point out that no chickens are raised with hormones, steroids or cages?

In the Meatingplace article on the 17^th, one of the responders made the claim that buyers had an “uninformed consumer’s misconception” when it came to animal ag practices.

Well, if they have misconceptions labels like these only add to the ignorance, so please do not blame the millennials.

Look in the mirror instead and see if you or your organization/company is one of those contributing to that misconception instead of truly and honestly informing.

As for the NAE label, except for the bird mortality rates and the price per pound, I have no problem with that.

It was earned the hard and honest way, so Perdue can and should crow about it.

The truth is in the FSIS approved label; Or is it?

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