An advert they won’t want you to see
To the best of my recollection I’ve never eaten foie gras. Veal isn’t on the menu. The soaring prices for unsustainable fisheries like bluefin tuna struck them off my shopping list before I was forced to ask myself any difficult ethical questions. And if there is any restaurant in New Zealand still serving sharkfin soup, let me know and I’ll slap ‘em on the front of next week’s Sunday Star-Times.
But, like other Kiwis, eggs are a loved staple of my family’s diet. I watched with bizarre pride as my two-year-old son demolished three of them at breakfast today.
They’re not cheap. Like an egg standing on its end, supermarkets must strike a precarious balance: To display leadership in phasing out caged eggs, or to leave the ethical decisions to the shoppers who must feed their families?
Not so long ago I did my shopping across the bridge in Mangere. There, in a community where some people struggle to put food on the table, most eggs were cheaper ones, from battery hens.
The same is true in the 183 Countdown supermarkets owned by Progressive Enterprises. This week, they announced they would not only phase out battery-caged eggs by the government’s deadline of December 2022, but also require their own-brand suppliers to stop farming colony-caged eggs.
Progressive brought forward their announcement, initially scheduled for today, as they caught whispers of an aggressive Safe campaign. The animal welfare group has filmed a stark advertisement, depicting emaciated battery hens in a coop at a Countdown supermarket.
It is an advertisement that Countdown will be unhappy about. It is an ad that, no doubt, they’d rather you did not see.
So, after negotiating with Safe, they moved first. They claimed leadership by announcing a small and slow step towards a more tolerable life for our chickens.
A small step it may be, but a step in the right direction.
The bigger question it poses for all of us when we do our grocery shopping, is this: Do we want to rely on big supermarket chains and the government for moral leadership? With respect to some very good and decent business and political leaders, I say no.
Until the caged egg ban comes into force in 2022, those of us who can afford free-range eggs will make our own decisions to pay that premium.
There are others who would be genuinely hit hard in the pocket by having to pay twice the price for a valuable protein staple.
They are best-placed to make those tough decisions for their families – not Safe, not the supermarket chains, and not the government.