Slick advertising has blinded us to the realities of cheap food production

To survive in the food sector, you can do one of two things: get big enough so you can afford to sell as cheap as chips; or develop a strong enough brand that you can charge a premium. Of course, if you hit the jackpot, you can do both, become a global brand and retire to an island of your choice.

For the rest of us, it’s a case of hanging in there in the hope that we’ve backed the right horse.

With my flowers and poultry I’m spending an increasing proportion of my waking hours thinking about branding, positioning and all the other guff that goes with modern marketing.

Grudgingly, I’m gradually accepting that there’s a system and science to all this that will take a lot of time, persistence and money to get a part of our offering to lodge in enough people’s brains to keep us in business.

It basically all starts and ends with social media at this stage. And, social media, like those Tamagotchi that swept the world in the late 1990s, requires constant tending.

Bucolic

Posts have to be scheduled routinely, photos have to be suitably bucolic, and accompanying captions have to be right on-message, on-trend and on whatever else you’re having yourself.

While everyone has the urge to occasionally post a lovely photo, or a hilarious video, humanity was never hardwired to want to post routinely, a couple of times every day, in a constant state of

Production line:

The meat processors’ ability to produce the cheap food consumers have come to expect as the norm depends on access to cheap labour and economies of scale

chirpiness. That’s why there are people who are paid and hired specifically to carry out all this carry on. Digital marketers, social media audience managers and the like.

And all I wanted to do was sell a few bunches of tulips!

The one thing I have going for my digital marketing is that farming is so visual, and intuitively understandable.

That’s why farmers are constantly used as backdrops in adverts for everything from banks to fast-food outlets.

It’s also part of the reason why there

is such a massive disconnect between consumers and how their food is actually produced.

Images of farmers’ hands lovingly massaging new potatoes from the ground, and hens roaming through gorgeous sunlit meadows have very little to do with the vast majority of spuds or eggs that are produced.

It seems that the bigger the business, the lovelier the imagery, and the more tenuous the link to the actual product being sold.

I mention all this only because I was thinking about it when listening to the harrumphing on the airwaves over the last week about the clusters of Covid-19 outbreaks among food factory workers.

Everybody is very strong on the link between a worker’s vulnerability to infection with coronavirus and their terms and conditions of employment. The clear pattern is that the less that you are paid, the more likely you are to be exposed to the disease.

But what do people expect of a system that produces a bag of carrots for 49c, milk for 79c a litre or ham and chicken at a price that is so low they end up eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

Cheap labour

Cheap food relies on cheap labour and vast scale.

But the public are still shocked when confronted with these realities because they have been fed the Instagram diet of sun-soaked images of endless meadows and quietly contented farmers out living the good life.

No wonder the younger generations get such a shock when they ‘discover’ the realities of modern livestock and crop farming, complete with its drive for scale in order to offer a product that is competitive anywhere in the world.

The wholesale photoshopping of food production systems fuels vegan and vegetarian trends and a distrust of farmers, and does the whole sector a disservice.

One of the possible silver linings from this pandemic might just be to expose the jarring chasm between the realities of cheap food production systems and the masterful marketing that it cloaks itself in.

But I suspect that’s just wishful thinking on my part. And, if you can’t beat ’em, you had better join ’em. That must mean it’s time for another tweet.

Farmers are constantly used as backdrops in adverts for everything from banks to fast food outlets