How Ads for Meat, Milk and Eggs Sell You a Fantasy

Imagery is a powerful cornerstone of food marketing — think of a laughing cow on cheese — often playing an outsize role in what consumers ultimately choose to buy. But when it comes to the marketing of meat, dairy and eggs, the branding does not necessarily match reality. Appealing to the emotional part of the brain, visuals are there to tell a story to connect with consumers, not provide transparency about the meat or milk in your cart.

As author, academic and activist Carol J. Adams tells Sentient, “We’re in an image-based world,” and “images accomplish a lot, going around rational minds, right to the emotion.” After all, in the minds of many consumers, how farm animals are raised is important.

Symbols like red barns, rolling green pastures, sunshine and happy animals are common on meat and dairy labels. But how accurate are the most common visual representations? Sentient spoke to Adams, author of the books “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” “The Pornography of Meat,” and others, as well as to Jo-Anne McArthur, photojournalist and founder of We Animals, to compare common tropes in advertising with the reality of industrial animal agriculture today.

 Misleading Advertising Expectation #1: The Traditional Barn

The Reality: 

The red or otherwise traditional barn is a prominent symbol used in meat, dairy and egg marketing. Rooted in childhood nursery rhymes, fables and films, the barn helps paint farming as wholesome and idyllic. From “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to “Charlotte’s Web” and “Babe,” we learn at an early age that farms are peaceful places where animals roam freely.

As adults, we find that same barn imagery on labels for meat, dairy and eggs. Adams argues these images are placed to evoke feelings of comfort, familiarity and trust; a powerful marketing tool. “You’d really have to stretch the notion of barn to apply it to these [modern] institutions,” she argues.

McArthur has been to over 60 countries to document agricultural spaces, and says that what she often finds is “that the barns are actually very big warehouses. Gone are the days of the small red barn.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are approximately 74.5 million hogs and pigs at any given time raised on around 56,265 U.S. farms. This means the average building holds over 1,300 animals per farm, not quite a little red barn. The majority of farm animals in the U.S. are housed in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs), which operate “more like factories than farms.”

Misleading Advertising Expectation #2: Green Pastures for All

The Reality:

Another visual commonly utilized in the marketing of meat, dairy and eggs is that of green fields and grassy hills. Sometimes accompanied by bright sunshine, blue skies and blue water, these symbols elicit notions of farming as a natural endeavor.

Agriculture, however depicted, is an entirely human invention developed to feed ourselves more efficiently, not a product of nature. Today, the vast majority of farm animals are raised on factory farms; not on rolling pastures. Space is particularly tight for chickens.

“For the most part, birds who are used to lay eggs don’t ever have access to daylight,” says McArthur. They are kept in windowless warehouses, often with artificial lighting used to manipulate laying cycles. Around 60 percent of hens in the U.S. egg industry are confined to battery cages, the smallest size cages allowed by law. In Canada that number is over 80 percent.

For poultry chickens, also known as broilers, no outdoor access is ever required by USDA standards, unless the label claims “organic” or “free-range,” then outdoor access is mandated by USDA guidelines. On industrial farms — which can house up to 50,000 birds — each chicken is provided as little as 100 square inches each, as per the National Chicken Council’s minimal guidelines.

There are some programs that do require chickens to have “access” to the outdoors, such as Certified Animal Welfare Approved and USDA Organic, but what that means in practice varies. Certified Humane standards, for example, do not require that chickens have access to the outdoors at all, unless specified as “free range” or “pasture raised.”

This limited access to green fields and sunshine is simply not the norm for the majority of egg-laying hens, nor broiler chickens farmed in the U.S.

And as we’ll see with our next piece of misleading advertising, pasture is only the norm for beef cows, and for around four to six months, give or take depending on the farm.

Misleading Advertising Expectation #3: Green, Not Brown

The Reality:

On a label, green tends to connote healthy and natural to consumers. “Green is a positive color, and green fields imply bucolic,” Adams says. Unfortunately, though, the use of the green pastures on meat labels is often not accurate. In fact, the reality is much…browner.

“Where is all the manure?” Adams asks. “Where is the dirty water that comes from these huge manure fields?” In reality, modern farming operations produce immense amounts of waste, around 1.4 billion tons of manure each year. That waste is supposed to be spread onto fields to help crops grow — but the sheer volume of waste coupled with spills from accidents or extreme weather leads to plenty of exceptions.

Manure from agricultural operations is the primary source of phosphorus and nitrogen contamination in surface and groundwater, leading to undrinkable water supply in factory farm frontline communities in states like Iowa and North Carolina.

Beef cattle in the U.S. spend at least some of the first part of their lives on pasture. Over half of them eventually end up in dusty feedlots for fattening, before being sent to slaughter. As of January 2024 in the U.S., there were 14.4 million cows and calves on feedlots.

McArthur has been to industrial feedlots all over the world, including in the U.S. and Canada, and describes them as cramped and dirty spaces, where animals are “not given much room to move, explore or do anything natural.” They are also often slippery, she says, due to the excessive amount of animal waste. “It’s not a place that animals can romp around on.”

Misleading Advertising Expectation #4: Happy Cows and Other Cartoon Animals

The Reality:

Meat, dairy and egg companies that include animals in their branding often use cartoon depictions or simple silhouettes, rather than real images of animals.

This may sound harmless enough, but Adams, who has been called a pioneer of vegan-feminist critical theory, argues there is a more sinister intent behind the tactic. Meat marketers tend to shy away from real images, she says, as “that would perpetuate the lie that animals want to be our food. So they have to rely on different cultural tropes, and the cartoon is one of them. The cartoon sort of liberates them into a bigger lie.”

From her work photographing farmed animals, McArthur adds, “you would be really hard-pressed to find an animal that could be photographed to look pretty [enough for marketing purposes],” she says, “because they are very, very dirty, because they don’t have the ability to clean themselves in these conditions.” She adds that it wouldn’t be possible to “go into a place like this and take a beautiful picture that would make us want to eat these animals.”

The use of cartoons like the “laughing cow” helps perpetuate the image of happy and clean animals, animals who only experience what is often described as “one bad day” by farmers who tout their welfare standards. Again, the vast majority of animals are not raised on such farms.

“There’s a desire [by marketers] to sanitize, to sentimentalize, because the truth is threatening,” says Adams. “Avoiding some language and using a happy cow is a successful way of keeping complacent consumers.”

The Bottom Line

Meat, dairy and egg marketing relies heavily on imagery to shape consumer perceptions, with symbols like red barns and green pastures suggesting idyllic farming conditions. However, the reality is starkly different, with most farm animals confined to industrial, overcrowded environments, far from the serene settings depicted on labels. These carefully crafted visuals mask the grim conditions of factory farms, perpetuating a misleading narrative that sanitizes the true nature of industrial animal agriculture.