In-the-better-late-than-never category, Australians are finally speaking out about a Coles Supermarkets advertising promo that markets fear rather than food safety.
Adding hormones to Australian poultry was outlawed in the early 1960s but the myth of pumped-up chickens has persisted, said Dr Andreas Dubs, the executive director of the Australian Chicken Meat Federation.
Choice spokesman Christopher Zinn said,
"You can't have hormone-free chicken unless there are chickens that are pumped up on hormones. I think it's a little dodgy. It's true, but it's like saying it's plutonium-free or cyanide-free because it's suggesting that anything that doesn't have that label on it might have that."
A Coles spokesman said the supermarket was just countering the myth.
"Chicken in Australia has not been treated with hormones for over 40 years. However, there is still a widespread misconception among customers that they do. In fact in July last year, chicken producer Steggles commissioned a Newspoll study among 1000 people that showed that 76 per cent still believed that hormones and/or steroids were used in chicken production."
So why isn’t Coles leading the formation of public perception instead of blindly following? Because there’s a buck to be made.
Posted: January 23rd, 2011 - 8:41am
by Doug Powell
Coles Supermarkets is an Australian supermarket chain owned by Wesfarmers. It has 742 stores nationally and more than 93,000 employees. Coles currently has the second-largest market share behind Woolworths Supermarkets.
Coles is now using celebrity chef thingy Curtis Stone to push its ‘No Bull’ campaign, which proclaims all beef sold at Coles is free of hormone growth promotants, or HGPs - supplements of naturally occurring hormones that reduce farming costs because they cause cattle to produce more beef from less feed.
Meat and Livestock Australia, which acts on behalf of 47,000 meat producers, said Coles' marketing strategy could frighten consumers into thinking beef from cattle raised on growth-promoting hormones was unsafe, despite years of scientific testing showing it posed no risk.
The group told The Sunday Age it was too early to tell if customers had stopped buying beef from retailers other than Coles, but if the industry was forced to stop using hormones due to unwarranted fear, ramifications could be widespread.
Victorian Farmers Federation president Andrew Broad said, “They're creating a monster in the mind of consumers that this is bad … when the reality is there are no health risks with HGPs. The campaign implies that there's some chemical being pumped into the beef, which is just a nonsense.''
Never go with the no-risk message. There are always risks, but these are miniscule compared with the risks of dangerous microorganisms associated with beef. I’m still waiting for someone to step up and market microbial food safety – so there's fewer sick people out there.
Simon Berger of Woolworths, rightly dismissed the campaign as “a supermarket gimmick that will be bad for the environment and bad for Australian farmers,” and that it would not follow Coles' hucksterism.
“We have absolute confidence in the Australian beef industry … We have no plans to dictate to them how it's produced. Removing technology means you need more cattle, eating more food, on more land, producing more methane over more time to produce the same beef. Someone will pay for that - either farmers or customers, as well as the environment.”
Coles spokesman Jim Cooper defended the campaign, and stressed that Coles wasn't saying HGP-raised beef was unsafe, it was saying that HGP-free beef was of a higher quality and tasted better, adding, “We are doing what we need to do to improve the quality of beef we sell to customers and that's all this is about for us.”
CSIRO Professor Alan Bell confirmed there was no proof that HGPs in beef posed a health threat to consumers. But a recent CSIRO study, published in the journal Animal Production Science, supports Coles' assertion that HGP-free beef is more tender. The study found the hormones had a ''negative influence'' on tenderness, taste and quality.
HGPs have been used in Australia since 1979, and about 40 per cent of cattle are now implanted with slow-release HGPs, which add an estimated $210 million in production gains to the Australian beef industry each year.
The group said the amount of hormones found in HGP-raised beef was far lower than the level of hormones naturally occurring in many foods. One egg contained about the same amount of estrogen as 77 kilograms of beef.
to speed growth.
supplements of naturally occurring hormones that reduce farming costs because they cause cattle to produce more beef from less feed.(1).jpg)
food, on more land, producing more methane over more time to produce the same beef. Someone will pay for that - either farmers or customers, as well as the environment.”
