You are adorable, little chook, but I really wish you hadn’t told me all that to my face. How am I ever going to swallow your body part now? And how did you get your tongue around “legumes”? But do go on. “I am naturally healthy, 100% antibiotic free, and I certainly wouldn’t touch hormones because my body is a temple, and so is yours.” Jeez. And you’re worried about my body. What a sweetheart.

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There’s something very wrong about all this. Yes, I know that if we must eat meat, we must look after the animals providing it. That’s a given and a necessity. But trying to paint a rosy picture for customer carnivores is as hypocritical as Meghan Markle wanting Archie to be a prince. As an advertising strategy, it’s plain misleading, I reckon, and rather than make consumers feel good, is more likely to make them feel sick as a dog. It only took a glance at his own little lambs frolicking in the sun to turn Paul McCartney into a veggo. I don’t think this is the companies’ intention.

It gets worse. According to an RSPCA website, Knowledge Base, free-range meat chickens must stay indoors for their first three weeks until they’ve grown enough feathers to handle the great outdoors. At four to six weeks of age, they’re then shunted off to the great big chicken coop in the sky. Let’s do the maths. That means that all this good-life, legume-pecking, beak-in-beak fun stuff down on the ranch might only last one week of the chook’s little life. (The natural lifespan of a hen is up to 10 years, says the RSPCA.)

I could go on about the sad stuff and the Orwellian euphemisms that industry gives for sending chooks to their final non-resting place – “partial depopulation”, “thinning out”, “multiple pick-ups” – but, like the film Babe, this story is G-rated. I’ll just say that you’ll need to assume your favourite yoga position and start chanting “om” to read elsewhere about their “humane” killing. In my book, it should be no less than by lethal injection from an anaesthetist with a bedside manner. True, that would be expensive and labour-intensive, but so much kinder.

But back to meat labels. My favourites are the ones that get straight to the nitty-gritty, happily ignoring that the chicken breast tenders I might have eaten two weeks ago, when I was a carnivore, were once a chirpy sentient being who enjoyed bathing in the sun. “At FroPro, we understand the irresistible appeal of crispy fried chicken … Made using 100% hormone free Aussie chicken breast and coated in our famous High Protein Southern Coating. You get all the flavour and crunch without the guilt!”

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Without the guilt? Now that’s a food label.

Jo Stubbings is a freelance writer and reviewer.

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