Antibiotic-free meat to hit the shelves

Don’t want to eat pork pumped full of penicillin? Look for a smiling pig’s face on your next packet of bacon

 Intensive farming relies on the blanket use of agricultural antibiotics. Photograph: Joel Sartore/Getty Images/National Geographic Creative

Wednesday 22 June 2016

Name: Antibiotic-free meat.

Age: Brand new.

Appearance: A smiling pig’s face.

Oh good, I’m so hungry. Are you? Hungry for meat?

Yes, I love meat! Yum! Meat that has been intensively farmed? If so, there is a very strong chance that it has been systematically pumped full of antibiotics.

Good! I don’t want to eat a poorly animal. It’s not so much because they’re poorly, more that the antibiotics – when administered in subtherapeutic doses – improve feed conversion efficiency. They might be brimming with penicillin or bambermycin or salinomycin or virginiamycin or carbadox, all because they make the animal bigger.

Thank God for that! Big animals means more meat for me! That’s not a good thing. All these antibiotics are entering the food chain. They are in your body now.

Great! I’ll never be ill again! You might be very, very ill. This blanket use of agricultural antibiotics is thought to be blunting the effectiveness of these drugs on humans. And if antibiotics stop working on humans, then we might all start dying from infections again.

Well, that doesn’t sound great. No, it doesn’t. But Karro – which bills itself as one of the leading pork processors in the UK – has just registered an “antibiotic-free” trademark with the Intellectual Property Office.

What does that mean? It means that some meat will soon come packaged with a picture of a smiling pig, which will show that the animal wasn’t treated with antimicrobial agents during its lifetime.

What a good idea! It’s good, but not exactly new. Sweden banned agricultural antibiotics in 1986, and Denmark has cut down drastically in the last 20 years.

Does that mean that I can eat Danish bacon without worrying about getting MRSA? Probably, although don’t forget the World Health Organisation’s claim last year that bacon gives you cancer.

Actually, I’ve lost my appetite. I’m worried that this has been too preachy. Has it been too preachy?

A bit. Sorry. Eat what you like, I say. We’ve all got to die of something, right?

Do say: “Finally, meat you can eat with a clear conscience.”

Don’t say: “So long as you’re cool with the mass murder of millions of animals, obviously.”