Forceful advertising on Eggs / Animal cruelty: the right to know.

BuyBlue.org just mentioned a new egg-vertising scheme, whereby egg shells will be used as a medium for delivering yet more advertising to the consumers:

On Monday, [CBS,] the U.S. broadcast network was to announce plans for placing laser imprints of its trademark eye insignia, as well as logos for some of its shows, on eggs - 35 million of them in September and October.
Newspapers, magazines and Web sites are so crowded with ads for entertainment programming that CBS was ready to try something different. The best thing about the egg concept was its intrusiveness.
"It's unlike any other ad medium in the world, because you are looking at the medium while you are using it". "You can't avoid it".

Precisely: we cannot avoid it. While you can zap away from television commercials, you must look at the egg shell if you want to break it to do an omelet.

A Buyblue user asks: do we have to become vegan to still have a chance to avoid intrusive advertising alltogether?

At the same time, we are reminded of animal cruelty at factory farms like at Wegmans and all the others:

Wegmans crowds up to nine hens into tiny, barren cages at its company-run egg facility, allowing each hen less than half a square foot of space. These animals are forced to live in their own waste and on top of the corpses of their cage-mates. A team of investigators from Compassionate Consumers found hens at Wegmans Egg Farm with severe infections and suffering from extreme dehydration. Some hens were trapped in the mesh of their cages, and others were drowning in liquid manure.

A documentary made by a small investigative team from the organization Compassionate Consumers features statements from Wegmans representatives, interviews with the investigators, and footage of what life and death is like inside of an "Animal Care Certified" battery cage facility.

The Animal Rights activists wanted to go into the farm to see for themselves the conditions the hens where living. In this video, Jo Natale, Wegmans' Consumer Service Manager says:

No one, including people within our own company, are permitted to ... go into the facility... It is strictly limited to the people who must work in the facility.

I haven't watched the whole video yet (I didn't want to delay writing this blog), but that statement reminded me of an old idea of mine (and probably others): I think the consumers should have a legal, if not constitutional right to know what food they are ingesting, how it was produced and processed. We should push for a new law that would guarantee us access to factory farms, slaughterhouses and maybe other food-processing facilities. With such a legislation, factory would be required to allow representative of animal-rights charities or consumer associations to enter such "facilities" and take pictures/shoot a film AS LONG AS such visitors do not disturb the operation within those "facilities".

This legislation should cover at the very least fishing boats, factory farms and slaughter houses (because those involve not only the right of the consumers but those of the animals!) but could be extended other food-processing facilities.
I have never heard about a drive to push for such legislation.

We have a right to know.