Where's the beef from? Soon, you may find out
Bill would require country-of-origin food labeling, but there are loopholes
WASHINGTON -- After contending with tainted toothpaste, suspect seafood, and poisoned pet food traced to China, many consumers are now looking for labels that indicate a product's country of origin.
Some foods -- like shrimp and other types of seafood -- already must be labeled with a country name, thanks to legislation Congress passed in 2002. Other suppliers added labels voluntarily long before a series of recalls made consumers skittish about Chinese products.
After years of delays, labels for a wider variety of foods -- including beef, lamb, pork, perishable agricultural products, and peanuts -- are set to become mandatory by September 2008. A bill passed by the US House of Representatives in early August is expected to be taken up by the Senate and signed by President Bush with few revisions. But despite the long-awaited regulations, plenty of food still will not carry country labels.
Consider poultry. Because opponents of the legislation were so strongly against requiring country labels and so little imported poultry is sold in the United States, legislators exempted it to avoid jeopardizing the bill, said a staffer at the US House Agriculture Committee.
Then there are the labeling law's quirks. For example, jalapeno peppers sold fresh will have to be labeled. But if they're sold frozen as "poppers" -- wrapped in a jacket of breading with cream cheese filling -- they will be exempt.
And a laundry list of countries are likely to grace various hamburger labels, owing to the multitude of countries that send beef here for processing. But if that same beef is used as an ingredient in a Marie Callender's frozen dinner, for instance, the dinner's maker -- ConAgra Foods -- will not be required to note the country of origin.
Opponents have seized upon what they call the arbitrary nature of the legislation. Why pigs and not poultry? Why green peanuts but not peanut butter? The answers lie in politics, and the definition of processing.
Processed foods do not have to carry country labels. For peanuts, that exempts nuts that are pulver ized and sold as peanut butter, roasted nuts coated in chocolate, and peanuts roasted in their shells.
"We've made our case to USDA and Capitol Hill that snack nuts go through a roasting process," said Jim McCarthy, president of the Snack Food Association.
Bob Sutter, chief executive of the North Carolina Peanut Growers Association, suspects snack makers want to purchase ingredients from all over the world, "without having to say they came from Argentina or Mexico or Honduras."
When it comes to gourmet peanuts, however, Sutter hears from buyers seeking as much information as possible. Callers say, " 'We want to tell our customers where these peanuts came from. Not just North Carolina. We want to tell them they came from a farm in Northampton, N.C.,' " he said.
Those against the labeling law also say it provides few benefits for consumers but plenty of additional costs for suppliers and retailers.
"People are not looking for the origin of the product," said Kirk Ferrell, vice president of public policy for the National Pork Producers Council.
Indeed, the three-year-old practice of adding "US" labels to seafood did not boost sales, according to the Food Marketing Institute, which represents food retailers and wholesalers with annual sales volume of $340 billion. First-year costs for adding the labels soared up to $16,000 per store, 10 times what the US Department of Agriculture estimated.
And the new labeling will be complicated. For instance, new meat labels will mark beef, lamb, and pork born, raised, and slaughtered domestically as well as meat that came from animals raised in other countries before being sold here. Mixed labels will highlight animals born and raised in one place, but slaughtered elsewhere.
Scraps from hundreds of carcasses can wind up in massive hamburger grinders, meaning a hamburger package could potentially list scores of countries. A long list will inform consumers that a tub of hamburger may contain animals from a range of countries whose meat is processed by US slaughterhouses. The largest exporters of fresh and frozen beef to the United States last year were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Uruguay, and Mexico, according to the USDA.
In the dozen or so years it's taken for country-of-origin labels to move from concept to congressional action, consumers have come to see them as shorthand for which food is safer. American shoppers are reassured by food imported from such countries as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, said Christine Burhn, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California-Davis. They are wary of imports from lesser-developed countries, including China, India, and Mexico.
"I want to know how far the food has traveled. I want to know which country it has come from," said Marion Nestle, a New York University nutrition professor and author of "What to Eat." "I want to know whether the standards that we have for food production in the United States are generally followed in that country."
With such shoppers in mind, Kellogg NA Co. highlights the Virginia peanuts in its Nutri-Grain Fruit & Nut Bars. Newman's Own Organics notes that its olive oil is a product of Tunisia and that its mints were made in Mexico City.
"There is a growing group of consumers who want to know more about . . . the source of their food," said Peter Meehan, chief executive of Newman's Own Organics. The company tries to buy domestically first, but rigorously certifies its suppliers regardless of their location.
Gretchen Ellison, a 57-year-old Shrewsbury resident, is learning more about such practices. She found out that Trader Joe's uses third-party labs to test products like frozen shrimp imported from Indonesia. Ellison also discovered that the Trader Joe's smoked salmon she adores is imported from Chile.
"It says right on the label 'from the icy cold waters of the Atlantic,' " she said. "So, we got out the map to see which part of Chile touched 'the cold waters.' A little tiny bit of it does abut the Atlantic."
Diedtra Henderson can be reached at dhenderson@globe.com. 