Where does your food come from?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/business/01food.html?ref=business
The Agriculture Department has given American retailers six months to comply with a new rule requiring that meats, produce, and certain nuts be labeled with the country of origin. The idea is that consumers have the right to have access to this metadata when making decisions about which food to purchase. Interestingly enough, certain foods, such as roasted nuts and mixed vegetables, are exempt from this rule. The article refers to these exempted foods as processed foods (mixed vegetables – processed?). I don’t see why a food’s classification as “processed” grants it special status to be exempt from rules that are meant to inform consumers about the potential safety (or dangers) of food.
Regardless, I’m glad to see this step being taken to include more classes of foods in country-of-origin labeling (seafood is already labeled). Necessity arising out of food recalls seems to be driving these efforts.
Ryan Greenberg Said,
October 1, 2008 @ 11:24 pm
If I had to guess, I imagine the reason that processed foods are exempt from labeling gets back to another 202 principle, namely that metadata is expensive. Since processed foods are less likely to be unsafe, especially in the context of food recalls, someone must have deemed that the benefits for this category were outweighed by the costs. Once you’ve cooked, cleaned, canned, or otherwise processed a food, it seems much less likely that they will carry food-borne illness. Considering the problem with jalepeño and serrano peppers in the U.S. earlier this year, only fresh peppers were affected; those that had been processed in some kind of salsa were unproblematic.
I’m not sure who was defining the terms such that mixed vegetables are processed. There’s probably an interesting story or reason for that classification somewhere along the line.
Shawna Hein Said,
October 3, 2008 @ 4:21 pm
maybe this will help people be motivated to eat food from their local community… I wonder how visible the labels have to be. come talk to me about my final project if you’re interested in this sort of thing
Becky Said,
October 25, 2008 @ 11:38 am
I wonder if this is because processed foods are likely to contain ingredients from many different regions — sodium caseinate from one place, hydrolyzed vegetable protein from somewhere else, and disodium inosinate from yet another place.