If you want to understand what’s going on with Country-of-Origin Labeling (COOL), try USDA’s exceedingly useful COOL website. If you are really serious about tracking COOL, you can subscribe to a listserv for updates.
Under the current rules, meat sold as organic must come from animals with access to pasture. Loophole alert! The animals did not have to be raised on pasture. The USDA now proposes to close the loophole as it applies to ruminant animals. This proposal is open for comment. If you want to see how such things are done, this one is an excellent example (it includes a detailed history of the regulations, among other useful things). USDA wrote this in response to more than 80,000 comments on the “announcement of proposed rulemaking.” Virtually all of these wanted organically raised ruminants to be grazing on pasture. The Federal Register notice is 24 pages of tiny type but my immediate take is that the USDA proposals are really good. Take a look and see what you think. I’m withholding final judgment until somebody does a decent summary so I don’t get bogged down in “We propose to remove the word “or” at the end of paragraph X and replacing the period at the end of paragraph Y with a semicolon.”
While the U.S. economy is falling into the tank, it helps to think of cheerier topics. This very day, after years of delay, mandatory country-of-origin labeling (M-COOL) supposedly goes into effect. The “supposedly” is because M-COOL still faces so much opposition. If the experience with fish COOL is any indication, we will see lots of passive ignoring of the rules.
The legislation requires grocery stores to say where a motley collection of foods – beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, macadamia nuts, pecans, peanuts, and ginseng – were raised or grown. This is great but you can drive a truck through the loopholes. Excluded are food service, processed foods, Internet sales, and butcher shop sales. And then there’s the 6-month grace period. Here again is Consumer Reports’ guide to the exceptions.
If you don’t see COOL on products that are supposed to have such labels, ask why they aren’t there. Tell the store managers you want to know where your food comes from and remind them that they are required by law to tell you.
This is interesting. The USDA has done an analysis of the kinds of imported foods rejected by the FDA for reasons of sanitation (the lack thereof), pesticides, and improper or no registration. The winners are vegetables, seafood, and fruit, in that order. This report was about the industries that are having the most problems. It doesn’t say a word about the countries doing the exporting. Maybe the USDA will do that next? That’s the one I want to see.
One of the lesser known (to me, anyway) provisions of this year’s farm bill was to ask the USDA to do a study of food deserts – parts of inner cities and rural areas that do not have access to fresh foods. The Economic Research Service, a section of the USDA that performs major public service, is holding a conference on food deserts on October 9 in Washington. Its agenda looks terrific. Check it out!
Oh dear. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has just released a summary of a new report on the use of USDA surplus commodity foods in school meals, mainly in California. The major findings? More than half the commodity foods are processed before they get to the schools and that means added fat, sugar, or salt (example: chicken to nuggets). More than 80% of funds for commodities are used for meat and cheese; only 13% is spent on fruits and vegetables. There is so little correlation between foods recommended by the USDA pyramid and those purchased by schools that the report displays a nifty side-by-side illustration of a commodities pyramid next to a USDA pyramid (the useful old one). It is an almost perfect inverse. The complete report has lots more good stuff in it. High marks to the groups that collaborated on this one, the California Food Policy Advocates and Samuels & Associates.
USA Today interviewed USDA officials who think food prices will go higher quickly, and maybe much higher. Grow your own, anyone?
Sometimes I think we live in an alternate reality. The U.S. Court of Appeals (District of Columbia Circuit) has now overturned a lower court ruling that allowed Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct its own tests for mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE). Imagine! Creekstone wanted to demonstrate that its beef was free of BSE so it could be sold in Asia. But that would imply that other meat was not safe and force other companies to test as well. Apparently, the USDA does not think that would be fair and the Appeals Court agrees. What about fairness to beef eaters? About that, the court had nothing to say.
