Last month new country's agriculture secretary, former governor of Iowa and friend to some people in the local food movement Tom Vilsack, announced the COOL program would go ahead as planned. COOL stands for "Country of Origin Labeling" and, after a delay of nearly four years, the law finally went into full effect on Wednesday. (Portions of it became law last year.)
COOL requires manufacturers to clearly label the country of origin on a wide variety of foods including pork, lamb, goat, chicken, fresh and frozen fruits, vegetables, ground beef, nuts and ginseng.
It acts as an early warning system.
America imports a huge variety of foods from countries with differeing health codes. When mad cow disease happens in Britain, it affects the rest of the
world too. Same goes for the melamine scare in China and a host of
other close calls. By making labels listing the country of origin
mandatory, the USDA can tell consumers to avoid a certain food
from a certain country, instead of avoiding said food altogether. If the FDA had required peanut manufacturers to list the state
and county of origin, it would have been able to just tell people
to avoid peanut butter from Peanut Corporation of America's region,
instead of issuing a recall list a mile long.
Until now, those
little stickers announcing that oranges are from Florida
or pears are from Mexico have been voluntary. Processed foods are exempt from COOL but nearly all uncanned meat, fish, vegetables
and fruits are covered. Labels are also supposed to note whether fish has been farm-raised
or caught wild.
And Vilsack is not finished with COOL. Last month he released a letter
(PDF) to the food industry asking meat producers to follow several more labeling guidelines. Specifically, he's
worried about animals traveling from one farm to another or from one
country to another, and has asked producers to identify on the packaging
where the animal was born, where it was raised and where it was slaughtered.
We'll see how all of this works. I have a feeling that in the next four years, Vilsack will deal with plenty of scares.
Comments (0)