A Dry Run

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I did some food shopping a couple of days ago and decided to call it a dry run and see how hard it would be to eat during the 30 days. After reading up on labeling requirements for my previous post I knew where to look and I gave myself some extra time so I could read the labels and compare a few products. I took some time and really considered taking a hardcore approach by buying only products with 100% American ingredients but the more you look into it the more you see this is almost impossible in our global economy. Somewhere along the way everything has been touched by a foreign country in one way or another. Even the purest grass fed, hormone free texas beef products have been carted to market by a truck burning foreign oil and has been wrapped in PVC or LDPE (plastic).

I'm over it. We're too busy to nitpick and the motivation to do this was more about supporting American farmers and American jobs than it was about protectionism or shutting out the rest of the world. I guess I would like people to prefer buying American products but not to the point where they are being adversely affected by this effort. e.g. - I would never expect someone in this day and age to give up using a cell phone or watching TV because they don't make any in the US, but if they did make cell phones here I'd like to think we would prefer those over others which are not.

Back to my shopping trip. I always start in the produce section and this is the easiest place to be sure your buying American products because as previously noted all fruits and veggies are required to be labeled with their country of origin. I zipped through this section with only one hitch. Bananas. I like bananas, the kids like them, we eat a half a dozen a week on average and they just don't grow here. I'll skip them I guess. The good people of Ecuador will have to live without my business for a month. Tough luck, amigo. Everything else had a Made in USA alternative or was grown here anyways. I'm off to a roaring start! Most of the packaged foods we eat are made by huge American companies like General Mills and ConAgra etc. which have plants all across this great land of ours and have American addresses under the "Manufactured by" or "Packaged by" label. Even the spicy Ramen noodle soup bowl thing was made here. Food is looking like it might be a layup in this endeavor.

Three items I did have to look around a bit to get right were Beef (confusing labels), OJ and coffee creamer. Beef was all labeled with a USDA label but I knew this didn't mean it was from here, only inspected here, so I asked the butcher. It turns out that the meat that was shipped to them was labeled with the country of origin and was indeed American beef. Mmmmm, beef. When they cut and wrap it they do not have to list the country of origin so just ask the butcher, they keep good records for the government so they always know.

The OJ brands I usually buy as well as the store brand all contained juice from Brazil, Mexico and Costa Rica. I've been to Florida more than a few times and I know they grow oranges there so I looked around a bit more and found a brand called Florida's Natural. Made from oranges in Florida as you would expect. It is tasty and the cost is in line with the stuff we were buying before. I think we have a new orange juice!


Somewhere along the way we started using flavored coffee creamer. It's funny but I never drink flavored coffee anywhere but at home. Anyhow, I read the label and no luck. I thought about just buying half and half but I looked around at the other non-dairy creamers for an option closer to what we are used to. The only one with a Made in USA label was, oddly enough, International Delight. WTF? There were a few that said "Packaged by" and listed a US address so I guess they passed muster with my newly relaxed standards too. I still might just buy cream if the wifey gives it the OK. I'm sure there is a local dairy farmer that would appreciate my business.

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Reading Labels

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I live in the Northeast and in January (the month I’m going for it) farmers markets are pretty scarce. While I respect the hell out of people who are organized and ambitious enough to go all the way with eating only locally grown food it’s just not practical for all of us without making major lifestyle changes. As an example I just can’t see going to a hog farm and buying half of a pig, processing the meat and freezing it for future use. Canning fresh veggies is not my thing either. I hope there are plenty of American companies using American ingredients that are providing this service efficiently for all of us that have too much going on to already without having to become farmers, food processors and warehouses for all of our food. So how do we find the right foods while pushing that cart down the aisle with two screaming kids that are late for soccer practice in tow?

"Under §304 of the Tariff Act of 1930 as amended (19 U.S.C. § 1304), every imported item must be conspicuously and indelibly marked in English to indicate to the “ultimate purchaser” its country of origin." According to the U.S. Customs, generally defined the “ultimate purchaser” is the last U.S. person who will receive the goods in the form in which it was imported. However, if the goods are destined for a U.S. based processor where they will undergo “substantial transformation”, then that processor or manufacturer is considered the ultimate purchaser. Furthermore, Title X of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (known as the 2002 Farm Bill  requires retailers to provide country-of-origin labeling for fresh beef, pork, and lamb. The program exempts processed meats. The United States Congress passed an expansion of the COOL requirements on 29 September 2008, to include more food items such as fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables. [Sort of reliable source: Wikipedia et al.]

Blah blah blah. Basically, fresh, unprocessed, non-manufactured foods all have a label that clearly states the country where it came from. Fruits and veggies have it on the little sticker with the product number or for things like broccoli and lettuce it is on the rubber band or twist tie thing holding the bunch together. At our local Stop and Shop the put the country right on the sign above the item that tell you what it is. This is very convenient when shopping with two young boys that really don’t want to be there in the first place. Coming to think of it, I really don’t want to be there either but on we go. This doesn’t work as well for processed / packaged type foods where, as noted above, the suppliers of ingredients have to label the country on their product going to the factory but the final product only has to list the “name and address of the manufacturer, packer or distributor. Unless the name given is the actual manufacturer, it must be accompanied by a qualifying phrase which states the firm's relation to the product (e.g., "manufactured for "or "distributed by")” according to the FDA.  Ugh, therein lies the challenge for the busy, hungry and late for soccer practice modern family.

Without resorting to a completely fresh food diet where we cook everything from raw ingredients, how can one be sure about where all the ingredients came from? It aint easy I’ll tell you! Here’s an example. I was originally going to start this post with breakfast foods so I went to the cupboard and pulled out the staple of our family breakfasts since the kids were still in diapers, General Mills Cheerios.

General Mills has a lot of info available online but it was hard to find source info about ingredients so I gave them a call. The very nice woman with a typical Minnesota accent (no outsourcing customer support here) could not get specific info about where the oats came from but she did say that Cheerios meets the “product of the USA” labeling standard and they were produced in plants in the good old USA. That doesn’t mean that all the ingredients are grown/processed/whatever in America, but the final product is manufactured (cooked) here. “How far do I take this” I ask myself again. Looking at the ingredients on the side of the Cheerios box I find: oats (plausibly from the US), corn starch (we grow most of that), sugar (insert screeching tire sound effect here). Oh crap, sugar. That’s a tough one. We here in the US barely produce any sugar other than that corn stuff that seems to be the root of many evils with the American diet these days. That’s not good. Not good at all. Moving on though, salt (we make ½ the worlds salt so flip a coin I guess), tripotassium phosphate (an emulsifier which  helps stabilize the mix, god knows where they brew up that chemical cocktail but it doesn’t seem to have any side effects when ingested thank god), Wheat starch and then a bunch of vitamins and minerals (from around the world no doubt) round out the list.

How far do I take this indeed. If anyone’s looking for me I’ll be the guy reading all the labels in the cereal aisle today. We can’t skip breakfast so I have some figuring out to do. 


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Coffee

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Coffee – the only place where coffee is grown in the USA is in Hawaii. Apparently it only grows in tropical climates with certain conditions. Ugh.

I started with a Google search for [coffee grown in the USA] The first useful hit was to www.Americansworking.com. It seems like a pretty good resource fro a lot more than coffee with lots of links. I’ll have to bookmark this site for future use! (Upon further investigation it seems like there are a few links in a lot of categories so it might be hit or miss but a much appreciated resource that I’ll check often.) 

After perusing their links I came up with these two places:

Dragons Lair: [http://www.pendragonhawaii.com/] $20/lb, $6.70 shipping for ground Kona coffee. They do their own roasting and grinding too! Fancy stuff.

http://www.usacoffeecompany.com/ lefty politics abound, just as expensive but they have some fun products too (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Another option I came across was Maui coffee. It’s lesser known

and a little cheaper and I was able to dig up a reasonably priced coffee from a farm near Lahaina that according to the website [http://www.mauigrowncoffee.com/] was resurrected by a worker after being abandoned by the Pioneer Sugar Company in 2001. They offer a 2lb. bag of 100% Maui Estate Blend Medium Roast for $34 but shipping the package was $12 making this an only slightly cheaper option.

Most of what I found was blended coffees that contain Kona as well as Columbian or some other foreign coffee. Not what I was looking for. I checked for Kona and Maui coffees at all my local stores with no success so I think ordering it online is the way to go. The wifey suggested stocking up on our regular coffee (Peet’s) in December. Not going to happen. I might have a way to save on shipping by having my nephew at the University of Hawaii shuttle a couple of pounds of Kona home on Christmas break. I’ll let you know how that works out but I don’t have the highest expectations of success. If the coffee turns out to be as old and stale as the Macadamia nuts I bought for short money at a flea market in Honolulu last time I was over there I need to have a solid backup plan because I will not succeed without coffee. Mmmmm….coffee. Step One in any successful project.

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Purchasing prologue

So I've been kicking around an idea for a few months and a conversation on Facebook spurred me into following through with this project. I want to try to only buy things made in the USA for one month. Seems like a simple way to support local businesses and there are many more good reasons to steer your purchases towards domestic products these days as we all know. I'll try to leave out the politics of it all and stick to documenting my experiences and observations and I encourage anyone who reads this to share their experiences or offer suggestions in the comment sections and we'll see where this might lead us all.

I figure I'll have to do a bit of research on other people that have done this and what products are actually made here from foreign parts, etc. I have to limit this to durable goods and some soft goods (consumables) like food and household products, excluding the chemicals these are made from. Basically, everything I eat must have been grown and packaged in the USA, and all the junk I buy has to be made in America. Think I can do it? I don't know either but I'm going to give it a shot! Check back soon and see how my research is going over the next couple of months and on January 1, 2012 I'm going foreign free!

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