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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?
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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