LABELING OUR FOODS (Yes. Consumers have safety fears)

[nosmokes]

it's reprehensible that we aren't allowed to know where our food comes from, or indeed even what's in it in the case of GMOs. no other industrialised country would stand for this type of corporate subservience and i have no idea why a nation so full of self proclaimed cowboys and independent spirits that we claim to be lays down and allows ourselves to be run over like this. the lack of democracy is part of it, but only a part.
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original-sandiegouniontrib

LABELING OUR FOODS

Yes. Consumers have safety fears

Should Congress require the U.S. food industry to list the country of origin of foods?

By Ronnie Cummins
May 11, 2007

U.S. consumers want and need country of origin labels on food. Recent food poisoning scandals, linked to contaminated pet, pork and poultry food ingredients from China, along with tainted produce and seafood, have taken away many Americans' appetites for cheap imported foods.

Although polls indicate that the overwhelming majority – 82 percent – of Americans want to know where our food is coming from, Big Food and Washington bureaucrats have united to deny us this right.

Lobbyists for corporate agribusiness such as the American Farm Bureau; giant food manufacturers such as Cargill, Smithfield and Con-Agra; and supermarket chains have handed over millions of dollars to an industry-indentured Congress to keep us in the dark about the “country of origin” of the hundreds of billions of dollars of foods we buy every year in supermarkets or consume in restaurants.

Shocked by media reports that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspects only 1 percent of all imported food shipments, increasing numbers of health-minded consumers have complained to their elected public officials. They are demanding that the government increase food-safety inspections – which unfortunately have been reduced by nearly 50 percent under the Bush administration – and require mandatory country of origin labels for foods.
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complete article here

[Trillo]

1. When money talks,

food safety walks.