Your concerns are valid, but the system isn’t really set up to meet your needs. I think country of origin is the only thing required in most cases. I think the best answer is to buy local and meet your farmers.
“Country of origin” isn’t much use either. There are lots of legal ways around that, plus of course just doing something illegal waay upstream in the supply chain. Example:
I learned here a couple years ago that under EU law, olive oil can be labeled as originating in the country it was bottled in, regardless of where the olives grew or were converted from fruit to oil. So it’s 100% legal, and very common, for olives grown in Turkey to be converted to oil there, sent to Italy in bulk tanks, then bottled and sold as 100% pure Italian olive oil. With a nice markup over the same oil bottled in Turkey and labeled as Turkish.
Under US law products meeting EU origin labeling standards also meet US standards, at least as far as olive oil is concerned. This may also be true for all EU ag products, but I don’t know that.
Good points. A big advantage to this for the distributor is that they can buy from wherever without having to modify the label. The distributor might buy a huge batch of produce from Farmer Bill in Pennsylvania one month, then later find a cheap source from a Guatemalan exporter looking to take advantage of an awesome Guatemalan harvest. Later on, the distributor finds themselves short and goes to the Agro Market and asks for bids from potential suppliers.
I’m not saying that your concerns are completely unfounded, but they may be just a bit overblown. According to the article you linked, oil wastewater from California’s Kern River oil field is being used to irrigate approximately 45,000 acres of crops. California has somewhere on the order of 8 million acres of farmland, much of it 100 miles or more from Kern County.
That’s not to say that wastewater pollution isn’t a real thing, and it’s certainly possible that the problem is more widespread that that article details. But if your decision to boycott an entire state’s agricultural output is based on the fact that approximately one-half of one percent of it’s crops may have been treated with polluted water, then you may want to do some more research.
While I understand what you are saying I have to disagree with your point. As a consumer, your average Jane Doe, the only real power I wield is with my wallet. I’m not the president or the mayor of a big city or a billionaire with the ability to sway lawmakers based on my words. All I can do is look at something and say, “I dislike the way you choose to do business and I no longer wish to support that choice” or “I like the way you do business and I choose to give my money to you in exchange for goods and services.” If California (or Pennsylvania or any other state) says that they are cool with polluted wastewater being used in agricultural production in their state and I don’t like that I have only two options, spend my money elsewhere or keep giving them my money and bitch about it on the internet. Or I guess I could run for governor of California, but being as I live on the East Coast they might not be willing to let me telecommute for that job so the odds are slim that I could change things in that way.
Well, we could check their website… oh, wait… they don’t seem to have one.
:dubious:
Literally. Dubious.
Water potentially polluted with chemical with scary-sounding names but no documented adverse effects on humans is being use to irrigate TREES.
Do any of these scary chemicals get into the trees? Don’t know. What are the odds that, if they do migrate into the tree roots, they could get into the fruit? Don’t know.
What is the exposure? 45,000 out of 8,000,000 acres.
Yes, let’s all panic!
This is on the order of destroying Chile’s ag exports because a spider was found in a bunch of bananas.
First, the problem is alot bigger than simply using some chemically polluted waste water. The process of fracking is causing pollution of ground water and other water sources, occasionally killing off farm animals and causing illness in the people who drink from that water supply. Some of that water also goes to agricultural use. In addition, the chemicals released in blowdowns and the occasional explosion are impacting air and soil quality in addition to the pollution of the water sources used in farming.
But my question isn’t really about all of that. If California wants to have fracking and agriculture together and no one has a problem with that then they can totally go with it, but I should have a right to say that I don’t want to buy those goods without being accused of “panicking.” Belittling my concerns with, “eh, it is such a small chance of your produce being exposed to that stuff and even if it was, you don’t know that it will actually hurt you anyway” doesn’t really address the fact that I can’t go into a store and know where that particular food item came from, whether I want to know because I’m concerned about pollutants or because of abuse of migrant farm workers or because of an industry operating a water-heavy industry in a desert state in the middle of a drought or any other reason.
I thought we were talking about food safety.
You now want to throw in fracking.
You lose a bunch of points.
The short answer to the OP’s concern is that today the laws of the US do not require that suppliers provide that level of detail. If enough people who share the OP’s concerns complain loud enough to their Congresscritters then maybe relevant law changes will happen. I wouldn’t hold my breath, as producer interests rule and most consumers care about cheapness as their first, second, and third level concerns, with nutritional quality or chemical-freeness about #37 on their list of worries.
Rest assured that cradle to grave tracking of all inputs to all ag products sourced all over the world would be an expensive overhead addition to the price of food.
Until such time as the laws change the best course of action is to buy only from local small suppliers where one can personally meet the management and determine if their standards meet your own and if they are trustworthy.
You don’t read for detail.
You lose a bunch of points.
Look, pbbth, as **Telemark **pointed out in #21, the validity of your concerns is irrelevant (and a total hijack of this thread - whether or not fracking etc. should be a food safety issue is way outside the scope of the OP) since you want the national and global food supply regulations to do something they’re completely not designed for.
As others are saying, if you want to avoid entire states for your sources (thus making the “USA” label or designation not sufficient) and are committed to humane animal practices, your only real valid option at this point in this country is to eat very, very local: going to farmer’s markets, ordering direct from the rancher, driving out to the pick-your-own place, etc.
People are getting snarky with you because you’re expecting to be able to go to Mego-Lo-Mart and have them be able to label whether or not a berry came from a particular state, etc. and that just ain’t happenin’ for anybody.
I bought some gala apples today at the supermarket, and when I got home I noticed that it didn’t say where they were grown. As a New Englander I can be cavalier about apples, know I shouldn’t be. Now I know I won’t be again as to where they come from. I usually do a quick spot check, did today, called Foodhold but they were closed. It’s important to me that my fruits & vegetables are U.S. grown. From what I know of how fruit is grown and, shall we say, irrigated and treated in Mexico, I don’t want to buy anything grown there. I doubt the apples are Mexican but my sense is that if they were grown in the U.S.A. the bag would say so. It doesn’t. :dubious:
Tomorrow I’ll try again.
Considering the enormous sums the US gov’t has paid US apple growers to export their cropsit’s much more likely that a person in Mexico will pick up an American-grown apple at their market.
I’m glad you posted, I’ve had an interesting time reading about the apple industry in Mexico; as a fruit tree enthusiast I’m always interested to learn how trees are irrigated and fruit are treated in other places (I’m in the high desert, practically).
Here in Colorado the local farmer’s market sells lots of stuff packaged and shipped in from other states. Hardly “local grown.” Some is, lots isn’t.
Hi all! Someone can help me here please?? :smack:http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=19768711#post19768711
Thank you!! 
Thanks for both replies. That sounds right about Mexico.
Thinking on this makes me (okay, OT) wistful: when I was growing up and throughout my youth, into my early thirties I was a loyal consumer of Maine potatoes. The state was known for its potatoes back then, and while they were tough to peel and often dirty my attitude was WTF, it’s good for the local economy. I’m like that.
Then, as time went by the Maine potatoes (mostly grown in Aroostook county) got worse; dirtier, increasingly difficult to peel, often with black spots inside, needing hollowing out to get the good (i.e. white) stuff. Not so good. Then, when I bought a bag of west coast potatoes, on a whim, and I can’t remember whether they were Oregon or Idaho, as the saying goes, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Best potatoes I’d ever tasted, and the easiest to peel by far.
It was like I’d never tasted a real potato till then. And they were clean, or almost clean, near spotless, compared to the mangy spuds they bring down from Maine that look like tumors; irregular in shape, ugly, unclean looking. This is one of those things I hate to admit, but as the sort of person who likes to “buy local” this was a sea change for me. Sometimes you gotta go with quality over loyalty, especially when it’s like ten squared (whatever).
Anywhoo, a nice relief from Donald Trump here, and in a strange way somewhat relevant to his “message”, such as it was, which is that Americans have to start making things, good things, again. We need to produce. I agree, even as I didn’t vote for the guy. Well, with food we’re already tops, but even at the regional level it’s worth pondering.
A while back, a local grocery store had salmon in their fish case labeled as “Caught in Alaska, Processed in China.” They had to stop stocking it because people refused to buy it.
People have this weird idea that words on food packages have the same definition they read in the dictionary. Words like ‘fresh’, ‘new’, ‘local’, ‘low’ (in the sense of calories or sugar), bigger, better’… I could go on. Oh - another favourite these days - ‘traditional’.
UK supermarkets, and I imagine American ones too, sell a lot of pre-packaged produce in bags labelled “Orchard Farm” or some such attractively rural name. There is, of course, no such place and the contents come from wherever they can source them from cheaply. As for origins - we have the same rule here, where the origin is the place the product was last processed, so Albanian beef (which might actually be horse) can be magically transformed into British beefburgers.
I just called Foodhold and they were quite gracious, told me that the apples I bought were indeed American grown; and when I asked if that was true for their apples generally they replied yes.
At the end of the call I suggested that they label all their American grown products and they agreed.