Did you know about Country of Origin Labeling going into effect?

A new USDA law requires country of origin labeling information to appear on certain meat, poultry and produce items that are produced or packaged after September 30, 2008. This law is in addition to current requirements for raw wild or farm raised seafood.

What foods need a label? The law applies only to whole or ground beef, pork, lamb, chicken (not turkey), goat meat, fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, pecans, peanuts, macadamia nuts, and ginseng. The law doesn’t apply to processed foods. USDA defines processed foods as foods that are "cooked, smoked, cured, roasted or combined with other foods." Examples of exempt processed foods in our stores would include rotisserie chickens, smoked pork, cube steaks, kabobs and fruit and vegetable salads.

Although the interim final ruling for the law began on September 30, retailers have six months to implement systems that comply with the law while the USDA continues to develop their final COOL regulations. Our merchandising group and our IT group have been working diligently to develop country of origin labeling in our scale labeling system to make it as easy as possible to identify source countries for covered produce and meat commodities. The produce group is also working with suppliers to provide PLU stickers with country of origin labeling on products at point of purchase. Both produce and meat departments are working with our marketing group to provide signs or stickers with countries of origin for those items where PLU stickers may not work or for bulk areas such as meat service cases. Our stores will soon be seeing all of these means of identity for covered commodities as we work toward compliance with this new law.


http://www.waldbaums.com/becool.asp

If I ma not mistaken it was supposed to have gone into affect some years back, but Bush and his clowns delayed it.

I think this is a start, but all those things you mentioned that are exempt, should be labeled also. We need to know where any thing we eat comes from. There are so many things that have been recalled lately from China that we need to know where things come from that we feed our families. I have pretty much given up on seafoods and fish because I have had some bad experience with the stuff in the past, and found out that the majority of the products were coming from China! I see no reason why we can't produce food in this country, and process it here instead of importing it from other countries.

I hope that congress goes even further with their COOL regulations. We have a right to know where things are coming from.

oh, our untested beef, too.

retired. He worked in the meat dept. and for the products sold at the service case & seafood dept. they had small pin labels they inserted right in front of the price label.

It all seemed to be working out well.

I still don't know where it "comes" from. It may be raised in one or more countries, slaughtered in another, and butchered in yet another. Hence the confusing label.

why even bother with a label at all?

Does that mean we're still eating old stuff?