Court affirms imported beef still allowed to be labeled "Product of USA"
foodsafetynews.com
foodsafetynews.com
M-COOL (Meat Country of Origin Label) is the right solution... and let me give an example why:
If I buy a new, real wood, kitchen table, that was imported as a sapling, planted in the USA for 20 years, then milled in the USA, then worked into a table by USA craftsmen -- would that be a product of the USA? I'd say so, and I think few people would argue that the "birth" of the tree on foreign soil taints its "Product of the USA" qualities in this sense.
If you agree with me there, then what we will end up disagreeing on is when that threshold is crossed, and it's no longer "Product of the USA".
By attacking this label, it was always an uphill battle, I think.... and that's why M-COOL is the better solution. Tell me where the meat was born, raised, and slaughtered. If a soup company imports that beef and uses it in their soup that is mixed, seasoned, and canned in the USA, I don't think it's fair to say they are not a USA product, however, it's still valid and good (I think) to say that it's from imported meats.
In my mind if a product has foreign decencies in it’s supply chain then it is not a product of the US alone. A reasonable exception for manufacturing equipment or IP owned by a foreign company.
(I'm using platinum ingot since that's how I'm assuming you'd buy a lump of platinum metal. If this is not correct, substitute for whatever the thing is you'd actually buy from somebody like Rio Tinto. I'd have used the platinum ore directly, but my understanding is that it generally is produced as a byproduct of other metal refining.)
The problem is that there are differing degrees of "Product of the USA" here. "Big Meat" wants to slap it on anything they want that vaguely touched the US at some point prior to packaging for marketing purposes. Absolutionists may want it to mean nowhere in the value chain that produced that particular animal does any other country appear, and may even say, yes, that means the car you mention is not made in the US. (Presumably there is a limit to how far back the analysis needs to go, since cows are not native to the US.) The guy on the street probably doesn't care, and may care about it for quality issues (perceived or real) or care about the vast majority of the profit of the value chain being retained in the US.
Generally, when it comes to product labeling in the US, the federal government declares what labels mean, and in the absence of that, labels have very little meaning [1]. In this case, the court majority ruled that the meaning the government outlines was fulfilled by the meat labeled as such in the package. This is not wrong, it just happens to not be the definition preferred by other people, and they're going to Congress to get it changed.
So, to answer your question, yes and no and maybe, all at the same time. Hence the problem.
[1]: It occurs to me as I type this that more of the labels could stand to be clear about which is which. If my bread says it is "whole wheat", is that in the set of meaningful, legally-defined labels, or is it just something the manufacturer felt like they could stick on because there was a whole wheat grain that accidentally got into the dough? I don't know, and my not knowing is the point, not the question itself.
The only loophole is short descriptions by default have an ambiguous meaning. “Made with Oak” could mean you used an oak spoon at some stage in the process. So, it needs to be extremely egregious which this case wasn’t.
If we can't include a copper heatsink because it was imported to the USA as raw copper ore... then can we even include foreign workers who come to the USA to work ? They may go home at any time... or they might be forced to go home... they might not even be authorized to work in the USA, or not let back into the USA (even if they were otherwise allowed to work) next season...
Again, we're arguing over where to draw the line, and that's why I dislike "Product of the USA" as a mechanism for meat labeling... everyone wants to draw the line somewhere differently, so it would be better to be more specific about labeling aspects of it, not the whole.
Copper can be sourced inside the US, if you didn’t then you have a foreign dependency in your supply chain which is something the DoD actually cares about for obvious reasons.
Any other definition is just meaningless marketing crap like “The Best” which is legally meaningless.
This! Can't agree more. In modern economies, something might be a product of few dozen countries (beef born there, raised here, slaughtered somewhere else, beans from that place and pepper imported from another, there's a can and paper label design and printing too, and of course a labor to make those into the final product - which might be distributed), so trying to argue about things as having single country of origin is just wrong and archaic.
Not rare to see here in Germany. I have seen it for Austrian-grown chicken to be slaughtered in Germany, similarly Argentinian beef is sometimes cut in the Netherlands.
EU regulation stipulates:
> The term ‘origin’ should be reserved for meat obtained from animals born, reared and slaughtered, and therefore wholly obtained, in one single Member State or third country.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15906711...)
UK law requires country of birth, country of rearing, country of slaughter and country of cutting to be on the product.
Slightly surprising that US consumers don't get so much information.
I remember reading about a company importing crab and fish from china that on analysis found out what they were receiving wasn’t necessarily what they ordered, and the Chinese themselves were officially importing the food from canada, but what was shipped out to customers wasn’t necessarily that just labelled as that.
Murky waters, hard to control compared to everything being domestic.
For comparison, there are 8 species of salmon. We eat maybe two of them.
All of which are cichlids.
That's a long way away from "any whitefish".
"Whitefish" most commonly refers to cod and pollock, not tilapia.
And we eat every species of salmon, not just two.
tilapia are cichlids, and are not part of the old definition; not sure if the definition has changed
Meanwhile, tilapia is farmed. Hence misidentification there would be intentional.
Presto Italian ham.
As far as I remember Prosciutto di Parma has a proper disciplinary, the pigs must be bred in Italy, and not even all of it.
For example, you can no longer sell german cheese called "Parmesan", because it can be confused with Parmigiano.
Likewise, the italian wine called Tocai is no longer produced under this name, because it could be confused with the hungarian Tokaji, even tho they're quite different.
It is literally to fight the issue raised by OP.
If the product is very different than yeah, it would make no sense, but I do not know what dutch Parmaham is supposed to be.
If it's not trying to bank on the notoriety of Prosciutto di Parma, I do not understand why it's not called Amsterdham, which would be a really cool name.
The big initial scandal around that was around live cattle exports to the Middle East. This was largely down to animal cruelty, because live exports happened because nobody wanted to export halal meat from Ireland. Amongst other things, this eventually lead to the establishment of halal slaughterhouses in Ireland, which, while it didn't entirely eliminate the animal cruelty argument, at least minimised it.
It doesn't hurt that everything in the EU is traceable.
Mind you, then there's the whole horsemeat scandal in the EU. Me, I've no problem with horsemeat, but I'd just prefer it to be labelled as such. It's not all that terribly different from beef.
I think it's very misleading if they're selling beef soup with an american flag on the front. Either way our disagreement just highlights the importance of the meat country of origin label.
I'm not sure which it says more about, the ethics of the company or how easily the American consumer is swayed by flag imagery.
But that's not a good analogy to what is being complained of in this case. What is being complained of in this case would be more analogous to a tree that was raised from sapling on in a foreign country, cut down, milled, and worked into pieces of a table in that foreign country, then a US company imported the pieces of the table, assembled them into a table, and labeled it "Product of the USA". Still ok to you?
Huber banjos are "hand crafted in Tennessee" but the mahogany sure didn't grow there (or anywhere else in the USA).
This case isn't about canned soup. It's about meat that has been minimally processed, e.g., a side of beef that gets cut into steaks and ribs in the USA. Calling that a "Product of the USA" is absurd. M-COOL sounds great, but this is still stupid.
Do you consider that to be a good thing, though? Or, at least, a net good?
My own initial intuition was that it's not OK to add "Product of the USA" to the label if the intention is to mislead the consumer, but there may be other things at play that determine what must or must not be on the label, e.g. tax-related considerations, which, if you ask me, are also frequently arbitrary.
Also, keep in mind that a label with a full history might create information pollution, like with CA Prop 65 labels.
And who decides that? A lot of things have blurry lines and I don't know who you expect to clarify them. A court where two sides argue seems like the best solution to me. Not a great solution, but it falls into that quote about democracy being bad but still the best.
In fact, there is a legal theory gaining traction in conservative circles that seeks to neuter the federal government by arguing that Congress cannot delegate law-making to the executive branch. They argue that Congress must lay out laws in full detail instead of expressing a general intent and creating executive institutions like the EPA, FTC, and FAA to then elaborate and administer detailed regulations. The effect would be to make our laws brittle and short-sighted.
When I worked in DC, I saw guidance that suggested criminal liability retroactively for selling some financial products.
Lots of petty dictators with no respect for the legislative process or limits of executive power.
Clear labelling about where they were grown, and where the butchering was done will go a long way towards helping people make informed decisions.
Each legal realm is free to interpret their own language in their own terms, and they do so on an ongoing basis.
It's okay to import an animal, put them on a feed lot for a few days, then move them over to the slaughter house and claim "raised in the US"?
The point is, "Product of..." is essentially meaningless without added context. If I buy a McDonalds Hamburger, cooked by someone in my hometown in New Jersey, is that a "Product of New Jersey"? Sure! But also no, if the meat was ground in New York, from a cow slaughtered in Vermont but born and raised in Alberta Canada.
Short, pithy slogans are great to get people to think/feel things, but they're absolutely useless to actually explain anything. Look at how long my post is when I could have just said "You cheated!".
Both are generic spectrums... "Product of the USA" is vastly more generic then "Raised in the USA"... you couldn't possibly make "Product of the USA" a common-folk-understandable term that means what most people think it means, because the spectrum is too large.... Does it mean the chicken was born in the USA, fed only seed found in the USA, which was grown in the USA, collected by a US business/individual (with no foreign labor or equipment)... etc.... By the end, no car could ever be a product of the USA because every engine or battery needs a component or element that is often imported.
"Raised in the USA" could be meaningfully quantified in a way people can understand... for instance: "spent the last 51% of its life in the USA prior to slaughter", or to support export: "Spend the last 51% of its life in the USA, prior to being sent to slaughter, not to exceed 7 days outside the USA"
Of course, people will bicker over the 51%... I don't like that either, but it's a "simplification" of the issue to a slogan, which is what all of this is really about anyways, if we don't provide quantifiable and factual statements like M-COOL partly provies (it's still ambiguous itself on the "raised" part, I think... though I've not read the full details)
The reality is, it's highly political. This typically results in somewhat-to-very perverse decision logic at high legalisative levels..
The M-COOL approach will sidestep some of the nonsense.
And what should that meaning be? I don't understand where you think the line should be.
https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/groceries/country-of-origi...
> Cattlemen believe it also helps create a level playing field for American ranchers by assisting them to get a fair price.
This is the industry that has fought to make it illegal to publish video from within slaughterhouses, and for regulations that require packages be labeled with disclaimers that imply organic and hormone-free meat and dairy are meaningless.
If I were to show you the jar of (blended) honey I have in my cupboard, it lists every country it came from. I haven't looked at any soup I have (granularity with stuff like that is more important when it comes down to food standards in individual blocs), but anything with differing food standards would likely be marked as such. Anything that's a mixed source of raw product has to be labelled as such, such as "Made in Ireland from a blend of EU and non-EU sources".
One of the good things about the EU, though I'm sure some in a particular ex-EU country might debate this, is that any food imports are required to be of the same standard as anything produced within the bloc.
Regarding the term "product of the USA", I think the problem there is down to phrasing: the table is a "product of the USA" if the work done in the US to transform it from the raw material to a table is done in the US. Maybe the solution is to do the same thing as is done in Europe, and have something like "Product of the USA from US and non-US raw materials".
[And if you want complicated, try being somebody working in Northern Ireland right now! Though it's a mixed, mostly positive, blessing for them: they can operate under "made in the UK" (good domestically, less so abroad mostly), or "made in Ireland" (so long as they're sticking to EU rules, and NI is so dependent on agriculture that it's to their benefit, as with tourism, to export under an all-Ireland umbrella), but it makes the paperwork... fun.]
Is this true across all of Europe? If not, what country are you in?
The cattle could have born, died, and primarily been butchered in another country as long as any amount of processing was done in the US.
This would be like if a tree was grown and and harvested in China, turned into a table in china, sent to the US, then a logo was stenciled in a corner in the US and then US was listed as the country of origin for the table when in fact every meaningful step of it's production occurred somewhere else.
Other things I think there's more of an expectation of durable component retransportation or even reuse or recycling at the extreme, and not the same issues of direct bodily safety. You could also make the argument that increased transportation and processing per se, regardless of where, would all other things being equal, increase safety risks.
This is all vague in my head though.
Seems like there should be more labels like "made in X of imported materials" or "mixed origin" or even spelling out what was done where.
This is paired with a set of rules which apply to each category which undo typical efforts made to make a product appear more local.
In the case of a livestock/grown product that is partially raised overseas, that instead lands on a scale.
But there is a certain type of Lawyer-brain legalism that has infected our courts, and I don't know of a good solution. But you get this kind of obvious perverse result where it just defies common sense. In that sense, I can understand how lawyers and judges looked at whatever laws that define what each part of a "product", "of", "USA" means and concluded, that yes, imported beef can technically be "Product of USA"
I'm so sick of this.
People with Lawyber-brained legalism on the brain are the ones who write those poorly written laws.
“Don't struggle–only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down.”
This isn't 1 person writing 1 law who gets to iterate on it until the bugs are gone. Bandwidth is not exactly abundant here.
Before suggesting lawmakers somehow have enough bandwidth to improve every law into perpetuity, I feel like it might be an interesting experiment to try writing software the way law is written (through democratic voting on "amendments" to the codebase, with filibuster and all that fun, with similarly limited ways to kick people out of the group), and to then observe how many times you can feasibly go back to the drawing board to remove bugs and "write better code". And then calculate how much bandwidth you would need if you wanted to produce N products every year, instead of just 1.
The same goes for the unneccessarily prolonged fight against tobacco companies and junk food in schools.
The law needs to be changed, of course. But that's not up to the judges.
Sure it is. English common law countries place heavy emphasis on precedent. If the judge had refused to take the law literally in this case and done the reasonable thing instead, chances are this precedent would be cited in any future lawsuits of this sort.
The minority opinion judge said > if consumers are deceived by the label, “Product of the U.S.A.,” then that label violates both the FMIA and USDA regulations.
You need to some how break through the selection process to appoint people of integrity and put enough safeguards in place to prevent conflicts of interest.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a single time this design worked out in the past and created a working entity.
Corruption is the standard because it's the easiest path. This is true in other arenas like plaintext vs all the work of adding encryption or screen time vs exercising.
All the laws in the world won't fix a mindset or mental attitude.
From the court’s decision:
<<But this new law generated several years of international-trade issues with Canada and Mexico, including two disputes before the World Trade Organization and more than $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs imposed against the United States. … … As a result, in 2015, Congress repealed the new country-of-origin requirements for beef products, essentially reinstating the pre-2008 status quo.>>
The court just used this “status quo” law formulas. But it’s not the result of just lobbying, right. It’s the result of a trade war.
Bear with me, I think these are actually two examples of net good (potentially) done by lobbyists, where their (admittedly uncaring) business incentives end up standing up for what people want.
Tobacco and junk food are big targets for the "protect us from ourselves" crowd who think they should dictate values to other people. Just because they aren't good for you, government shouldn't be telling people what to do. Luckily (and I mean this, it's essentially a coincidence) the incentives of tobacco companies and soft drink manufacturers or whatever align with giving people what they want, so ordinary people who would otherwise get pushed around by controlling political types (for their own good) get an unexpected ally.
I've seen this with covid too, few stand up for people who just want to do their own thing and not get pushed around by people who want to impose their values of maximizing for health (pretending to) at the expense of all else. The only groups with the clout to stand up to health officials mad with power end up being lobbyists for companies that are losing money hand over fist, and the interests align.
I'm not saying it's utopian, but for better or worse, they end up providing a much needed countervailing force against what might otherwise be a march to some technocratic hell hole where people can't make their own choices because someone knows better.
Schools should absofuckinglutely not be serving, nor even making available, junk food to kids on any kind of regular basis. This isn't the government raiding your cupboards and throwing out things they don't like.
But when big government rears it's ugly head and tries to do any sort of regulation for the greater good, it's automatically bad and imposing on my freedoms and choice.
You're advocating for a world where people have the perception of freedom while being oblivious to the fact that they're actually being manipulated for profit. But that's ok as long as it's Facebook, Coke, Philip Morris and Nestle and not big bad government.
> If there were just profit seeking companies, and no opposing forces, that could be bad too, and maybe cause the kind of things you're talking about.
That's exactly what the problem is. On many issues, there are no opposing forces to the special interest groups. These arise when for example when an industry causes a small issue for a large population. It's difficult to organize and litigate in such cases.
Edit: I think we're mostly in agreement. I think what is needed is, like GP suggested, a rational way to balance the incentives for the special interests and the public good. Our current system relies on mustering large public support to make legal changes for the public good, but that's not scalable, and doesn't tend to rational, balanced thinking.
It is insane that a minor is allowed to buy or consume junk food in an institution (a school) that’s supposed to look after them. Food served in schools should be selected by a professional, such as a dietician. It should not be possible for a child to eat hamburgers or jacket potatoes or fries, first of all because we should not poison them and second because part of their education should include teaching them how to eat properly.
The notion that a 7 year old can buy fries or may think it’s normal to buy fries (rather than it being an exceptional thing that happens no more than once a week under the supervision of an adult) is as stupid as thinking that they should be allowed to buy and consume beer.
The problem I have with these groups/people that "end up standing up for what people want" as you phrase it, is that while such groups generally stand up for the causes they like its also generally the same people that also carve out their own list of exceptions that they think the government should intervene on. So, in essence, what's the difference between them and the "protect us from ourselves" crowd as you phrase it.
I’m not an expert, but roughly speaking PDO (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_ori...) means that the entire process follows certain procedures, ingredients come from a particular area and production happens in certain areas (usually the same as the ingredients).
PGI (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Geographical_Indic...) instead is looser.
For instance you may have PGI Tuscan oil that is produced with North African olives, while Lametia DOP (a PDO oil) must be produced near Lametia Terme and must use Carolea olives from the same area.
You can’t label your oil “Lametia DOP”, if you produce it near Milan or if you use different olives.
All this to say that for “product of USA” to make sense, it should not necessarily mean that in order to get that label all ingredients must come from the USA. You probably miss a PDO-like certification.
Also, for meat, origin labelling is mandatory, but you usually see all three: "raised in", "butchered in", packaged in". If I understand the case in the article correctly, they're saying that if any of those three countries is the US, you can slap a "Product of the USA" on it and be done with it, which just wouldn't fly in the EU.
To be honest, these protected denominations favour the producers more than the consumer. If you think about it, from the consumer's perspective, it doesn't really make sense to prevent somebody in Florence from producing Prosecco, if they follow the correct procedures and use the correct grapes. The same applies for meat origin labelling, why should I care if my steak comes from the UK? I would understand Argentina... I find way more relevant knowing the breed rather than the country of origin (What's this? Angus? Chianina? https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/steak/sainsburys...)
But I digress.
https://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/sites/ca10/files/opinions/0101...
The dissent starts on page 22 of that PDF, it's an interesting read.
"The text, history, and purpose of the FMIA all point toward the same conclusion: Congress could not have intended to authorize outright deception in meat labeling. Plaintiffs invoke state law to challenge precisely this sort of label, alleging that defendants mislead consumers about the origin of their beef products."
If a pack full of candy, 0.5g (edit) sugar each, can be sold as zero-kcal candy, then what's the fuss with meat labelling? Not lobbied enough?
It’s amazing how badly this affects the credibility of the USA.
The presence/absence of "Product of the USA" label affects some people's buying decisions.
A few google searches show the effect is minor to major depending on product category. I wasn't able to find exact numbers. But as a personal note I would never buy meat labeled "Made in China"
There's no law requiring the "made in USA" label on goods made in the USA. US ranchers who don't want to use the label don't have to.
The WTO doesn't like trade barriers, especially US trade barriers, and a strict "made in the US" label is a barrier, so their opposition is a given. If such labels had no effect, WTO might argue against them on principle, but if they did, that would be a reason for WTO to argue against them.
For any product, if there is a substantive processing step done (other than basic packaging), I would consider the label to be accurate.
Additionally, mandatory COOL seems like a self-serving overreach by the cattle industry. By all means, include optional labeling specifying the country of origin, following whatever (non-fraudulent) criteria you want, and that label can be protected all you want, but don't make it mandatory.
Shades of the equally ridiculous mandatory GMO labeling that thankfully got nixed.
Meanwhile it's valuable for corporations to hide where the meat comes from since such a country might sell their beef considerably cheaper to offload it despite the disease. So it's one of those cases where the corporate interests (profit) are against the individual interests (not getting a prion disease) and having government step in and mandate country of origin labeling would be valuable.
I think the US tends to be less strict about meat anyway, though. Our grocery stores still package beef in carbon monoxide to make it look red even though other countries have decided that makes the meat look misleadingly fresher than it really is, for example.
If some sort of pathogen or other issue is discovered in CountryX, you would probably think "whew, not my problem. I only buy beef from the US" and ignore everything else about it.
Feels like it's setting up a bad situation but hopefully they have mitigation approaches.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/10th-circuit-confirmed-...
Seeing these, I always wonder which came first--The phrase or the abbreviation?
It's the need for folks to buy something with a nationalistic label, where the problem begins.
I'd be more worried about people who place other nations above mine while living in mine.