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Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

I sympathize with US ranchers, but I agree with the courts that "Product of the USA" okay...

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.

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That there isn't an obvious place to draw the line does not in any way justify drawing the line at a patently absurd position like this court has done. Courts constantly make rulings on issues where the boundaries are somewhat blurry. For just one example, take the infamous line about pornography: "I know it when I see it." They have well-established techniques for reasoning about such cases. It's not perfect, but it can be, and is, done all the time.

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.

> Courts constantly make rulings on issues where the boundaries are somewhat blurry.

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.

I would consider that to be their primary job function. Especially at the higher levels. The rule of law would break down if they didn't. Laws are like product specs. They cover the core stuff as best they can, but there are invariably areas where they are a bit buggy, ambiguous, and incomplete. We already have problems with loopholes, but if judges weren't allowed to to exercise some degree of reasonable judgement when things are not 100% crystal clear those problems would be orders of magnitude worse.

> 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,

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.

Yes, it's a good thing. Otherwise there would be a great number of things our elected representatives would want to execute in law on behalf of their constituencies that they would be unable to do so because the burden of legislating in sufficient detail would be too high.

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.

The agencies are abusing the guidance and rule making processes in ways that are completely absurd.

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.

The easy solution is to allow for something like "Prepared in the USA", and only allowing "Product of the USA" if the animal was slaughtered in the US.

similar to "Assembled in the USA"

I'm sure consumers will love "Pork Chops: Designed in Texas, butchered in USA from components sourced in USA and elsewhere".

Don’t do that, you end up with the torture that is live imports.

Clear labelling about where they were grown, and where the butchering was done will go a long way towards helping people make informed decisions.

For outsiders, it's visible as an unintentional reverse-judgement by a jurisdiction upon itself.

Each legal realm is free to interpret their own language in their own terms, and they do so on an ongoing basis.

Here in Europe, you're told everything, not just where it was finally processed/packaged. Produce is labelled not just down to a country level, but to individual farms, and often you'll see meat for sale in shops include not just the code for the farm, but the full name too.

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.]

> Produce is labelled not just down to a country level, but to individual farms, and often you'll see meat for sale in shops include not just the code for the farm, but the full name too.

Is this true across all of Europe? If not, what country are you in?

Ireland. To my knowledge, it's practiced elsewhere, though I can't point to a directive.

> Tell me where the meat was born, raised, and slaughtered.

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.

I appreciate why it feels archaic writ large, but for folks who want to know the animals in question were raised in a certain way (free of antibiotics, to pick something clear), I for one feel more confident that the label is being honest if the meat was also raised here.

>beef born there, raised here, slaughtered somewhere else

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 think there are big quality control issues with shipping away cattle to other countries for slaughter as well. Your ability to control the final product is much reduced compared to when everything is regulated locally.

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.

A massive amount of seafood in the US is intentionally mislabeled, which leads to a lot of problems because tilapia, for example, causes upset stomachs for a lot of people.

Not sure how that works. 'Tilapia' isn't a fish. Its 'any whitefish'

Tilapia certainly does not refer to any whitefish. If tilapia is not "a fish" then neither are salmon or tuna or probably a dozen other common names.

Tilapia certainly does refer to (almost) any whitefish. Over 100 different fish are called 'tilapia'. Because their flesh is white, and they cannot pass as a more valuable fish.

For comparison, there are 8 species of salmon. We eat maybe two of them.

> Over 100 different fish are called 'tilapia'

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.

Most of those 100 fish are not eaten at any great scale. If you ask someone for examples of whitefish, you're going to get answers like cod, haddock, pollock etc. None of which are tilapia. Tilapia arguably isn't even an example of whitefish.

whitefish in the US seafood market traditionally refers to cod, haddock, pollack and similar species, even including sole, flounder and halibut.

tilapia are cichlids, and are not part of the old definition; not sure if the definition has changed

A lot of seafood is mislabled because it's hard to identify. Especially given that there might be a few random fish in a catch that is predominantly X.

Meanwhile, tilapia is farmed. Hence misidentification there would be intentional.

tilapia actually refers to a large group of fish from the cichlids group.

That is interesting. It does still seem like most tilapia is farmed.

There is an infamous example in the EU with "Parmaham". Take pigs from the Netherlands, put them in a truck and drive to Italy.

Presto Italian ham.

Are you sure?

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.

Prosciutto di Parma is very specific and not parmaham, which is a generic designation applied to all sorts of crappy ham and meant to trick those that don't know better.

oh I see, I am surprised this is even allowed under EU regulation.

You think EU would ban selling a different product under a different name from the protected name?

yes, if the product can be confused and the name is close enough.

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.

Here in Ireland, our reputation with raw material is important, because what we make is traded as best-of-breed, which in agriculture means any meat is grass-fed and free-range, and any fish we catch is mostly from managed wild stock (important for salmon), or explicitly labelled as farmed.

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.

Sure. I can get onboard with that. In this case, the company should not claim that the beef is a product of a single country. The issue I think is that sellers realize that people don't always want food shipped from halfway around the world-- so they obfuscate.

> imported as a sapling, planted in the USA for 20 years, then milled in the USA, then worked into a table by USA craftsmen

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?

Parent's point is that it's a spectrum. What if the log was imported but it was milled and worked into a table in the US? What if it came in as milled lumber but was cut+worked into a table in the US? "Made in the USA" is fuzzy.

Huber banjos are "hand crafted in Tennessee" but the mahogany sure didn't grow there (or anywhere else in the USA).

Sounds like “assembled in… from foreign components” or in this case “butchered in… from foreign cattle”

I own a box fan that is labeled "Made in the USA from imported parts". I guess it was cheaper to ship flat

This seems all about removing the capacity for a consumer to make an informed choice between products. The label 'Product of USA' should have an unambiguous meaning-- especially for food.

100% agree, it "should" have an unambiguous meaning, and in the ideal world it would.

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.

>"The label 'Product of USA' should have an unambiguous meaning..."

And what should that meaning be? I don't understand where you think the line should be.

Whatever it is, it should be well understood. If that means finished in the USA, fine. If it means cradle to grave within the borders of the US, fine. Right now it means nothing since it isn't clear and is used as a label to drive sales through obscurity.

> I agree with the courts that "Product of the USA" okay...

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"?

No, you changed words there sir. "Product of the USA" =/= "Raised in the USA". I don't believe you would find a "Raised in the USA" label on any meat, but it's been over a decade since I took a meat & seafood class, so I may be mistaken.

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!".

"raised in the US" in this sense has the same problem as "Product of the USA"..

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)

I don't care about corporate rights I care about consumer rights. If it says Made in the USA, especially food stuffs, it should never have left the country for any purpose, I might make an exception for Canada, but only because they have as good or better standards as the USA. I don't trust Mexico or the Chinese FDA equivalents, given the sheer amount of corruption in those countries. I hope this lousy decision is appealed as high as it needs to go.

I have to admit that my intuition is food should be 100% within region to use a "made in" label, in a way that other products might not, although I'm not sure if I can explain it.

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.

The crazy thing is they actually 100% hold this data. Literally adding a few lines to the tag would solve this. I worked in a meat packing plant during summers in college and they would use rfid tags to scan everything in and out. The whole supply chain including down to which truck it was specifically transported on is there.

For cattle, yes, but how far do you go? Imagine trying to tag Milton Friedman's pencil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

I lol'd at this:

> 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.

Yes, what we need are more food labels. That way it'll be less confusing for customers.

The article goes out of it's way to address this argument.

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.

The problem of a binary yes/no label is not uncommon. Other countries have approached this problem with a scale system (a simple bar from 0% to 100%), this way a consumer can easily compare like-for-like in product categories.

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.

Yea, they should move away from "Product of USA" and start using "Controlled Origin Denomination", like European wine producers use.

Australia has a better system on all products 'Made in Australia from at least 98% Australian ingredients' or similar. Meat is treated the same as vegetables, nuts, milk, cereal etc.

https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/groceries/country-of-origi...

> 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

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 agree, I was in a grocery store and at the frozen meat aisle. The import company has a USA flag, is called something like "American Product Imports" and the Tilapia is of Chinese origin if you look at the back.

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.

Why not just follow current immigration policy (jus soli births)?

If you import a sapling from overseas then there's a good chance the government will come to your house, seize and destroy it, and put you in prison. They run sting operations on eBay and similar sites all the time. Why shouldn't the same apply here?

while this may or may not be true, and it is beside the point. We are talking about where to draw the line in the sand for "made somewhere" not if it is/isn't legal to have been made.

I disagree that your first example would qualify as a product of the USA. At least from a defense standpoint.

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.

Right, and the fact that you disagree is why M-COOL seems like a good solution: put all the relevant info on the label, and let each person choose where they draw the line.

So if everything in your car came from the US, except for a platinum ingot that provides the platinum in the catalytic converter, it is improper to claim that the car was made in the US? Note that the US is not a major producer of platinum.

Yes. It's really not hard to understand. At the very least it should say Made in America *except the catalytic converter

But the catalytic converter itself was fabricated in the US; only the raw materials for the catalytic converter didn't.

(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.)

Which means if the US went to war with X, you can’t make cars. That’s a critical distinction when talking about defense contractors.

I think you're arguing from the perspective that there's some objectively right "Product of the USA" meaning. But there isn't. A USA Apple Pie did not start by the USA creating the universe, paraphrasing Carl Sagan.

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.

False advertising still applies.

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 "Product of the USA" means 100% US Supply chain, then I would further argue that almost nothing COULD be a product of the USA...

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.

I am drawing a line between what could still be manufactured if US borders closed today and what couldn’t. Rain comes from water outside the US borders but a war isn’t going to stop rain the way it might stop platinum imports.

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.

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