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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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>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.

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.

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.

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