Poll: 92 percent want 'country of origin' labels

Time to shed some light on the industrial food chain!

WASHINGTON - U.S. consumers overwhelmingly support stricter food labeling laws, with 92 percent of Americans wanting to know which country produced the food they are buying, a consumer magazine said on Tuesday.

Consumer Reports said recent food scares, including worries about peanut butter and lettuce, have made Americans more interested in knowing not only how their food was produced but where it was made. [I'm more concerned about flour - which is much easier to adulterate]

“I was definitely shocked at how high these numbers were,” said the study’s coauthor Dr. Urvashi Rangan, a senior scientist and policy analyst at Consumers Union, the nonprofit organization that publishes Consumer Reports magazine.

“It’s much like a nutrition label or an ingredient label in that it needs to be part of the general information coming in about imported foods,” she added.

The poll was conducted with 1,004 telephone interviews between June 7 and June 10.

Last month, USDA said it would reopen public comment to its so-called “country-of-origin” labeling measure until August 20.

Congress enacted the meat-labeling requirement as part of a 2002 law but has twice delayed the start date, now set for September 30, 2008.

Will this be a campaign issue? Can we MAKE it one? With more and more of our food supply (along with every thing else) coming from overseas, and with more of it coming from places where we have no reason to assume the goodwill and proffessionalism of the exporters, it's high time that we expand testing. It's high time we give consumers enough information to make informed decisions.

If you want to let the marketplace decide, you must not hobble their process.

Large corporations need to understand - if they creat a paranoid public because of their secrecy and lax regulations, they cannot win when the next round of regulations seek to limit consumers' risk of sickness and death.

So, I say: If corporations want the "invisible hand of the market" to decide, they must open up ALL of their secrets to public scrutiny. EVERYTHING - including recepies and processes that might be patented or company secrets. All their financials, too.

Otherwise, they need to submit to some regulations, before more people die of tainted food and water - or loose their license to operate in this country.