Urgent: Is your meat or poultry “Made in the USA”?
When you’re selecting some steak or hamburger to cook up for yourself and your family, I bet you would choose meat from the U.S. over a foreign import any day.
But due to some outrageous and confusing regulations put into effect by the United States Department of Agriculture, it’s very possible to be tricked into believing that meat you picked out came from an American ranch, when in fact it may have crossed more than a few borders — and traveled a very long distance — to reach the U.S.
The problem is so bad that a group of cattlemen recently joined forces in suing the USDA over it, saying that the way meat is labeled confuses American consumers and harms U.S. ranchers.
This issue, however, goes way beyond just wanting to buy American-produced goods, be it a shirt or a skirt steak.
Because some of this imported meat is not only downright disgusting… it’s dangerous.
If you’ve been following recent news stories about beef and chicken, you know that it’s hard enough to stay safe where these meat products are concerned, even when they are produced in the U.S.!
Pathogens like salmonella and E. coli can easily taint these foods. That’s why we have to be so careful to avoid cross-contamination in the kitchen and make sure we thoroughly cook beef and poultry.
But when you’re talking about imported meat, take all those dangers and magnify them by 100 times.
For example, just this spring, meat coming from the biggest exporter of red meat in the world, Brazil, was found to be rotten. And I mean that literally — it was decaying, unfit for consumption.
And even worse — if that’s possible — the shady meat processors responsible used cancer-causing chemicals to hide that fact and try and disguise the meat as being fresh.
Plus that, in the case of Brazilian poultry, investigators found that cardboard and potatoes were mixed with water and chicken meat so that unscrupulous exporters could make more money.
Such disgusting examples of substandard or misrepresented meat from abroad, however, are nothing new.
A few years ago, for instance, a major poultry supplier in China was caught selling rotting chicken. Other imported meat products have been found to be laced with chemicals and drugs such as de-worming medications.
To deal with these problems, Congress passed an import regulation called COOL, otherwise known as “country of origin labeling.”
Two years ago, however, it was repealed because Canada and Mexico claimed it violated the trade agreement known as NAFTA.
And to make matters even more confusing, a label saying “Product of USA” is often slapped on imported beef.
Talk about adding insult to injury!
All this has caused U.S. ranchers to have a cow, and they recently sued the USDA over the matter, saying that the agency has violated rules that go back over 80 years.
These cattlemen claim it’s unfair for them to have to compete with “beef from other countries that do not have the same health and safety standards.”
And I couldn’t agree more.
That’s why — for now, at least — we have to go that extra mile to make sure the beef and poultry we’re buying is coming from the U.S. Obviously, we can’t depend on the USDA, so here are two things you can do yourself:
#1: Look for a good old-fashioned butcher shop close to where you live — one that can tell you exactly where their meat and poultry come from! If you can’t find one nearby, that means you’ll have to be sure to shop in supermarkets that actually have a staffed meat department. I know, that used to be the norm, but many big-box stores in the food business sometimes cut corners by not employing an actual butcher.
#2: Buy from American companies that sell beef and chicken products under their own labels that are U.S. grown and raised. One such brand, nationally distributed and available in many supermarkets, is Coleman Natural Foods.
“Cattlemen sue USDA in federal court over Country of Origin labeling (COOL)” Dan Flynn, June 21, 2017, Food Safety News, foodsafetynews.com
