Why Not Farm/Factory of Origin Labeling?

China's decision to limit imports of some U.S. meat products has triggered fears that consumer safety concerns will become the new focus of trade disputes (see this morning's Wall Street Journal). That's the good news. If tit-for-tat retaliation increases cleanliness and inspections in both nation's food production facilities, everyone gains.

But a broad brush ban on a class of consumables -- such as all U.S. poultry products or all Chinese-made toothpaste -- is a blunt weapon. It's unfair to producers who follow the rules and maintain first class factories. That's why country-of-origin labeling for food products, touted last week in editorials, is no solution. That may appeal to consumers' prejudices, but it hardly gives them actionable information. That Chinese toothpaste was bad, so all Chinese toothpaste is bad?

A better solution is farm- or factory-of-origin labeling (which, of course, would include country-of-origin labeling). This will give public health officials and inspectors instantaneous feedback about the source of a problem once it has been identified, and will enable them to shut down that source without the collateral damage of economically harming other producers who follow the rules and make safe products.

If free traders are really worried that consumer safety concerns may be used as a new weapon in the never-ending international trade wars, the solution is raising the regulatory bar, not lowering it.

Why Not Safe Food?

The New York Times today editorializes in favor of country of origin food labeling, which has been defeated during the Bush years by industry lobbyists. With an increasing share of U.S. food coming from abroad and safety scares multiplying, labels informing consumers where those shrimp, steaks and veggies that they'll be throwing on the grill this afternoon seems like a no brainer.

Yet I wonder. What am I as a consumer supposed to do with this information? Tell me if the fish is farm-raised or wild caught. Tell me if the vegetables are grown organically or through heavy use of herbicides and pesticides. But do I really care where food comes from as long as it is safe?

This is another case where the power of industry has forced consumer advocates to seek a weak half-measure. Disclosure through labeling has been substituted for the real solution to the food safety problem, which is more Agriculture Department and Food and Drug Administration inspectors.

We need more cops on the beat to police our entire food supply, whether domestically produced or imported. Country of origin labeling does nothing more than allow consumers to substitute their own prejudices for meaningful enforcement. That's no protection at all.

Two Buck Chuck, Too?

And now for some good news from the Reuters Newswire:

Red wine might work to protect the brain from damage after a stroke and drinking a couple of glasses a day might provide that protection ahead of time, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.

In an effort to better understand how red wine works, the scientists from Johns Hopkins University fed mice a moderate dose of a compound found in red grape skins and seeds before inducing stroke-like damage.

They discovered that the animals suffered less brain damage than similarly damaged mice who were not treated with the compound, which is called resveratrol.

And for those who don't get the "two buck chuck" reference, it refers to the $2-a-bottle wine produced by the Charles Shaw winery in California a few years ago. One lady I heard on Air America Radio today said it was now going for $3 a bottle in her neighborhood.

First They Go After the Red Wine; Now the Steak

You probably read about last week's study showing that moderate drinking did not, I repeat, did not improve health outcomes. The pooled analysis of dozens of studies showed that the slightly reduced heart attack rates that light drinkers enjoy is largely due to the fact that the teetolers in the comparison groups had stopped drinking for health reasons. In other words, these already sick people had more heart attacks anyway. Duh.

Now comes a new study from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Nutrition Reviews that purports to show that vegetarian diets promote weight loss. According to the press release: "Vegetarian populations tend to be slimmer than meat-eaters, and they experience lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other life-threatening conditions linked to overweight and obesity."

Even better, going Vegan will allow you to drop one pound per week no matter how much exercise or calorie-counting you do. The study's authors, Susan Berkow and Neal Barnard, say vegetarians in the 87 studies they reviewed had obesity rates ranging from 0 to 6 percent, far below the general population.

Since I work at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, where a significant number of staff are Vegan, I think I'm in a good position to testify to some confounding factors that may be skewing their claims. People who obsess about eliminating animals and dairy from their diet are far more health conscious than the rest of the general population, which makes them eat less, exercise more and avoid truly heart-stopping foods.

I'd bet my life that if one could conduct a truly objective experiment comparing two populations made up of physically and genetically matched people, both of which exercised regularly and kept their weight within certain bounds but one ate meat and the other was strictly vegan, we'd find very little difference in their heart attack rates.

In fact, I already have made that bet. I drink moderately. I eat meat. And I exercise regularly. My weight is quite normal for a man my size and build (5'10'', 161 pounds). Indeed, my weight is no different today than it was 30 years ago when I was 25 (full disclosure: I've lost 7 pounds since the first of the year despite my meat-eating ways, largely due to a slightly more rigorous exercise regimen).

If this blog stops suddenly, you'll know that the Vegans may be on to something.

How Now Mad Cow

When does a corporation want more regulation? Apparently when its ox is being improperly gored.

McDonald's Corp. this week complained to the Food and Drug Administration that the government wasn't taking strong enough measures to keep contaminated meat from entering the food supply. Their concern, of course, is mad cow disease. The nation's biggest burger chain fears that people will flee its restaurants in droves if new cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease) show up in the U.S.

The U.S. has found two cases of mad cow disease, one in 2003 in Washington state and one in Texas. Unlike the Washington case, which was found in a cow imported from Canada, the Texas case involved a native born cow who probably ingested the bug that causes BSE in its food, which may have contained the remains of stricken cows.

Responding largely to pressure from importers of U.S. beef, the FDA announced a new program to test cows for BSE two months ago. Leading farm state senators and public interest groups immediately attacked the measures as woefully inadequate.

Critics say much higher testing levels than those proposed by the FDA are needed to reassure Japan and other trading partners. "I've said time and time again, there is little risk of BSE in U.S. beef, but it is obvious that we have not yet convinced key trading partners of that," Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, told the Associated Press last November. Harkin wants the Agriculture Department to perform at least 20,000 more tests on healthy cows. That would still leave the vast majority of the U.S. beef supply untested.

Public interest critics are pushing the FDA to ban entirely the use of dead cattle, restaurant wastes and any tissues that contain nerve tissues, eyes or intestines in animal feed. Without specifying specific measures, McDonald's agreed that the agency should adopt measures that will reduce the risk of BSE-tainted beef to "nearly zero."