Washington, D.C. – Imagine picking up a T-shirt with the label “Product of the United States, China, Indonesia and/or Honduras.”

Confused?

Shoppers may see labels like that in the supermarket meat case, starting this fall.

A law requiring meat to be labeled with the nation of origin takes effect Oct. 1, but rules that resulted from a compromise among industry interests may puzzle consumers.

Pork labels

The law, which was altered by the new farm bill, allows special labeling for ground meat and for products of hogs and cattle that were born in Mexico or Canada but fattened and slaughtered in the United States. The U.S. Agriculture Department last week issued rules for interpreting the modified law.

A lot of pork will likely carry the label: “Product of the United States and Canada.” Allowing that label means that U.S. packers won’t have to keep track of where the hogs they are slaughtering were born. Millions of young Canadian pigs are shipped into Iowa and other states each year for fattening, and packers didn’t want to have to process them separately from U.S.-born swine.

Beef labels

Labels for ground beef could be even longer.

Industry officials say any one package of ground beef often contains meat from a variety of different nations. But under the new rules packers won’t be required to keep track of what beef goes into a particular package.

Instead, they’ll be allowed to list all of the countries from which they have purchased beef during a particular period. So in the store, ground beef could be labeled like this: “Product of the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and/or Uruguay.”

It’s the same idea used in listing ingredients on bags of potato chips. They list all the various vegetable oils, such as corn, cottonseed and sunflower, that the processor uses, not the specific oil that was used in any given bag, said Mark Dopp, who follows the issue for the American Meat Institute, a packers’ trade group.

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