That loaf of Sara Lee bread on the grocery shelf in San Jose was made with flour from U.S. wheat. But the Illinois-based food giant uses honey and vitamin supplements from China.

While Paul Newman’s daughter uses California figs in cookies made by her Aptos organic food company, she turns to Mexico and Austria for other ingredients.

And even though a Procter & Gamble spokeswoman described Crest toothpaste “as a truly American product,” it uses additives from China and Finland.

Recent reports of tainted imports from China have focused new attention on a little-known trend: In today’s global economy, more food items are being produced in this country with some ingredients from other lands. But the FDA inspects less than 1 percent of all food imports – and that means consumers must trust food makers to guarantee the safety of their products.

“It’s not just the stuff that says `Made in China.’ It’s the stuff in the stuff that says `Made in the USA,’ ” said Elisa Odabashian of Consumers Union, a non-profit consumer advocacy group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine. “We’re importing more and more of our food and we’re inspecting almost none of it.”

William Hubbard, a former Food and Drug Administration associate commissioner who is advocating for a beefed-up food safety system in the United States, agreed.

“It’s not which foods contain these ingredients, but which foods don’t contain them,” he said.

You may not know it from the label. Food makers aren’t required to disclose the source of what goes into most products.

Some major food makers won’t even talk about it. Campbell’s and Kraft use ingredients from around the world, although representatives there refused to say which countries supply them.

“We don’t want to be the poster child” for an article about imported ingredients, said Campbell’s spokesman John Faulkner.

“We’d prefer to leave it that we’re very confident about our practices.”

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