New Considerations

Yesterday, Jason and I discussed the questions I posted on my blog Saturday, and I thought he had an interesting take on them.

If I buy something that was produced locally that has several different ingredients (like bread), do I have to make sure that the place where I buy also uses ingredients only from the US?

and

Can we eat at restaurants that don't get their food from domestic sources?

Jason feels there's a continuum here, with "fully foreign" on one side and "fully domestic" on the other.  Broken down roughly, the scale runs like this:

Produced in Foreign Country from Foreign Goods
Produced in Foreign Country from Domestic Goods
Produced in Foreign Country then Imported and Modified Domestically
Produced Domestically from Foreign Goods
Produced Domestically from Domestic Goods

These are just the big obvious gradations on the scale; obviously there are shades of grey that apply, especially with food.  Jason feels that it's most important to lean strongest toward a domestic influence in your products, since they mean more American jobs, etc.  However, that doesn't exactly answer my question.  Obviously the most "pure" philosophy here is to go with domestic products that have gone through all their manufacture and processing in the US.  However, does this mean that I need to necessarily stick with this extreme?  After all, a product made from American goods in a foreign facility (like the steel wool from my previous post) is still sort of American - so is that good enough?  Considering that I'm trying to work out what's best for the American economy as a whole, that wouldn't be good enough, and technically neither would getting foreign food through an American third party.  Let's just hope I don't starve to death.

If bulk foods don't tell us where they come from, should we avoid them completely?

Jason thinks it shouldn't really matter.  After all, economically speaking, I'm providing jobs just by buying these items from an American company, right?  I disagree here: that would mean that I can end the experiment now, since I don't import any of my own products, so I'm helping American somewhere along the line.  That's good enough, right?  For this experiment, I'm afraid that's a no.

Can I buy products from companies that aren't American, if their products were made in the US?

Another tricky question, but Jason and I both felt that this one at least is in the clear - assuming, of course, that the ingredients in this product are from domestic sources as well.  After all, a cheeseburger with beef from Missouri, veggies from California and a bun from New Jersey, all prepared by American workers is a literally all-American burger, even if the company selling it to me is from Germany.  It's like being born and raised in America by immigrant parents - it doesn't make you any less American.  (Of course, this argument necessarily begs its own questions - "But where is the ad agency from?" "How much profit is shipped overseas?" "Who provides the transportation?" - but those are questions that I feel seriously over think the problem, so I won't worry about them now.  Maybe at the end of the year, if I haven't died of starvation.)

The best aspect of talking over these questions out with Jason, though, was that I came to realize that it's not just economic factors that figure into why I want to run this experiment.  Although the American economy can use all the help it can get right now, buying American should assure that I'm getting products that were produced by workers who are paid fairly for their work, work within laws to protect them from dangerous conditions, and are not subjected to lives as slaves.  These products should also be held to the particular standards that US imposes upon manufacturers which, while not necessarily required to be of the highest possible quality, are at least of a quality that I can research and find laws for.  Considering some of the quality issues that we've run into lately with Chinese products, this is a particularly strong point.

Unfortunately, as I was researching the labeling laws in the US today, I found that some of those assumptions above are not necessarily the case.

Here's a video from the USDA about the new labeling laws for food:



And here's another video, pointing out the loopholes:



You can see why I'm beginning to lean more toward "100% Produced in America."  The worst part about the loopholes in the regulations is that in order to find out where my food is from, I have to ignore my favorite kinds of stores: the little local mom and pop places that are the backbone of the micro economies in any city.  And, although I understand that these videos in particular relate only to food, it seems that similar labeling laws apply to any product: as long as it's produced in it's final, salable form in the US, it can be marked "Made in the US," even if every part comes from another country.

(You may have noticed that at the end of the second video, the narrator says that "you have to put [where ingredients are from] on the website."  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that even food manufacturers are required to put a country of origin for their ingredients on either their own websites or the FDA website that's pictured in the video.  Lamez.)