I've been travelling for a few weeks, and will soon be making a post about my exciting experiences as a Nitpicky Consumer on a major airline, but I wanted to make a quick post about country-of-original-labeling (COOL) and recent issues with China imports.
Back a few weeks ago, I talked about how it was pretty easy to find China import info now that the press has jumped onto the topic. We've now definitely made the leap to people-food with the recall of Veggie Bootie by Robert's American.
Although the FDA's release doesn't peg the source as China, a subsequent July 3, 2007 Wall Street Journal article does. As WSJ links tend to disappear and become protected, here is the key sentence: The "veggie" seasoning's ingredients came primarily from China, the company said.
My entire office loves Veggie and Pirate's Booty, so it is just happenstance that I didn't pick Robert's American as one of the companies I emailed a few weeks ago -- when I did Route 11, Del Monte, Stonyfield, and Kashi -- to ask them about COOL. It would have been interesting to have their response before all this came out ...
In the bigger picture, the FDA's home page has a big new link to "Recalls, Product Safety" and they describe a new enhanced pilot program and RSS feed to help keep consumers informed. This sounds like a good step in the right direction.
