Country of Origin Labeling. Finally!

All fresh and frozen produce, meat products and nuts must now be labeled by country of origin.

The USDA just issued the final rule, five years after it was initially passed along with the 2002 farm bill. But the large food processing and distribution outfits balked. They drug their feet and Congress was inclined to let them. This brief statement from the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service has the highlights:

... On January 27, 2004, Public Law 108-199 delayed implementation of mandatory COOL for all covered commodities except wild and farm-raised fish and shellfish until September 30, 2006. On November 10, 2005, Public Law 109-97 delayed implementation of mandatory COOL for all covered commodities except wild and farm-raised fish and shellfish until September 30, 2008. As described in the legislation, program implementation is the responsibility of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service. The recently enacted Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 (2008 Farm Bill) expands the list of covered commodities to include chicken, goat meat, ginseng, pecans and macadamia nuts. ...

That's the dry version, but you can see there was a lot of stop and go. Every one of those delays represented a flurry of organizing, phone calls to volunteers to get them to call Congress or write the USDA, and strategy meetings to plan outreach in states where people could call particularly influential players as their direct constituents.

And while I'm glad we'll all be able to find out where our dinners come from now, the best thing about the implementation of COOL from my perspective is that it'll free up a lot of activists' time to focus on other things. As Bill McKibben explained in a recent editorial on how to make a positive difference in the climate change fight, each of us has the power to make a difference politically far beyond the impact we could hope to achieve by changing our personal habits:

... If people who care about climate change mobilize politically, 5 percent will be more than enough too—it will persuade senators, congressmen, and presidents to back strict legislation that will set real caps on emissions and fund real research on the technologies we need. If such laws pass, they would change the behavior of 95 percent of Americans, including reluctant in-laws. This kind of equation isn’t hypothetical. Two years ago, I helped organize a march across Vermont that called on our leaders to work for deep cuts in carbon emissions. A thousand of us walked the sixty-mile route—one Vermonter in six hundred. And yet that was enough to get all of our legislators, including the conservative Republicans, to sign on to our pledge. A year later we organized fourteen hundred demonstrations in all fifty states to call for 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050. They were the most widespread rallies about climate change to date, but even so they hardly reached one-quarter of 1 percent of the population. And yet the next week both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton put our goal at the heart of their platforms. ...

The battle for COOL has been won. On to the nutrition program reauthorization skirmish!

(Photo credit: ricardo.martins on Flickr.)