Earlier this month, I wrote a post about the proposal to require country-of-origin labels on food sold in supermarkets, and in an update I mentioned that in my experience at a local store run by Australian-owned Progressive Enterprises, fresh fruit and vegetables only were only sometimes labelled with country of origin, despite the company’s claim that it was their policy.
Well, today I had to go to that store, so I counted: In the main section, there were 62 signs above the loose fruits and vegetables (things not packed into bags). The country of origin was noted on only 13 of those—and that includes, generously, those simply labelled “imported” (like bananas, which aren’t grown here) and Coconuts, which were labelled “Island”, without saying which one(s). In case your arithmetic is as bad as mine, that works out to less than 21 percent of all loose fresh fruits and vegetables being labelled with country of origin.
Why do I care? Because the company claims to be doing something when, in this store, it clearly wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t even close to doing what it said it was doing. Fortunately, there’s no extra charge for the hypocrisy that goes into the shopping bag, too.
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