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Foreign ingredients in U.S. foods get little if any government inspection.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — That loaf of Sara Lee bread on the grocery shelf in California 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, Calif., 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 U.S.A.,’ ” said Elisa Odabashian of Consumers Union, a nonprofit 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.”
Indeed, most European countries have high standards, Hubbard said. And not all Chinese products are of poor quality, said Peter Kovacs, a former executive with several national food companies who now owns a food-ingredient consulting business, the Kovacs Advisory Group.
The lure of lower prices has led some American firms to accept lower-quality imports, Kovacs added. But he said most major food companies are rigorous about checking the ingredients they import, even if the government is not.
To understand why so many American products are a composite of ingredients from around the world, one need look no further than three products found on any household shelf: a tube of toothpaste, a bag of cookies and a loaf of bread.
In making a simple loaf of bread, the bakers at Sara Lee must look to multiple sources for some standard ingredients, said company spokesman Mark Goldman.
“You cannot meet consumer demand, and meet the demands of a growing business, without finding multiple sources for your ingredients,” he said. “Global sourcing of ingredients has been and will continue to be a necessary practice.”
While Kovacs said lower costs are often a reason for buying overseas, food makers also say they obtain ingredients from other countries because they can’t find sufficient quantities in the United States.
As an example, Goldman said, “It’s impossible to meet the demand for honey without sourcing outside the United States.”
Domestic production has failed to keep pace with increased demand for honey in recent years. Most honey is still produced by relatively small beekeeping operations, and in recent years, many U.S. honeybee colonies have been devastated by parasitic mites and a mysterious disorder known as “colony collapse.”
Meanwhile, China is now the world’s largest producer of honey, though it’s had problems. In 2002, Europe and the United States banned Chinese honey after finding some batches containing potentially harmful levels of an antibiotic that farmers may have used to help their bees resist disease. Imports resumed within months, however, after the Chinese government halted the antibiotic’s use.
For its Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread, Sara Lee now buys honey from China, as well as Vietnam, India, Canada and several Latin American countries. Goldman said all of its sources must meet the company’s quality standards.
The company’s procurement experts visit suppliers around the world to ensure they follow health and safety rules, Goldman said. It requires suppliers to test and certify that ingredients meet specifications spelled out in purchasing contracts. Sara Lee also does its own testing.
In the United States, its central procurement office sets uniform standards for a nationwide network of bakeries.
Like other major U.S. firms, Sara Lee also looks to China for the B vitamins — thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, folic acid — and iron that are commonly used to enrich wheat flour. China has become a leading source of these additives, Goldman said, “as the industry has consolidated, limiting the number of available suppliers.”
With lower production costs — in part because of cheap labor and minimal environmental regulations — China now dominates the world market in vitamin supplements and other chemical food additives, such as stabilizers and emulsifiers, that are used in American processed foods, Kovacs said.
China has been accused of deliberately undercutting prices to boost its share of the market for pharmaceuticals and nutritional supplements. Kovacs said Chinese manufacturers have been building market share since the 1980s when the Chinese government poured economic resources into developing its food and pharmaceutical industries.
Recent scandals over tainted pet food, toothpaste and seafood have China’s government scrambling to show it is serious about food safety. In recent weeks, officials announced they have increased inspections, shut down some food plants and even executed the country’s top food-safety official, after he was convicted of accepting bribes.
But Hubbard, the former FDA official, and other consumer advocates said the recent incidents show the need to bolster government food-safety programs in this country.
Increasing customs inspections might help, but Hubbard wouldn’t stop there. He would like to expand on a model now used for imports of meat and poultry.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture visits other countries to certify that meat-packing plants and local inspectors are operating under acceptable standards, before allowing those products into this country. But the FDA doesn’t have the budget or legal authority to do the same for most other types of food.
Kovacs, the consultant, thinks the United States should require domestic manufacturers to keep records detailing where their ingredients come from, as the European Union does. The rules are intended to rein in unscrupulous distributors who might otherwise try to hide the source of suspect goods.
The United States relies too heavily on the food industry to police itself, agreed Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit research and advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
And with imports from other countries likely to grow, DeWaal sat before a congressional subcommittee last month with a warning of her own: “The gaps in protection from this system are indeed alarming.”