Under the guise of "food safety," USA Today called for stricter regulation and more labeling of foreign food.
A sidebar to the newspaper's cover story on July 11, cited two left-wing food police groups supportive of more country-of-origin-labeling (COOL), but buried opposition until the last paragraphs.
"Will knowing where food comes from make it safer?" asked USA Today's Elizabeth Weise before quoting a spokeswoman from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and pro-regulation nutritionist Marion Nestle.
CSPI is the same group that recently threatened to sue Kellogg's for marketing "sugary" cereal to children and has attacked nearly every food and drink you can think of.
Comments from the Grocery Manufacturers Association that mentioned the expense of more regulation were placed in the last two paragraphs.
Weise also didn't question the assumption that U.S. food isn't safe enough. But the Center for Disease Control estimates that there are 5,000 deaths per year from foodborne illness -- a very small percentage of the overall U.S. population of more than 300 million.
