A couple weeks ago, I asked the following question in relation to the U.S. COOL measure: "What will consumers think of seeing details on where the animal was 'born, raised, and slaughtered' on every package of meat?" CNN's Jake Tapper was intrigued by the same issue, and did a segment on it, with some comments by my Cato colleague Bill Watson:
This all reminds me a bit of the following scene from the TV show Portlandia:
The part I have in mind starts around 20-25 seconds in. You kind of have to watch the whole thing.
So what kind of information do consumers want about their cuts of beef? Maybe something general like "processed in the U.S., Canada, and/or Mexico" -- or whomever the relevant countries are that a meat processor buys from -- would be enough? Perhaps a measure along these lines could give consumers relevant information, without putting such a burden on meat processors to track the origin of the cow, in a way that has a detrimental impact on foreign producers.
