Origin labels can raise questions about food safety

I like knowing if the watermelon I'm buying was grown in Green River or Mexico, or if the grapes came from Chile. So I appreciate country of origin labeling, known as COOL.

But the recently added meat and seafood labels make me feel geographically challenged. For instance, the package of ground beef that says it came from Canada, the United States and Mexico. Surely the label could be more specific than a whole continent? That just seems like a heckuva lot of miles for one cow to travel.

But, from what I've been able to interpret, this could mean that the cow was born in one country, raised in another country and slaughtered in a third. Or that the ground beef was made from meat scraps from more than one cow, and they all came from different spots on the map.

The seafood labels are even more confusing. I saw a package of frozen salmon that proudly proclaimed "WILD ALASKA SALMON" on the front.

But the small print on the back said, "product of China." I asked the butcher how wild salmon caught in Alaska could still be a product of China. After all, that's quite a swim for a fish.

She told me the fish is caught in Alaska, then shipped to China for processing. I must have looked incredulous, because she added, "They've been doing this for a long time, but it's only because of the country of origin labels that anyone noticed."

I checked packages of other frozen fish, which are apparently well-traveled. Great American Seafood Imports' "Pacific wild-caught salmon fillet" came from China. Its farm-raised tilapia fillets were also from China, and its white shrimp from Thailand. Kroger's "wild-caught" cod fillets were from China, as were its bay scallops.

Chicken of the Sea frozen shrimp was a product of Indonesia, and Star Kist's canned "wild- caught tuna" said, "product of Ecuador." Harbor Seafood's "sushi-grade" swordfish, "all-natural, wild-caught," was a product of Singapore.

I e-mailed the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, asking how much wild Alaska salmon takes a detour to China before it's sold in the United States.

"ASMI does not have access to this information. Only individual seafood processors would have that information. I can tell you that it would likely be a significant amount, but that not all of it comes back to the U.S., much goes to the E.U.," spokesperson Emily Butler wrote.