COOL underway, enforcement unclear

September 30 brought Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) into play in meat marketing at the supermarket. It is a can of worms, and it's very unclear how it will affect either the industry or consumers.

COOL is one of those "hot damn" ideas that is great in concept, but very difficult in execution. Cattlemen justifiably believe that U.S. beef is a clearly superior product, and just putting their name on the label--as well as putting an inferior foreign name on beef from other countries--will greatly increase sales and decrease competition from imports.

If only it were that simple. For one thing, a lot of beef has more than one country of origin. Calves may have been imported from Mexico or Canada, but raised, fattened and slaughtered in this country. What label do you put on the beef?

For another thing, the feds and do-gooders have muddied the waters, so COOL is no longer just a marketing thing. BSE, E.-coli and other public health scares have bullied USDA into piggybacking on COOL to require all kinds of expensive paperwork to give beef traceability from birth to the dinner plate, to allegedly help root out disease in meat--and, of course (wink, nod), prove country of origin for the label.

What was a simple, clear marketing plan has become an expensive, onerous, bureaucratic tangle.

The law provides a $1,000 fine per occurance for violating COOL. That ought to make for some interesting court cases, as murky and muddled as the law and its enforcement has become.