Mrs. CHENOWETH-HAGE. I do, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank you so much for holding this hearing. You are so well aware of how important this issue is to me. I have been in constant communication with you, and you have responded to my concerns, knowing that this is one of the issues that is most important to me before I leave Congress because this is an issue that just goes to the very, very heart of food safety. And it is a strong right-to-know issue.
As both parties wrestle with trying to understand how to attract the women's vote it is beyond me that this issue of labeling our meats is not front and center on some of our women's issues, concerns, because it certainly is. I am a mom and a grandmom and a wife, and I want to know where my food comes from before I feed it to our families.
It is very interesting. I was examining the label that is already contained on some of our food, and I wanted to point this out to you, Mr. Chairman. We have everything on this label including, well, everything but the book of Genesis, including the fact that it is guaranteed meats, and this came from hamburger, this label. Guaranteed meats, guaranteed what? It states the store, and it states the store's address on there. It talks about the fact you have to sell it by a certain date. It gives a net unit of pricing and a full price. It has the barcode that contains the information that I think most consumers want to know, and that is where did this pound of ground beef come from. It is difficult for the consumer to read barcodes because these barcodes when the meat comes into the country already contains all the information that they need to translate into this label.
They have taken a lot of space in safe-handling instructions. The fact is that you have to wash your hands and you have to cook it to a certain degree and so forth but nothing is said about where that meat came from and how many countries or different kinds of carcasses are mixed up in one pound of beef. But we label everything, including the clothes that we wear. Here is a cap from the Hawaii Cattlemen in Idaho. Their cap is labeled made in Taiwan. We label the toys we buy our children. This set of Hot Wheels came from Malaysia. This dog bone that we feed our dogs, now, we are really concerned about the kind of food we put in our dogs' tummies. This is labeled as coming from Brazil but shipped from Canada. They have all that information on the dog bones. Here is more dog bones. They proudly displayed the American label, and another one.
So, we label the cars that we buy. Here is Jeep Cherokee Sports 4 WD, and it states for parts information for vehicles in this car line it is a U.S./Canadian parts content of 74 percent, major sources of foreign parts content for the Jeep Cherokee, Japan, 15 percent, a final assembly was in Toledo, OH, country-of-origin engine parts, United States, transmission parts, Japan. And I just have to ask, Mr. Chairman, as a mom, as a wife, as a grandmom, why aren't we labeling the meat that we put in our bodies and the bodies of our families?