Rant - Food Labelling / "Imported Ingredients" / Country of Origin

Have you taken a good look at the country of origin of stuff you're regularly buying?

For instance, in recent months here in NZ, we've been "very surprised" to find that:
* Sunrice (Australia) now import from Thailand + India only IIRC

* Practically all cooking oil now comes from Malaysia... But god knows if some of that actually secretly comes from China now! (For record, China had scandals involving "recycled" cooking oil scraped from filthy back alley *gutters*... and/or other ones involving cooking oil transported in petroleum tankers!!!)

* Equally disturbing is how we're increasingly having no local garlic across increasingly many months (I.e. used to be only summer, but now winter too), with only the Chinese produced ones (looking way too artifically uniform)/beyond stocked!

* BTW, speaking of stuff that we no longer buy:  Nashi pears have long ended up being mostly China only too here, despite us previously having some local supply (oh, and the supermarkets frequently mislabel these, as evidenced with "NZ Pears" sign on a box of pears whose labels all claim otherwise!)

 

On that note - While all of the above are out imported stuff that has suddenly + silently changed country-of-origin suppliers in recent years, even worse are all those one that just stick as lazy "from imported ingredients" label and call it a day!

As soon as that "packaged here, but of imported ingredients" gets slapped on, they literally give themselves the license to import random crap from anywhere - AND they would still be justified in saying that the label was technically still correct in what nonsense it was spewing.

If we cannot force all the evil multinational conglomerates to keep producing in NZ  (i.e. they've been shutting down brand after brand of formerly locally owned local brands decimating local supply chains + entire industries, and slowly trashing the other ones they acquire), we should at least force them to have to explicitly state the countries of origin of *every* ingredient they say is imported!  

(e.g. A particularly evil variant I've seen is: "Made in NZ from local and imported ingredients" - WTF?!   Are the *key ingredients* still NZ produce, or have they just gone "imported produce + NZ water to top it off"? 😡) 

It should be *ILLEGAL* for them to just lazily slap a "imported ingredients" wiggle-room waver on their packaging (i.e. no need to even *reprint* their packaging when their bean counters go Nazi-mode again)