I work hard to make sure my family eats nutritious meals. I’ll bet you do too. But even if you’re a cook-from-scratch kind of parent, it will do your family no good if the ingredients you use have toxins in them.

That’s why it’s so important that we know the sources of the food we buy. Other countries may not be as strict as we are when it comes to making sure food is not contaminated. Some don’t even check. I was buying newly affordable tilapia weekly until I learned that in China, where most of the tilapia comes from these days, fish raised for exporting live in filthy water full of sewage. We haven’t eaten tilapia since.

Then there was the news that melamine was found in baby formula. Even Chinese babies had died from this, yet China allowed it to continue until the global press publicized it, creating an outcry around the world.

Now we learn that French organic farmers have discovered that the imported-from-China soymeal they’ve been feeding their poultry is contaminated with melamine. Testing on the poultry has not shown contamination, but since the testing of the soymeal showed up to 30 times the allowable level of melamine (why is any amount allowed?), you have to wonder.

So French citizens who bought organic poultry from organic farmers at extra expense, presumably because they don’t want to eat poultry raised on antibiotics and who knows what else, got poultry that ate contaminated soymeal. I would be pretty ticked if I were them, and it makes me wonder what’s getting through to our food supply here in the U.S.

But we don’t even know where much of our food comes from. We have a six-year old country-of-origin labeling law that our government has not enforced. In fact, the USDA believes labeling should be voluntary, having already decreed that it’s not worth the cost.

I want all the food I buy to be labeled, and I don’t mean with useless phrases like “Distributed in the USA.” Yes, we know it’s distributed in the USA (duh)….what we want to know is, where did it come from? If it’s from China, I’ll take a pass. Given their track record, I just don’t trust them.