Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:

Once the catfood is formulated and in the tin, there is some chance of
tracing it, since the manufacturer prints a batch number on each tin,
which will encode the time and place it was made. I have a Whiskas
tin in front of me that says

023401GB208E294
01 11 12 MU

and I'd guess the GB means it was canned in a plant in Britain. But
before then - how do you label the origin of a lump of steam-cooked
meat in a mass of jelly?

Genetic barcodes?

You'd have to get that info from whoever transported the content to the
canning facility. They will have a record of where the content came from.
However, the content itself is made up of ingredients, each of which
could have come from different places. So then you'd have to find out
where each ingredient came from. Then you'd have to ask the places
where each ingredient was manufactured, to see where the ingredients
for each ingredient came from. It's exponential. Of course, eventually,
each line of inquiry would end up with a something that can't be further
broken down, and once you'd exhausted all the paths of the import/export/
transport tree, you would know where everything came from.

EXCEPT... often times, when a plant buys ingredients/parts to manufacture
an item, there might be several possible vendors they use, depending on
availability, current price, phase of the moon, etc. It might not always
be clear which company provided ingredient X in this particular batch
of compound Q. If you're just trying to eliminate certain manufacturers
or countries, then you'd have to check every potential source, at each
stage of manufacture, to see if your blacklisted place(s) pop up. This,
at least, is theoretically possible. But you'll never get a definitive
answer about where every ingredient in a specific can of cat food came
from.

Also, record-keeping for transport isn't always reliable, so there
might be missing or plain wrong information somewhere along the line.
As I've said before, I think you'd need to hire a private detective to
get your answers.

I also think that, in some part of every manufactured item, something's
going to come from China, and I just don't think it's possible to avoid it.
But as you pointed out, China is not the only country that cuts corners,
with potentially disastrous consequences. It's just the most visible one
at the moment. You'd have to live on an isolated island, and get everything
you use from your own work or that of your fellow strandees on the island,
in order to be sure where everyhing comes from.

Joyce