Upon further inspection …

CULVER CITY, Calif. – Phil Lempert is flummoxed.

The supermarket guru and marketing expert is only 5 feet into the produce department of his local supermarket, and already he has found four foods that defy his attempts to answer a simple question: Is this from the United States?

First there’s Laughing Cow cheese. “It says ‘A French favorite’ on the front, but it’s made in Kaukauna, Wis., with imported Swiss cheese,” he says. The label was printed in Canada.

Next comes guacamole in a plastic package that purports to have come from California. But the back of the container tells a different story: “Product of Mexico.”

Then there are prepared apple slices packaged with a low-fat caramel dip. They’re from Crunch Pak, based in the town of Cashmere, in the heart of Washington State’s apple country. And the apples are indeed from the United States.

“But suppose next time you don’t want the caramel dip?” Lempert says. He grabs a Crunch Pak package of just apple slices off the same shelf. “Product of Chile,” he reads aloud.

Lempert has been sent to the market, with reporter in tow, to research this question: If you want to buy foods produced only in the U.S., what are your options when you head to the supermarket?

He grabs a package of Marie Callender’s Ranch Croutons and starts going down the ingredient list, peering over his glasses to read the text. When he gets to “hydrolyzed corn protein, spices, dextrose, natural and artificial flavors, dough conditioners …” he stops.

“It shouldn’t have to be this hard!” he mutters, throwing the bag into his cart. “The average consumer spends 22 minutes on a shopping trip. You have to worry about fat and calories and health and money. Now if they have to think about where the food comes from, too …”

He sighs.

Knowing all there is to know about what’s in the supermarket is Lempert’s job.

But it’s becoming a chore for more and more Americans. With a steady diet of news about contaminated products coming from China and elsewhere and the spread of a consumer movement to buy locally produced foods, people are paying more attention to the source of their food.

“If I can afford to, I buy organic. If not, then I try to buy American. It’s my second line of defense against questionable agricultural practices,” says Grace Clark, a homemaker in San Francisco.

“I have an order of the countries in my head in terms of who is doing a good job of protecting my health and the environment. I equate Europe with the U.S. and Canada. Then Mexico. Then Central and South America, then Asia,” she says.

It’s not that foods produced in America are always safe; this past year’s outbreaks in spinach and lettuce make that clear.

But “we do still have the best food inspections on those foods that are produced here in the U.S.,” Lempert says.

“Imports have two problems. First is we don’t know and can’t verify the food safety inspections at foreign facilities, and second is that the inspections here on imported products are very limited.”

Doug Powell, director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University, agrees. “Whether your food comes from down the street or around the globe, you want to verify that producers and processors are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing.”

But it’s surprisingly difficult to know exactly where our food comes from. According to the Department of Agriculture, 14.6 percent of Americans’ food comes from overseas. That used to mean brie cheese from France, tea biscuits from England, olives from Greece and for the truly adventurous, canned lychees from China.

Not anymore. Grab a cart and follow along as Lempert attempts to fill his cart with only American-grown and -produced foods.

Fruits and vegetables

Forget bananas. They’re all imported. If you’re sticking to the United States, potatoes and oranges are your best bet, Lempert says, because most of them are home-grown, although there may be some stragglers from Canada with the former and South Africa or Australia with the latter.

As it’s June when Lempert takes his supermarket tour, there’s a good chance most of the produce is from the United States. Growers have fields in California and southwestern states and move their staff, following the growing seasons.

As the seasons turn cooler, the fields move farther south toward the equator.

“You follow the tilt of the earth,” says Tony Gonzalez of the Produce Marketing Association.

To illustrate, Lempert grabs a package of colorful mini peppers that says “Packed in USA” on the front but “Product of Mexico” on the back in smaller type.

And the salad fixings are even more confusing. A package of sundried tomatoes contains Roma tomatoes, herbs and spices and olive oil. There’s no indication where they’re from.

“The tomatoes are probably from the United States,” says Lempert, and the herbs and spices most certainly from elsewhere. “The olive oil is probably imported; it’s either Spanish or elsewhere.”

Not Italian. If it were, the package would say so.

That’s an interesting point when it comes to foods: Countries of origin always are labeled if they’re high prestige. Though not always clearly. Take olive oil. A side trip to the oil aisle shows a row of glowing yellow and light green oils, many labeled “Imported from Italy.” But a careful reading of the back label shows that while the bottles may have come from Italy, most of the oil inside comes from Spain, Greece and Tunisia with some Italian oil thrown in.

Baked goods

Lempert lets us in on a secret. The islands near the bakery are overflowing with fresh-baked bread, rolls and croissants. And while they were baked here – Lambert peeks through the door to point out the ovens and the rising racks – they weren’t actually made here, a guess confirmed by one of the hair-netted employees wheeling out fresh loaves.

The dough “comes in either chilled or frozen, and it’s baked off here,” he says.

There are two clues to whether the market actually makes its own baked goods. “If you don’t see mixers or flour on the floor, it wasn’t made here,” Lempert says.

That said, the ingredients are almost certain to be from the United States, simply because we grow a lot of wheat that becomes flour, as well as producing all our own milk and eggs, he says.

Deli counter

It’s anyone’s guess where the 50 or so pre-cooked food items filling the counter actually come from. And the white-aproned staffers dishing them up don’t know because they didn’t make them.

The salads – Asian noodle, chicken, potato and more – come in five-gallon tubs from salad manufacturers, as do most if not all of the entrees, Lempert says.

“The only way you could know if the fruit from the Waldorf salad has foreign fruits would be to find the tub it came in, and it probably just says it’s Phil’s Salad Factory.”

In the cheese section, it’s easy. We produce almost all the dairy products eaten here, so the vast majority of the cheeses are from the United States. As for the rest, because of the European coolness factor, cheese makers are happy to tout their mostly European origins. So there’s Danish havarti, French brie, Greek feta and Swiss cheese, all proudly labeled.

Fish, meat and poultry

Next comes the fish counter, the only place in the supermarket where country-of-origin labeling is federally mandated. Eighty to 85 percent of U.S. seafood is imported. It’s all there in neat black-and-white type.

Lempert picks up a package of salmon from Canada. “If I can have it on my fish, why can’t I know on my meat?” he wonders.

Though even here, things aren’t quite as clear as they might be. The far end of the counter is taken up with a bubbling tank featuring a few dozen lobsters scrambling over one another. Lempert laughs. The sign reads “Live Maine lobster. Product of Canada.”

No chicken is imported, and given the size of the U.S. meat industry, you might think that everything but prosciutto comes from the United States. But a call to the American Meat Institute reveals about 16 percent of beef is imported, much of that coming in as trimmings that go into ground beef.

“They come from all over the world. An American who eats a lot of hamburger will be eating imported beef,” says Dave Ray of the American Meat Institute. But “these aren’t steaks, cuts, chops and ribs,” which would be American-raised.

Beverages

Next comes the long soda aisle. This is easy but only because of U.S. price subsidies on corn. Those subsidies mean high-fructose corn syrup is the cheapest sweetener available, and it’s what’s used in almost all soda pop.

When it comes to water, it’s almost always possible to tell where it’s from, at least generally. In the “cool” category are, of course, the original spring waters: Evian, Calistoga, Pellegrino. Each lists with pride the springs from which it is taken.

Newer, more far-flung waters are best exemplified by the Fiji brand, shipped thousands of miles from the tiny South Pacific nation. “Drinking” or “purified” waters are generally labeled “from a municipal source,” which means city tap water.

While water companies go out of their way to make their wares sound small, protected and regional, most water is sold by big companies. Dasani is owned by Coke, AquaFina by Pepsi, Arrowhead is Nestle, and Evian is Dannon.

In the juice aisle, things get even more interesting. Lempert laughs when it’s suggested orange juice is all produced in the United States. And indeed, almost every jug he pulls down from the refrigerated shelves lists not just the United States but also Brazil, Costa Rica and other Caribbean countries as its source.

(In good years, when there are no freezes, Florida, California and a few other states produce almost all the orange juice we drink, says Andrew Meadows of the Florida Department of Citrus. In years when production drops because of weather, more is imported. Brazil is the dominant supplier, followed by Mexico and the Caribbean Basin, he says.)

Cranberry and tomato juice are produced in the United States, and apple juice frequently is from China.

Prepared foods

When it comes to heat-and-serve products, Lempert throws up his hands. There are simply too many ingredients that could have come from too many places.

As for cereal, the other staple for the cooking-impaired, the wheat, oats, corn and rice the cereals are made from probably are U.S. grown, as is the high-fructose corn syrup used to sweeten them. But the ancillary ingredients, nuts, dried fruits and so on, aren’t easy to figure out.

Why isn’t it easier to find out where foods come from?

Lempert believes manufacturers resist explicit labeling because they fear consumers’ reaction if they know how far some of their food has come.

“A consumer who sees that the items are from 10 countries isn’t going to want that,” he says.