Boeing Layoffs & No COOL Changes

Boeing Layoffs & No COOL Changes plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

The first major round of layoff notices went out Friday to hundreds of Boeing workers. Boeing is handing out 60-day pink slips to 1,100 workers, about 700 in the Puget Sound area. The Friday notices tell workers their jobs will end April 24. These are part of the 10,000 layoffs that Boeing announced in January for this year because of the recession. Most of these layoffs deal with Boeing's commercial airplane division, with many job losses coming in the "shared services group," which supports a variety of Boeing programs.

The National Pork Producers Council and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association say they don't want the stricter COOL guidelines that are being discussed in Washington. Ag Secretary Vilsack reportedly told a consumer lobby he'd seek to enforce voluntarily – or write new rules if the meat industry doesn't comply. NPPC spokesman Dave Warner says they don't want more changes that could add to COOL's cost

WARNER: The pork producers and the meat packing companies are ready to comply with the final end COOL rule which the Bush administration published. That rule goes into effect on March 16^th. As far as we know that is still the case and our producers and packers have already made changes to their systems to comply with the end COOL rule.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

While grocery shopping the other day I noticed a U.S. product label for the first time. It happened to be on the package of chicken breasts I was buying. Now, either I’m unobservant, which is quite possible at times, or this really was the first time I was seeing origin labeling at my local supermarket. I have to admit, it was good to see. I also noticed a product of Chile label and a product of Mexico label. Interestingly, there is talk of a new nutrition scoring label on foods as well. The system called NuVal would give food scores based on nutritional value on a scale of 1 to 100. Speculating that the higher the number, the higher the nutrition value. These nutritional scores will be next to the price on your grocery store shelves. Consumers will still have to use some good old common sense though when it comes to these scores and compare foods in the same specific category; as in apples to oranges. Hopefully, a lot of the guess work will soon be gone when it comes to buying healthy and nutritional foods for your family.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.