Chicken nuggets may soon log more miles than you realize: In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would, for the first time, allow poultry raised and slaughtered in the U.S. to be shipped to China, processed, and shipped back to be sold to U.S. consumers.
The move touched a nerve with a public already unsettled by repeated food safety scandals in China — notably, the discovery in 2008 that baby formula manufacturers there had deliberately laced their products with toxic melamine to lower costs, sickening thousands of children and killing at least six.
Nonetheless, food imports from China to the U.S. have ticked up, growing by 7 percent between 2009 and 2012. Between 2008 and 2011, Chinese imports made up two-thirds of the apple juice sold in the U.S., a third of its garlic and nearly 80 percent of its tilapia.
Some observers worry that the processing plants, ...
