Country Of Origin.

Dogs work the arrivals hall at the airport. They are trained to smell fruit, meat, seeds, plants. They do not read customs declarations. They do not care what a traveller wrote on the form. They smell the bag. Either there is an apple in it or there is not. Nobody has trained a dog to smell a spreadsheet.

This turns out to matter. Scientists tested tomato products from supermarket shelves. Not by reading the label. By measuring what was actually inside the tin, the soil, the water, the particular chemistry of wherever the plant actually grew. Two hundred and twenty one products. Thirty nine brands. Over nine hundred samples.

The label on the Leggo's paste said Australian grown. Most of it was not. The label on the Coles Italian tomato paste said Italian. It was not that either. The label on the Rosso Gargano passata said Italian, in the way that a label can say something with complete confidence and no supporting evidence whatsoever. It was not Italian.

More than half of the failed products traced back to Xinjiang specifically, a region people have been asking uncomfortable questions about for years, mostly regarding who is picking the tomatoes and whether they are free to stop.

Coles said it trusts its supplier. It has trusted this supplier for twenty years. Twenty years is a long time to trust somebody without checking what is actually in the tin. A dog would have checked on day one.

Aldi rejected the findings and pointed to its paperwork. The paperwork is, by all accounts, very thorough. Nobody has suggested the paperwork is wrong. The paperwork says the tomatoes came from Italy. The tomatoes, according to the chemistry, did not.

Europe learned this lesson earlier, from mad cow disease, and from beef that turned out on closer inspection to be horse. A cow in France now leaves behind almost as much paperwork as its offspring. Nobody there is asked to assume the label first. Somebody checks, and the label follows what was actually found, not the other way around.

Australia checks the other way. The label goes on first. Everything after that is a formality, unless somebody from Four Corners happens to be standing there with a machine that measures the periodic table. Reputation is not proof, whatever the label would prefer you to believe. A green and gold kangaroo printed on a tin is not itself a fact about the tin. It is a promise, made by whoever printed it, about a fact that somebody else was meant to check.

Australia spent this year telling the United States that its tariffs, based partly on supply chain integrity concerns, were unfair. Around the same time, somebody tested the tomatoes. People have noticed the two events sitting rather close together. Nobody is claiming one caused the other. Two hundred and twenty one products is a lot of tomatoes to be sitting close together by accident.

Allan Fels, who used to run the consumer watchdog, said the findings were deeply concerning. He said he was not totally surprised, but was very disturbed. This is a specific and useful distinction. It is possible to have expected a thing and still be disturbed to find it. Most of the companies involved appear to have managed neither.

Ninety three per cent of Australians say they trust the Australian Made logo. Ninety nine per cent recognise it on sight. Seventy seven per cent say they will pay more for a product that carries it. Nobody surveyed was asked whether they had personally verified any of it. That part was assumed to be somebody else's job.

A dog at the airport does not read the customs form. It smells the bag. A note pinned to the suitcase reading This Bag Does Not Contain Fruit would not spare it a search. The dog does not care what the bag says about itself. It cares what is in the bag.

The tin is still on the shelf. It still says Australian Grown. Most people buying it this week will put it straight in the trolley. What they will check, if anything, is the price of the one next to it. Some of what they buy may be Chinese. How would they know?