U.S. consumers overwhelmingly support stricter food labeling laws, with 92 percent of Americans wanting to know which country produced the food they are buying, a consumer magazine said on Tuesday.

Consumer Reports said recent food scares, including worries about peanut butter and lettuce, have made Americans more interested in knowing not only how their food was produced but where it was made.

“I was definitely shocked at how high these numbers were,” said the study’s coauthor Dr. Urvashi Rangan, a senior scientist and policy analyst at Consumers Union, the nonprofit organization that publishes Consumer Reports magazine.

“It’s much like a nutrition label or an ingredient label in that it needs to be part of the general information coming in about imported foods,” she added.

The poll was conducted with 1,004 telephone interviews between June 7 and June 10.

Last month, USDA said it would reopen public comment to its so-called “country-of-origin” labeling measure until August 20.

Congress enacted the meat-labeling requirement as part of a 2002 law but has twice delayed the start date, now set for September 30, 2008.