X-posted on my blog
I've started writing for Alternet on occasion and I had the privilege of interviewing one of my heroes, Marion Nestle, about her new book for an article that Alternet posted this week: Pet Food Politics: Why Our Pets Still Aren't Safe
What the title doesn't imply is the implications for the human food supply. Of course we don't eat pet food but if the government's asleep at the wheel with regard to our furry friends' food... how much attention are they paying to the safety of OUR food? And I'm afraid - what with the salmonella outbreak this year - the answer to that is quite obvious. It's Katrina on a plate. Or in your cat's bowl.
Molly's calling Congress to tell them to DO SOMETHING about this!
Remember back in 2007 when thousands of dogs and cats died from tainted pet food? I remember reading an incredibly sad diary here by a Kossack whose pet had just died from tainted food. In the early months of 2007, America suffered a 9/11 of cats and dogs.
Many people minimized the importance of the pet food crisis because it was "just" a bunch of cats and dogs. Obviously those of us who have these special critters in our lives do NOT think of them as "just" cats and dogs. I consider 2 of my 3 cats my best friends. (The third cat needs to stop peeing everywhere to get that status.)
When it comes to Marion Nestle's latest book, Pet Food Politics, the subject of my Alternet article, she gets it that the casualties of the pet food crisis weren't insignificant. But she also saw the bigger picture beyond that... if oversight of pet food is so poor, someone needs to figure out why - and what it means for farm animal food and for human food.
The book was absolutely fascinating. On one hand, you have a bunch of companies acting EXACTLY as I was taught they should in business school. Pet foods require expensive equipment to manufacture, so pet food companies outsourced to one company (Menu Foods) that was able to leverage economies of scale. From a profitability perspective, brilliant; from a safety perspective, one screw up at that one company could take down the entire pet food industry.
Likewise, to lower costs, Menu Foods sourced their wheat gluten from China. And because Chinese culture is somewhat befuddling to most Americans, they went through a company that specializes in importing from China. They have the Chinese cultural expertise required to deal with China so you don't have to. Again - brilliant for business, but it makes it a lot harder for Menu Foods to account for their ingredients to go through extra middlemen.
Regarding Chinese culture, the Chinese prefer to deal with people or companies they have relationships with. Even if the relationship is a bit of a stretch (your company's secretary's brother in law's nextdoor neighbor works at their company in Accounting), anything is better than nothing. I can totally understand the logic of going through a company that has established relations with Chinese exporters if you are a western company with no links to China.
What was going on in China was pretty clever (albeit fraudulent) - and it even worked for a while, until dogs and cats started dying. Wheat gluten is high in protein. The way to test for protein is to test for nitrogen. More nitrogen is more protein. So some smartass in China figured out that you can get something that looks like wheat gluten and contains a bunch of nitrogen and you can pass it off as real wheat gluten. Melamin and cyanuric acid both fit the bill.
You can feed animals cyanuric acid without bad results. You can even feed them SOME melamine without bad results. You just can't feed them BOTH. So for a while, this Chinese company sold (cheap) wheat flour laced with melamine as (more expensive) wheat gluten. It was great for them because they had wheat flour costs but received wheat gluten revenues. They also pulled the same trick for a rice protein product.
The system fell apart when the Chinese company goofed up and mixed both cyanuric acid and melamine together with the wheat flour. And if there was going to be any oversight on this stuff when it was imported, the Chinese bypassed that by putting a different code on their packages when they shipped them. If they labeled the "wheat gluten" honestly, it would have been subject to inspection, so they labeled it as something that wouldn't be inspected. The company on our side of the pond importing the "wheat gluten" is complicit in this because they didn't do anything about it.
The Chinese never wanted to kill any pets... they just wanted to make a buck. They thought they had it figured out, how much melamine or cyanuric acid they could put in the wheat flour without causing harm to pets and raising suspicion. The importers and the pet food manufacturers were also looking to make a buck, going with a cheap source of wheat gluten. Turns out the only reason the Chinese could offer it at such a low price was that it wasn't actually wheat gluten, but everyone was so busy getting rich they didn't care.
And all because these various companies wanted to make money, I could have very easily bought any number of brands of cat food for my girls and I could have killed them. My best friends. Three living beings who rely on me and trust me for every aspect of their care. I could have actually killed them. I might eat local and organic for my own food but when it comes to the cats, I buy a mainstream brand (Science Diet). Science Diet did have a few products that had the bad wheat gluten in them. I was just lucky that I didn't happen to buy them.
I feel somewhat trapped when it comes to my choice of cat food. There is no "local" option, and going vegetarian for my cats is out of the question. There are some organic or "natural" choices, and I'd really like to buy a brand I've found called Pet Promise that Whole Foods sells. But I don't get much of a choice. I need something they are willing to eat that doesn't give them diarrhea or hairballs. Science Diet Hairball formula fits the bill, whether I like it or not.
One major difference between pet food and human food is that pets eat the same food day in and day out. Our diet is varied. If we had tainted wheat gluten in a product, at least we would have eaten other foods that day. Hopefully we wouldn't eat enough to kill us. Pets aren't so lucky.
Still, if melamine could get into pet food, it wouldn't be impossible for the same thing to happen to human food. This summer we saw a big E. coli beef recall and a huge salmonella outbreak that took months for the FDA to even find the source of. These nationwide food scares are increasingly common. Our system is obviously broken. We're lucky that we haven't had a human death toll to match the pet death toll.
I encourage you to take a look at Marion Nestle's words on the subject in my interview with her, and to read her newest book, Pet Food Politics. It's an incredible case study that shows what exactly happened and where the flaws in our system lie. An Obama presidency could be absolutely key to reforming our food safety problems, and I hope we will be celebrating that in a few short months.