Pet Food Politics by Marion Nestle

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2008:

 

 

Pet Food Politics by Marion Nestle

University of California Press (2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley,

CA 94704), 2008. 219 pages, hardcover. $18.95.

 

 

The China Health Ministry at this writing has just announced

that the number of infants and young children known to have been

poisoned by melamine mixed into powdered milk or baby formula has

increased tenfold in 48 hours, to more than 54,000.

Four children have died, 13,000 are hospitalized, and

40,000 children plus two orangutans and a lion cub at the Hangzhou

Safari Park near Shanghai have required outpatient medical treatment

for kidney stones caused by ingesting melamine, a coal derivative of

no nutritional value.

Most observers expect the toll to rise far higher. Eighteen

alleged perpetrators face the death penalty.

Most of this was foreseen by Marion Nestle in Pet Food

Politics, detailing the melamine pet food contamination crisis of

early 2007. Nestle subtitled Pet Food Politics " The Chihuahua in

the coal mine " to emphasize that what happened to dogs and cats can

happen to humans, too.

Chiefly used to make plastics, melamine can also be added to

foods to make them appear to have higher protein content than they

really do, when tested using conventional methods. Accordingly,

stirring melamine into " milk " powder that has already been diluted

with cheaper substances such as chalk dust turns out to have been a

cover tactic for unscrupulous distributors of Chinese dairy products,

just as it was for unscrupulous Chinese sellers of pet food

ingredients.

As well as injuring many thousands of children in a nation of

mandatory one-child families, the milk adulterators sold their

tainted products to Bangladesh, Burundi, Gabon, Myanmar, Taiwan,

and Yemen, where they almost certainly harmed many more children,

mostly in nations of limited capacity to detect and respond

effectively to the damage.

Those nations' lack of ability to intercept poisoned milk

powder parallels the lack of effective inspection and oversight of

pet food production.

The Swiss-based Nestle food manufacturing empire is resisting

a request from the Hong Kong Center for Food Safety that Nestle Dairy

Farm Pure Milk in one-litre packs sold to caterers be recalled,

after melamine was reportedly found in one of 65 samples.

Pet Food Politics author Marion Nestle has spent much of her

career explaining that she has nothing to do with the Nestle food

conglomerate. Her previous books include Food Politics: How the

Food Industry influences Nutrition and Health, and Safe Food:

Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism.

Pet Food Politics would appear to be a departure from

Nestle's usual range, except that she also happens to be nutrition

co-editor of The Bark magazine. Nestle knows dogs, as well as

nutritional issues and the food industry.

In particular, Nestle understands the most basic issue in

manufacturing pet food.

" As one dog food maker explained to me, " Nestle writes,

" the products have to be nasty enough so a dog will eat them but look

and smell good enough for pet owners to want to buy them. "

A similar consideration applies to making cat food, with the

difference that cats are top predators who want their food to smell

and taste like a fresh kill. Dogs prefer theirs to have been dead

for three days.

" The manufacture of wet pet foods presents additional

challenges, " continues Nestle. " For most pet food companies, it is

easier and less expensive to give up control of production and

contract out the making of wet pet foods to 'co-packers' such as Menu

Foods, " which used 1,300 recipes, and for several months in

2006-2007 unknowingly included in many of them wheat, rice, and soy

glutens which were imported from China and spiked with melamine.

" Such recipes may differ in proportions of ingredients, "

Nestle explains, " but the basic ingredients are much the same. So

the recall produced this revelation: the contents of pet foods are

much alike, and the most important difference between one brand and

another is not nutrition; it is price. "

Melamine in pet foods killed from 1,950 to 2,334 cats and

4,150 to 4,583 dogs, causing illness in 14,228 to 17,000,

according to data collected by the Pet Connection web site and the

U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

" The Chinese government, " already embarrassed by several

previous food and drug adulteration episodes since 2004, " promptly

announced that it intended to strengthen safety standards, increase

inspections, require safety certifications, and tackle corruption

in the food system and its oversight. And they would be testing for

toxins in cooking oil, flour, beverages, and baby food, " reports

Nestle.

" In short order, China sent more than 33,000 inspectors into

the field, conducted 10 million inspections, and shut down nearly

200 food manufacturers. Over the next few months, " Nestle recounts,

" officials uncovered hundreds of thousands of food safety violations

and closed down more than 150,000 unlicensed food businesses. The

government said it would establish systems for food recalls, export

inspections, and food safety standards, and would create a

cabinet-level panel to oversee food safety and quality. "

Former Chinese food and drug safety administration chief

Zheng Xiaoyu, convicted of taking bribes to approve drugs, was

executed on July 10, 2007.

Concludes Nestle, " If we want our global food system to

provide safe food for everyone, ensuring the safety of pets is as

good a place as any to start. "

Yet ensuring the safey of pets, to whatever extent it was

achieved, proved insufficient to prevent a similar scandal from

afflicting children in China and other nations, barely more than a

year later.

Responding to the pet food crisis was delayed, as Nestle

details, because U.S. and Canadian laboratories initially had no

idea what kind of contamination to look for. By now the effects of

melamine ingestion are relatively easily recognized. Yet the

agencies that could have moved promptly to reduce the risk to

children were as sluggish in response to melamine in milk as they

were when the problem was an unknown pollutant in pet food.

The New Zealand dairy firm Fonterra purchased 43% of Sanlu,

the largest Chinese dairy company, in late 2005. Sanlu milk

suppliers were apparently already spiking their products with

melamine. Sanlu received complaints about babies falling ill after

consuming the contaminated products in December 2007, according to

China Central Television, but did not discover that melamine was the

cause of the illnesses until June 2008.

Fonterra learned about the mela-mine contamination on August

2. Pressured by Fonterra to recall any products containing melamine,

Sanlu the same day alerted the city government of Shijiazhuang, in

Hebei province, where the company is based. But Shijiazhuang

officials did not take the matter to their Hebei counterparts until

September 9. By then Fonterra had already notified New Zealand prime

minister Helen Clark about the melamine problem--but Clark did not

move to warn China for three more days.

Once China was officially notified, the response gathered

speed. Chinese media disclosed the investigation on September 10. A

day later, Hebei province deputy governor Yang Chongyong reported

that as many as 373 milk suppliers to Sanlu had been found to have

been adding melamine to powdered milk since as far back as April 2005.

Thus children may have been made ill by melamine for nearly

three years before the pet food contamination furor erupted-- and the

adulteration continued even after the perpetrators should have known

that they might be killing babies.

Lest anyone believe this depravity is uniquely Chinese, let

it be remembered that U.S. milk sellers in the early 20th century

often spiked milk with formaldehyde to delay spoilage. Overdoses

occasionally killed small children. Congress passed the Pure Food

and Drug Act of 1906 to address the problem, but " blue milk "

scandals, so-called because the chemical methylene blue is used to

detect formaldehyde in milk, remained frequent for another decade,

until the advent of refrigeration ended the incentive for the

adulteration.

People who gave their cats milk were mostly safe all along.

Though humans cannot smell formaldehyde in small doses, cats can,

and if milk was tainted, cats wouldn't touch it.

--Merritt Clifton

 

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

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Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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