Dr. Nathan Peterson examines a Pug named Monty before his release from a Boston animal hospital in this file photo. Hospital staff said they believe the dog became ill after eating contaminated pet food.
Tainted milk and the politics of pet food
September 28, 2008
Staff Reporter
In March 2007, Menu Foods, a Mississauga-based pet food manufacturer, issued a massive recall. The reason: Melamine, a polymer used to make countertops and glue, among other things, was causing so much trauma to the kidneys of cats and dogs that some had to be euthanized.
It's the same substance found in tainted milk formula that has sickened more than 50,000 babies in China and Hong Kong this month. Two days ago, H.J. Heinz Co., as a precautionary measure, recalled a small batch of vegetable cereal baby food in Hong Kong that showed trace levels of melamine.
Tracking how melamine ended up in the products of North America's largest pet food maker is the thrust of Pet Food Politics, the new book by Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health. What follows is an edited version of a phone interview she gave last week from New York.
The book starts with the Menu Foods recall but isn’t restricted to the pet-food industry.
I didn’t do a book on this because of the emotional attachment of pet owners to their dogs and cats. I saw it as a huge gap in the food-safety system. And guess what? It is. And it’s everywhere. I just got something from a reporter that says melamine has turned up in candy in New Zealand. Chinese-made candy, of course.
This isn’t just pet food. I never thought it was. We already knew, because of the problems that we had with genetically modified corn, that there was no way to keep the animal and human food supply separate. It’s just not possible to do that.
Melamine is plastic, isn’t it?
Yes. Plastic dinnerware, that sort of thing. The production of it leaves an industrial scrap, and it must be water-soluble. So this scrap is very high in nitrogen, and it looks like protein when you test for it. The fraudulent use of it goes back 30 or 40 years, at least. In the ’60s they showed that it killed sheep, so you knew right away that it was toxic. In Italy in the 1970s, melamine contamination of animal feed was so common, they developed a test for it. They found that 60 per cent of the fish feed in Italy was contaminated.
But it’s 2008 now.
Nobody paid any attention to it. Everybody forgot about melamine, even though there were steady papers published through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. And none of the papers that I came across as I was doing my research for this book turned up on the FDA’s toxicology review.
So it seems like this wandered its way back into the industrial food supply without anybody knowing or caring. Where are the standards to prevent this sort of thing?
Well, there aren’t any. It was a warning that every manufacturer that has a protein ingredient should be looking for this. But they haven’t been.
Manufacturers know this stuff is toxic but choose not to test for it. The obvious question is why?
Protein is expensive. Melamine is cheap. And these are unscrupulous producers who are only interested in making money in a hurry. This is rampant, unbridled capitalism in action. This is the kind of thing that was done in the U.S. before we had food and drug laws. And one would hope that China will do the same.
One of the revelations about the pet-food recall was the number of ingredients that were coming from China. The reason everybody had gone to China to get wheat gluten, for example, was because nobody made it here — it was too expensive. A number of pet-food companies told me they had to go to China to get ingredients because they couldn’t source them here.
It’s a pretty easy guess, then, when we’re talking about industrial food, to think that manufacturers will obtain ingredients where they’re cheapest, like the New Zealand candy. It’s one thing to buy cheap, low quality widgets that break; food ingredients are another thing.
Exactly. It’s a big problem.
This comes back to Michael Pollan and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Most of us don’t think – or haven’t, until recently — about where our food comes from. So much of it is wilful blindness, or blind trust in the producers. And what you’re suggesting is that it’s a misplaced trust.
Oh, yes. It’s misplaced because producers are asked to apply these standards voluntarily. And we know voluntary doesn’t work. There are tons and tons of examples; even mandatory doesn’t really work unless there’s constant monitoring and enforcement.
Most of us just assume that, in the West, we have a whole litany of protective measures when it comes to something as essential as our food supply.
No, we don’t. We don’t have farm-to-table food safety in the United States. Absolutely not. We have a food safety system that begins with animals at the slaughterhouse, and vegetables whenever they appear — certainly not at the farm. We only have oversight of vegetables for sprouts and fruit juices.
Why those two?
Because they caused problems, and the FDA, during the Clinton administration, was able to require food-safety regulations for those two products because of it.
So there has to be a problem, first, before any kind of enforcement comes to bear?
There has to be a very big problem. When I’m at my most cynical, I’ll say it has to be a very big problem that personally affects the family of a very important senator. Without that, I don’t think we’ll get any movement on it at all.
So if Cindy McCain were to eat some bad clams.....
That’s right.
That’s extremely cynical.
Isn’t it, though? But I actually believe that. That’s why we have (problems with contaminated) spinach two years ago, and tomatoes, or jalapenos, or cilantro this year — they still don’t know. And I believe you have a little listeria problem up there, don’t you?
Indeed. It’s been a terror. But you have to hope more rigorous standards will come of these things.
Yes, you’d hope. But it doesn’t always happen. And it’s convenient to blame China, but the Chinese look you straight in the eye and tell you, “Nobody ever told us they cared about anything except price.” That was in April, in The New York Times.
Given the volume of goods coming from China, how realistic is it to police that entirely?
They don’t have to inspect everything coming in to the United States; they just have to inspect enough for these producers to understand they have a good chance of getting caught. And everybody should be testing for melamine. Everybody.
It seems like the most basic thing in the world — what we eat. It must frustrate you to no end to see this political morass surrounding it.
I think it’s astonishing, but I understand it. We have an industry in the United States, across the board, that doesn’t want regulation. The moment the regulators come in, they say, they make you do things that you don’t want to do. Well, yes, they certainly do. That’s their job.
What I take away from this is that certain parts of our world — like the life-sustaining ones — maybe shouldn’t be corporatized.
Well, I believe we need regulation. There are things that government can do that no one else can. Government can require companies to produce food safely. There are many companies that do, but it’s at will; the company that packed the contaminated spinach a couple of years ago — you wouldn’t believe what they’ve done. They just decided it would never happen again. In the absence of regulations, they’re testing, they’ve got a microbiologist — they’re setting the standard for that industry, and voluntarily. But they’re out there on their own.
So what’s the solution?
Federal regulation.
But you’ve made very clear that there’s absolutely no political will for that; it sounds like you’re describing a hopeless situation.
Well, there may not be the will right now; but that could change.
What will it take to change the situation? A complete disaster?
In the wake of all this, the industry has started begging for regulation. They want to write it themselves, mind you, but the loss of consumer trust has them begging for it. They seem to have decided they’re better off with it than without it.
But as you say, they want to write it. Is it a case where something is better than nothing?
Oh, certainly. One thing is very clear: We know how to produce safe food. This is not a mystery. We know for a fact that other countries do it better than us, but we can do it. It requires a political will, it requires a very intelligent look at the processing procedure, identifying where problems occur, and fixing them; and then, diligent and constant monitoring. Companies that do that don’t have problems.