pet connection

Like many pet journalists, I’ve been working on a piece about the anniversary of the pet food recall. A year ago March 16, Menu Foods began a nationwide recall of “cuts and gravy” style food in cans and pouches. Soon more recalls were issued by other companies and the scope extended to dry foods. By the time it was all over, it had become the largest pet food recall in U. S. history.

One of the people I talked to was nutritionist Marion Nestle, Ph.D. Nestle, best known for her 2006 book What To Eat. She is the Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. After writing What To Eat, a guide to shopping the grocery aisles, she decided to turn her attention to pet food, which had received short shrift in the earlier book. To her surprise, she ended up writing two books: Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (September 2008) and What Pets Eat (2009). Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

KT: Did your interest in the food supply chain as a whole lead you to write about the pet food recall, or do you have pets whose welfare sparked an interest?

Marion Nestle: I did a book a couple of years ago called What To Eat that uses supermarkets as an organizing device for talking about food issues. Supermarkets have this great big aisle devoted to pet foods, and I didn’t say a word about them. I felt very guilty about that. My partner in life is a former animal nutritionist and I thought, ‘You know, this would be a great project for us to do together.’

KT: And then the recall happened…

Marion Nestle: We had a contract for the pet food book; we had just signed it. We hadn’t even started writing it yet and then the recall happened, which fascinated me. When I finally got around to starting to work on the pet food book, we divided up the work. He was working on the nuts and bolts, and I thought ‘I’ll write this little piece on the recall and stick it in the back as an appendix.’ It got completely out of hand, so it’s a separate book.

The recall book will come out first, in September. I’ve just gotten the cover, which is really cute. It’s this little pile of food cans.

It’s sort of a combination of Food Politics [published in 2002] and What To Eat for pets. We’re hoping it will be a comprehensive look at what’s on the market, how it got there, what it means and what people who have pets should do.

KT: What’s the most startling thing you learned during the writing of your upcoming books? Was there anything you learned about pet food that surprised or shocked you?

Marion Nestle: I’m just riveted by the whole thing. I didn’t know anything about this at all. I’ve had pets, but I don’t have any right now because I travel too much. There were several things that really surprised me. One was how absolutely similar the issues in pets are to the issues in humans. Even though I didn’t know anything about animal nutrition really and didn’t have a lot of personal recent experiences with feeding pets, I could move right into the subject by analogy.

We just came back from the Global Pet Expo in San Diego. What an experience! I wouldn’t have missed that for anything. I just couldn’t believe what was there. Every single issue in human nutrition is reflected in pet food, every single one. The 50-calorie pack, the enormous trend of specialty companies to produce foods that humans are willing to eat. There were some yummy cheese biscuits; I liked them a lot.

My partner was stunned by the whole thing. I go to a lot of food trade shows, so I wasn’t quite as shocked as he was. He said to the maker of this cheese biscuit, ‘How many calories are in these?’ and the guy said ‘Five.’ We just rolled our eyes. You couldn’t possibly have had five calories; it had to be more than that. Seventeen percent of the calories were fat, and it weighed more than five grams. It had to. But I was fascinated by that trend, which seems really profound, the trend toward not only making foods that pets will eat but foods that their owners will munch on happily. They were really good!

KT: You’ve said that people can learn a lot about nutrition by thinking about what their pets eat. Can you give some examples of what you mean by that? Where do human and pet nutrition converge?

Marion Nestle: The issues are the same, the health claims are the same, the nutrient needs are very similar, the issues around calories are the same. There are very, very few nutritional differences in the needs of people and dogs. Cats are a little more complicated. But if you feed yourself healthfully and you give your dog what you’re eating, your dog will be fine as long as you don’t overdo the calories.

It’s not dangerous to feed your pets table food; they’ve been fed table food for centuries. One of the things I’ve done in this is to review a lot of the history of pet food. You go back to books about how to feed pets in the 1790s; they’re feeding table scraps and they’re talking about variety and they’re talking about not overfeeding.

KT: What about variety versus feeding the same thing day after day, which we’re told is necessary because pets have sensitive digestive systems?

Marion Nestle: I think the food should be varied, but the complete and balanced stuff is fine. The commercial companies go to a lot of trouble to make sure that complete and balanced really is; they work hard at it. I’m not coming out of this thinking that commercial foods are poison–unless they have melamine in them, of course.

KT: What should pet owners consider when they’re purchasing a pet food? Will their pets really be safer if they buy foods that are organic or human-grade or if they make their own pet food?

Marion Nestle: I think they’re going to feel better about it. The kinds of things that are being produced, if you’ve got the money to pay for it, I think it’s fine.

KT: One of the criticisms during and after the recall was that there was no nationwide veterinary reporting system for diseases or other problems that had the potential to affect animals and people.

Marion Nestle: Absolutely! No question about it. It’s in the legislation that was passed that the FDA is supposed to be working with the industry to set up some sort of reporting system. I hope they do. I have a whole chapter in the recall book about trying to figure out how many dogs and cats were affected. Everybody has their own method of doing it, there are vested interests in having it be higher or lower, and the FDA is still saying there were only 14 or 17 or 18 or whatever it is confirmed deaths. That’s not very satisfactory and it doesn’t set up a trusting system. They need something better than that; that’s very clear.

KT: Why should the safety of pet food matter to non-pet owners?

Marion Nestle: The connection between the pet food supply and the human food supply is very tight, as was indicated by the recall. Who knew that discarded pet food would be fed to pigs, chickens and fish? I didn’t know that. That was a big shocker. So the food supplies are linked and the regulatory systems are linked. If you can’t regulate foods for pets, you can’t regulate foods for humans. In a way, I think of pets as being the most vulnerable members of society. They’re helpless and completely dependent on somebody else to take care of their needs throughout their entire lives. They’re in the same category as babies. If you have a system that takes care of vulnerable members of society, you’ll take care of pets as well. They’re an index of how well the systems are functioning.

We will spend the introduction of the pet food book discussing how upset our colleagues were about the idea that we were writing about something as trivial as pets. That’s another reason for doing this book. I don’t want to hear that anymore. I’m really tired of the business of ‘There are people starving all over the world and you’re doing something about pets.’ I got lots of arguments about that.

KT: As it is, we seem to have trouble inspecting human foods.

Marion Nestle: We do indeed. This was a real indication of that. The book I’ve written is not only about what happened during the pet food recall, which is a fascinating story, but also what it’s implications are for food safety for humans, for international trade, the food safety policy in lots of other countries. Look what it’s done to China. China has completely cleaned up its food safety–or said it has.

KT: Has enough been done since the recall to improve the oversight or preparation of pet foods?

Marion Nestle: No. A lot of places are working on it, but it’s still voluntary and as long as it’s voluntary, there will always be breaches. There will be breaches anyway, but voluntary doesn’t work as well as regulated. The legislation said the FDA would work with the industry to develop regulations that everybody would adhere to, but they’re not done yet as far as I know.

KT: Will we see country-of-origin labeling on pet foods and mandatory recall authority for the FDA any time soon?

Marion Nestle: I hope I live that long. Yes, I do, actually; I just don’t know when.

(Find out more on Dr. Nestle’s FoodPolitics Web site and WhatToEat blog. )