pet connection

First, the laugh for the day. Nancy Peterson is drawing names for door prizes and one of the prizes is a 15-minute reading from a cat communicator. Amy Shojai, president of CWA, pipes up: “I don’t want to know what my cat thinks.” Laughter all around.

Marion starts by telling how she, a human nutritionist who studies food systems, came to write Pet Food Politics. She’s interested in obesity and food safety, which of course are important for animals as well as people. Today’s food safety threats include food quantity (too many calories and too few), microbes such as Salmonella and E. coli, etc. The argument of her book is that if we don’t clean up the safety of pet food, it’s going to affect human food. Her interest started with her book What To Eat, a book about the human food supply and how to think about food issues. Talks about looking at pet food during the writing of that book and not understanding what was on the labels. Her partner, who had a background in animal nutrition, would look at them and explain about the guaranteed analysis and so forth. She planned to do a chapter on pet food and decided it deserved its own book. She realized that the kinds of questions people were asking about pet food were the same questions people asked about human food.

Now she’s talking about the pet food recall. It became very apparent right from the beginning that the implications of the recall not only affected the pet food industry but also American government food safety regulations, foreign relations with countries like China, etc. I was having my first experience with investigative reporting. The surprises about this and there were a great many were the number of recalls. Explaining what wheat gluten is and how it’s made and that it’s expensive to make, which is why it was outsourced to China. Wheat gluten in health food stores is called seitan. Now she’s explaining that melamine is an industrial chemical that had also been outsourced to China. Used to make plastic dinnerware and Formica countertops. For years people have been trying to figure out what to do with the nitrogen in melamine. Unscrupulous people added melamine to protein so that any food it’s in will test as being higher in protein. Melamine by itself isn’t very toxic to the human or animal body, but it’s unstable and one of its breakdown products, cyanuric acid, formed crystals that blocked kidney function in cats.

Who knew that surplus pet food would be fed to farm animals, but pet food is highly nutritious…and animal feed makers feed surplus food to chicken, pigs and fish. Talks again about link between human and pet food supply. I got the feeling during the recalls that the FDA was floored by the response of pet owners being so upset about their pets eating tainted food. One of the problems was the complexity of the food distribution chain. Very difficult to trace where ingredients went. A lot of the facts of what had happened only came out when one of the distributors was indicted and the documentation was presented in the court case. It was never clear who manufactured the tainted wheat gluten.

People didn’t know that so many of our food ingredients were made in China like citric acid and vitamins and minerals. NYT reporter found out melamine had been added to pet food for years. 80 percent of China’s food production is done in very small scale decentralized companies, basically backyard factories. China has cracked down on those factories since. Asked a USA Today reporter who was in Beijing for the Olympics to tell her what she saw in Chinese pet food stores and their shelves were very similar to those seen in American pet supply stores.

Now talking about the discovery of melamine in infant formula in China in fall 2008. Evidence that problems began a year earlier.

Result: bad economic situation for Menu Foods, although they are now back in the black. Implications for FDA and Congress. New legislation calls for standardization of ingredients but so far not much has happened.

We have one food supply and if it doesn’t work for pets it’s not going to work for people. We have a global food system that needs some regulation. CDC says there are 76 million cases of food poisoning each year, not counting pets. Lots of reports about how U.S. food supply isn’t particularly safe, and Nestle thinks that’s an understatement. Just this year alone, recalls of peanutbutter, pistachios and cookie dough.

What I find disturbing is the number of recalls that still continue. Pet food companies are not doing the kind of testing they need to. Laws regarding food safety have not changed much since 1906, when they were instituted after publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The food safety system is divided in regulation between the FDA and the USDA and there are aspects of the food safety system that are so antiquated that they would be absurd if lives weren’t at stake. Many of problems in food supply are due to animal waste.

Too much is proposed but not passed or is voluntary not mandatory. Notes that FDA does not have recall authority, although it may after next week. FDA poorly staffed and cannot keep up with burden of oversights with which it’s tasked. So government passes on food safety responsibility to consumers.

Common ideas: single food safety agency for all food, pet or human; recall authority to FDA.

I think we’re in the middle of a food revolution. Slow food, organic, animal welfare, locavore.

Her mantra: “one food supply.”

Ends with slide of her “grandcat”