pet connection

PetConnection.com contributing editor Christie Keith recently spoke with author and nutritionist Marion Nestle (NES-uhl) about her recent book about the pet food recall, “Pet Food Politics,” and her forthcoming book “What Pets Eat.”

Christie Keith: An area where you and I really very much overlapped in what we saw as the important issue of the pet food recall was the failed food safety system which incidentally was in pet food this time, but of course now we’ve seen it seeping out into –

Marion Nestle: In exactly the same thing. The other part about it was it’s the “just pets” issue that you had tied together on that. So the sort of general feeling is that pets aren’t important, they don’t matter. And this was just pet food. And I thought that just permeated the entire discussion of what went on. So it was never taken as seriously as it need to be taken. And it’s hard to be proved right all the time but there you are.

Christie Keith: So you are or were working on another book about pet food, however, not just this one on the pet food recall. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Marion Nestle: Yeah. That came about with my partner Mal Nesheim and I, as a result of what was the leftovers from my book “What To Eat” that came out in 2006. He’s an animal nutritionist and an animal scientist. He was trained in that, that’s what his doctorate is in, and he chaired the Animal Science department at Cornell for many, many years before he switched over to human nutrition. And he’s retired and I thought ah, this could be something we could do together. The pet food aisle was something I just didn’t touch when I was writing “What to Eat,” because I couldn’t understand it. But he could. So I dreamed up this project, I thought it was something that we could do together. I already knew that we could write together because we’d done a couple of things – and I thought it would be fun. And it was. And we wrote a proposal and we got a contract, or we had an agreement for a contract in January, 2007 and I don’t think we signed it until the end of February. And then the recall hit. We hadn’t even started on the research.

And for us, the recall opened up research possibilities that we didn’t know existed. I mean things that we might have had a terrible time finding out, were suddenly headlines in newspapers. What it did was it confirmed what – I mean I just had a feeling about it. I can’t explain it. I would look at those products and not understand them and think there’s something going on here that’s really interesting and I just don’t know what it is.

And when we were telling people that we were going to write a book about pet food, I can’t tell you how nasty the reactions were. I mean, people would say things like, “Children are starving in Africa, how can you waste your time on something like this?”

And I couldn’t explain it – I didn’t have an answer for it. And my colleagues thought it was the most ridiculous thing they’d ever heard. It was very, very difficult to justify that this is a personal thing that I was doing with my boyfriend. It was sort of that kind of thing. And I was kind of surprised by the reaction. I don’t have a cat or a dog, but I know plenty of people who do, and they’re quite fond of their pet, to put it mildly. And I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I couldn’t think of anything that was wrong liking your pet or being fond of it or getting emotional for your pet. I just couldn’t think of anything wrong with that; that seemed like a really good thing.

So I went into this thinking there’s something to this, and then the recall happened which completely confirmed – I just said it’s hard to be right all the time and we’d laugh about it. But there it was – it just opened up. And I thought oh, okay. I was on book tour for “What to Eat” and couldn’t pay as much attention to it as I ordinarily would have. I was traveling a lot, so I didn’t have hours to sit down and do the web stuff that you and Gina were doing. But I was sort of following the major events and each new event was jaw-dropping.

Jaw-drop number one was all that stuff is made in one place. What’s that about? Jaw-drop number two – melamine? That’s where Mal came in so handy because the minute he said what’s melamine and he looked it up on the web and he said oh, I know what this is for, they’re putting it in there to make it look like it’s got protein. He knew right away because animal feed has always been ripe for adulteration, and this was an obvious one. And so then it came from China, and the companies didn’t know that it came from China? Each one of these things that unfolded, I thought was riveting, really a fabulous object lesson and what’s wrong with the food safety system in general.

And then, of course, it turned out – if you didn’t know it already – that the pet food supply is intimately connected with the human food supply in at least two ways; one, that it uses a substantial fraction of the byproducts of human food production that would otherwise be wasted, and surplus pet food was fed to pigs, chicken and fish?

Who knew? I mean this is jaw-dropping stuff. So I was totally into it, but I didn’t start working on it until July when I got out from under all the other things. And I said why don’t I write a 10-page summary of the recall and stick it in the back as an appendix and that will be our justification for writing the book. It’ll take care of that – until I started researching the pet food recall, and it got completely out of hand.

Before I knew what had happened, I had a 60- or 70-page manuscript that the editor of our book said no, no you can’t do that – that’s disproportionate, that’s not what this book is about, that’s not what we contracted you for. And my University of California press editor said he would take it but it had to be longer. Which is the story of my life. It always has to be longer. So I made it longer, that was no problem at all; there was plenty to talk about.

Christie Keith: How’s it doing?

Marion Nestle: I don’t know. I don’t have any idea. They’ve done a reprint – they’re thrilled beyond belief. But it’s an academic press and they have very low expectations.

Christie Keith: It’s getting a lot of reviews for an academic press book – pet blogs and pet websites are writing about it.

Marion Nestle: Yeah, I see those and I think that’s great. That’s certainly an audience I want to reach, but I’d like it to reach a wider audience. So I’m kind of surprised that people haven’t picked it up in the light of the Chinese infant formula.

Christie Keith: I think that there’s still that wall they have where they don’t understand. Like I didn’t understand why people weren’t getting that this ingredient was not sold as animal feed, it was sold as rice gluten powder, wheat gluten, whatever. It could have, at that time, gone into the human food supply with no problem. And now it is, obviously.

Marion Nestle: They’re finding it in everything, I mean, instant coffee and cookies, candy – it’s everywhere. It’s in human food right now, but that’s because everybody sees these things as being completely separate and because of this funny thing about just that. And unless you’re talking to people in the pet community, who get it loud and clear, and it’s been lovely to have met them I must say, people look at you just glassy-eyed, it’s the weirdest thing.

Christie Keith: I’ll tell you, my theory on this is because we have been propagandized for 50 years now and increasingly even more so in the last 30-35 that there is something called dog food and cat food, and it’s not just food. They’ll use this very strange phrase that we have in the pet world – people food. I’m going, okay what is people food and what do you think is in dog and cat food?

Marion Nestle: It’s just different parts of the animal.

Christie Keith: Yeah. It’s like there is no such thing as people food, dog food or cat food; there are products formulated and marketed to be fed to dogs. But it’s still food, folks. And it’s the same animal. It’s all coming from the same places.

Marion Nestle: The same animal. And if it’s got melamine in it, it’s gonna go into everything anyway. It was just an astonishing experience to research this and to read things that people said. You know, I did a lot – in the book – a lot of letting people speak for themselves, which I like to do. And oh, they just said amazing things – amazing.

Christie Keith: So, and the forthcoming book, what is it called?

Marion Nestle: It’s called “What Pets Eat.”

Christie Keith: And do you know yet when it will be released?

Marion Nestle: No, because the editor is sitting on it. She’s had it for months.

Christie Keith: Really?

Marion Nestle: It’s an analysis of the pet food industry basically. It’s “What to Eat” for pets. We did exactly what I had done in the human book.

Christie Keith: Do you discuss fresh real foods for pets?

Marion Nestle: Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, we have a chapter on how to cook for your pet. That’s one of the things I feel, there’s stuff in the book that just amuses me and we have a generic recipe for cooking for pets that meets AAFCO guidelines, and it is so simple to do. It’s breathtakingly simple. And we’ve got a chapter on raw food and a chapter on all of the different kinds of premium – natural, organic, human grade – all of that stuff. We cover all of that. We cover the commercial, the AAFCO rules, we cover veterinary education, we cover the ethics of doing research on animals, on pets. We did the whole thing.

Christie Keith: I actually think this conflict is overstated, but our readers are very frequently saying that their veterinarians are recommending certain commercial pet foods because they make all this money selling it, which I don’t think is the reason. I think it’s because it’s what they know.

Marion Nestle: I think it’s both.

Christie Keith: I don’t really think that most of them make that much money selling pet food.

Marion Nestle: We saw estimations of the proportion of veterinarian income from food; it’s not that great. But it’s what they know. We talk about that. We have a whole chapter on nutrition and veterinary education, which is something I know a lot about because I taught at UCSF for ten years. I know a lot about nutrition and medical education, and veterinary education is just where medical education was 30 years ago — with all those conflicts of interest.

Christie Keith: What did your co-author, with his background, think? I find that the nutrition departments of veterinary colleges are the most hostile to the concept that a pet owner can prepare his or her pet’s own food at home.

Marion Nestle: As I said, we have the Hills book. Hills puts out this really superb book on clinical nutrition for small animals. It’s an absolutely superb book – I mean, even though it’s done by Hills people. And they have a chapter on home-cooked food for pets that is hilarious. Three-quarters of the chapter is on how dangerous it is to cook for your pet and what harm you’re doing, and then they give recipes. And we just lifted the recipe, we just lifted them out of the Hills book, translated them from grams into ounces. You can do it on one little teeny table; it just couldn’t be simpler. We just thought it was hysterically funny.

Christie Keith: I’ve home-fed my animals for almost 23 years; in January, it will be 23 years. And apparently it’s not as hard as they say it is. You know, I can remember during the pet food recall, [FDA Director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine Dr.] Stephen Sundlof was saying that he himself did not feel qualified to prepare his pet’s food at home.

Marion Nestle: Yeah, I saw that. Mal, having spent 15 years as Chair of the Animal Nutrition department and 15 years as Chair of the Human Nutrition department, points out that you know somehow people manage to eat. Nobody worries about cooking for people – what’s the problem? I just don’t see what the problem is. I mean, part of the problem is – and this is sort of a philosophical issue that has to do with what society would be like if pets ate human food. We added up the calories and if pets were eating human food it would be like feeding another 40 million people on a calorie basis. So I think by-products have a function here, especially if – but they have to be good by-products.

Christie Keith: Well, you know I feed my pets beef trim from Marin Sun Farms, which is a grass-raised local ranch.

Marion Nestle: Lucky them.

Christie Keith: And it’s quite affordable. I have two giant breed dogs and it’s really not that bad. I buy it through a co-op for people who are feeding their pets. We buy all kinds of locally produced grass-fed what you’d call byproducts; you know, the parts of the animal that are rarely used in human food. You’d be – well, you wouldn’t be – a lot people would be amazed that we’re competing in a lot of cases with restaurants and food manufacturers for these so-called by-products.

Marion Nestle: I know we went to Pet Expo and everybody there was complaining that they can’t source this stuff because they’re competing and they just can’t get it.

Christie Keith: There’s really not that much anymore that doesn’t get used in the human food chain. So the stuff that we’re getting is by-products, by one definition, but it is fresh, local, raised how I want it, slaughtered how I want it slaughtered – and I think these are alternatives that people think maybe jump from feeding them exactly what we’re eating to kibble, as if there’s nothing in between.

Marion Nestle: There’s plenty of stuff in between, and you don’t have to do it one way, I don’t think. We went to visit the Bravo plant because I was kind of curious about how the whole raw food thing went. They have the most exotic parts of animals, beautifully dried and packaged. In fact I have a trachea in my office and I’m looking for somebody who wants a raw trachea but I can’t find anybody who wants it. But that was great. We did as many field trips as we could. Although we were denied access to a lot of places.

Christie Keith: Interesting. Who denied you?

Marion Nestle: We wanted to go to an animal testing – well, actually lots of places. We can’t get into any Procter & Gamble or Nestle placed, despite having contacts. We weren’t allowed. Mal went to visit Hills. I was invited too, but I couldn’t go, I was doing something else. But he went to Hills. But we couldn’t get into Nestle, we couldn’t get into Procter & Gamble. And we wanted to go to Summit Ridge, which is a testing facility in Pennsylvania that’s actually quite close to Ithaca. And we had met a Summit Ridge person at one of the meetings that we went to last year and she said oh yeah, we have visitors all the time – it won’t be a problem at all. And we set up a date and then the week before we were supposed to go, they wrote us and said forget it – we’re not letting you within 100 yards of this place. We have clients to protect. That was sort of amusing – it went right in the book.

Christie Keith: I’ve been long curious, there’s so much ranting and raving against raw diets. In writing the book do you feel that there’s –

Marion Nestle: That was why we went to Bravo. I was very curious to see what they did about food safety and were they producing their products under a HAACP (food safety) plan. The answer to that is they have to because they’re in a facility that also produces human food, which would bring it under the same rules. And they passed. I thought that sets the standard for the industry; I don’t have any problem with that at all. And again, I don’t have any problem with raw as long as the specific nutritional needs of pets are taken care of. And then I think supplements can usually take care of that pretty easily. I ended up pretty eclectic about all of this.

Christie Keith: I always think of you as sort of a whole foods type person, and it seems to me that commercial pet food, kibble in particular, is pretty much the antithesis of that. So how did you feel about suggesting that people eat these varied diets and eat lots of vegetables and fruits and then talking about cereal-based dry food for pets?

Marion Nestle: We reviewed the literature on cereal-based and it’s complicated. I mean, there are some animals that do just fine on it, and for owners who want that level of convenience, it works for a lot of them. It doesn’t work for all of them. And I just thought that values had really a lot to do with this. I mean what you’re doing with an animal – a dog or a cat – as you’re using a commercial pet food is you’re feeding them infant formula, basically, and you’re asking it to rely on one product.

And where the variety comes in is the variety of ingredients that went into that product. If you’re looking for variety, you want to look for a single product that has that. I mean, that’s not the way people eat, but for people who have dogs and cats and who really are baffled, obsessed, put into a tizzy by the thought of trying to construct a healthful diet, this is a way of taking care of what I call their nutritional responsibility in a pretty easy way. And for a lot of people that’s what they want to do.

And so the pet food industry produces products at an enormous range of – what’s the word – I don’t want the word quality. But an enormous range of values I think. They will produce – you want to feed your animal a vegetarian diet, okay. They’ve got a product for you. Whether this makes any rational sense at all, I have no idea, but if you want to feed your animal a vegetarian diet you can do it and not kill them in the process, and not kill yourself in the process either, by having to deal with grains in certain ways. I mean, I don’t know. It depends on what the owners feel and most pet owners in America don’t want to bother.

Christie Keith: You know, I don’t really mind framing it that way. What I think is the reality that we deal with, however, is that we’re being told that any deviation from feeding your pet nothing but a commercial product for every single day of their life is actually bad for their health.

Marion Nestle: Yeah, well that makes no sense at all. I mean that really makes no sense at all. And I see that as – what veterinarians told us is that yes, they see animals that have owners that don’t know how to do it right and are hurting their pets in the process. But doing it right is so breathtakingly simple, I couldn’t believe it – I just couldn’t believe it when I saw those recipes. And they’re generic. The recipes that Hills gives, they’re generic recipes; a half a pound of grains, a quarter of a pound of meat, you vary them within it, you throw in some vegetables, you throw in a couple of supplements that you can buy at a supermarket and you’ve taken care of it. It couldn’t be simpler; all you have to do is follow the recipes. You need a scale.

Christie Keith: Don’t you know you need an industrial calibrated scale and a food laboratory in your garage and a degree in biochemistry? Don’t you know this, Marion?

Marion Nestle: None of the above because they don’t have to be that accurate. Because if you think about it for one second, you think about it, people don’t eat that way and somehow people manage to survive and heart disease rates are going down and life expectancy is going up.

Christie Keith: Well, commercial food isn’t that precise either because if you just look at the label, it’s given in ranges. And the calcium range, for example, is a huge range. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just saying they’re not holding the two to the same standard.

Marion Nestle: The basic principles of nutrition apply to pets. And those are balance, variety and moderation. I can’t even say it without laughing. But they apply – they absolutely apply. And I’m very influenced by Mal in this because he, as an animal scientist, as part of the early part of his career, did animal experimentation in which you put animals on diets that were going to cause a nutrient deficiency. And he talks about how hard it is to induce a nutrient deficiency in an animal. If the animal is getting enough calories, and if the person – if a person is getting enough calories and is eating a variety of food from different food groups, it’s really hard to induce a deficiency. And so what people resort to is talking bout marginal deficiencies and sub-clinical deficiencies. I don’t know what that means. If you can’t document it, does it exist? I don’t know.

Christie Keith: A lot of people had their eyes opened during the pet food recall about the limited information available on the labels of pet food, especially compared to human food – there are very different standards and requirements for pet food.

Marion Nestle: That’s what got me interested in the first place. I would go down this aisle – here’s the huge aisle in the supermarket I’m not paying any attention to and I would occasionally walk down, I’d pick up a can and look at it and I was hopelessly confused – what is this? What are they talking about? Then Mal would pick it up and he’s an animal scientist so he says oh, I know what this is; this is animal feed regulations. So when we started doing it, he started drafting the sections of the book that decode the pet food label. I can do that now, and also use them to figure out what’s in it. And we show how to do all that stuff.

Christie Keith: Although it was interesting, one of the things in the pet food recall I found, one of the foods that did not have rice protein powder listed on the ingredients, and when they went to the manufacturer who was doing their foods under contract for them after the food was found to be contaminated, they said, well rice protein is a fraction of rice and you’ve got rice on the label. So when we added a little rice and protein, it didn’t count So here was something in the ingredients of the food not on the label, and it wasn’t in the recipe.

Marion Nestle: That was the American Nutrition thing I guess; the companies argued that it wasn’t in their recipe. And my speculation on that was that the company thought it wouldn’t matter. It’s just pet food. That’s what the Chinese said – the Chinese said it. It’s just pet food. Pets don’t have to grow as fast – you know that fabulous reporter in China for the New York Times. He was great. And that, by the way, Mal and I feel really good about because he wrote us when the story broke and said, what should I be looking for? We said, go look at animal feed. Go talk to producers of animal feed, they’ve been doing this for years – they had been. Because by that time, we had already done our melamine research, which was another sort of jaw-dropping thing, was that nobody knew anything about melamine. And it’s been around for 40 years. Documented for 40 years, papers published in scientific journals for 40 years – and nobody knew. The FDA’s toxicology review left me breathless when I saw it. None of those papers were referenced.

And afterwards we talked to a very, very prominent veterinary nutritionist at Cornell, who was furious we had written the Journal of the American Veterinary Association about the melamine stuff. He was just furious with us because it insulted veterinarians who didn’t know about melamine. He said we know all that – we just didn’t think it mattered. Oh? I thought it mattered. I mean, if you knew that the Italians had a test for melamine in 1970 because 60 percent of the fish feed in Italy was contaminated with melamine, wouldn’t that give you some idea that maybe this was a really serious problem that ought to be looked at?

Christie Keith: You’d think they’d rather say we didn’t know, than we knew and got it wrong.

Marion Nestle: Yeah. I can understand why they didn’t know because this was a library project and only old people know how to do those. I’m old. You know, I’m serious about this.

Christie Keith: Believe me, when I went to journalism school there was no Internet – if I wanted something I had to go on my little feet and get it somewhere. Yeah, I remember. Remember microfiche?

Marion Nestle: Oh yes, I do. Our library still has it. But you know, we went to the Cornell Veterinary Library and they had this South African Veterinary Journal – so that was lucky. And then we did the standard thing; we traced the papers back, we read the references, we read the references to that paper. When we got stuck we got them by Internet library loan. And some of them were in Italian – we had to get them translated. It just seemed astounding to me – this is old stuff. Everybody should be testing for melamine in anything that’s got protein. They’re gonna start finding it in soy, I don’t doubt it for a minute.

Christie Keith: I don’t see how they won’t.

Marion Nestle: I actually brought soy up at the time, just speculating on things that might be in it. Some soy products were listed on the import alert that the FDA put out to fool us into thinking – I mean, to protect the American food supply. That’s it, yeah. By putting out an alert that they ignore.

Christie Keith: Well I think that this recent infant formula, chocolate, coffee scare of whatever crisis – whatever you want to call it – I think it’s getting kind of subsumed at the moment into the economic collapse of the nation and the election which is a shame. Because this, to me – I think these things are all related, of course. You can’t start talking about food safety without talking about the economy and politics. And there you go. I know that’s a little far up-field although your book is called “Pet Food Politics.”

Marion Nestle: Oh now – that’s what this book is about. It’s absolutely how I see it. It’s all part of the same thing. I’m sorry that it’s getting dismissed out of hand in this way but it’s there and for somebody who wants to read it, it seems to me the lessons are very clear. And I must say that from going to the Pet Food Forum, the lessons were not wasted on a lot of the pet food companies, or at least the people from the pet food companies who went to the pet food forum.

Christie Keith: Do you feel – you were at the Pet Food Forum in Chicago during the pet food recall or the one the year after?

Marion Nestle: No, the one this year.

Christie Keith: What was that like?

Marion Nestle: Well, they were all talking about the changes that they’ve made.

Christie Keith: And did you feel that a lot of them were really substantive changes, had better testing?

Marion Nestle: Oh, yes. Was it Natural Balance who built their own lab?

Christie Keith: Well they were the ones who got caught up in the rice thing –

Marion Nestle: So they’re not going to let that happen again. And the fact that there are companies like Pet Food Express, that refuses to take it unless it’s been tested; that’s helpful. That sends a very clear message and the huge transfer of peoples’ loyalties from commercial pet foods to alternative brands I think really sends a very clear signal. So the way that the companies are responding is they’re all putting out fancy brands now.

Christie Keith: Did you present at the Pet Food Forum or were you just attending?

Marion Nestle: No, we just attended.

Christie Keith: So you feel that there has been a change in the pet food industry, and it’s not just a marketing change.

Marion Nestle: I think it’s more than a marketing change. I don’t know if all companies are actually – I’m puzzled by Procter & Gamble, I just am baffled by them. I wrote about that in the book because it seemed to me that what Procter & Gamble had done during the recall was to behave very responsibly. But you would never have known without really an incredible amount of digging.

Christie Keith: I tried to get even a comment from them that would have reflected on them in a very good light recently, and they referred me to the pet food industry – what are they called – the trade group? I forget the initials.

Marion Nestle: Whatever they are.

Christie Keith: Who I wasn’t interested in talking to. And it was really interesting. The only comment I’ve ever been able to get from them is right in the heat of the recall when I picked up on the Congressional testimony that sounded to me like it was Procter & Gamble dropping the boom on Menu that broke the recall open. They confirmed that that was what happened and then they never spoke to me again. They were very nice.

Marion Nestle: I got somebody to talk to me about that. I got a scientist at Procter & Gamble who’s a friend of a friend to talk to me about that, and I had two hour-long conversations with him that were fabulous. He was just fabulous. And he told me – and I wrote about this in the book – but he told me everything that they had done, how they had done it. He was so proud of what they had done and how they had solved the scientific problem, because not only were they the people who had blown the whistle on Menu Foods, but they also were the people who found melamine. And he told me the whole story about how the amniopterin thing happened. The FDA and Cornell already knew that it wasn’t amniopterin at the time they had their press conference, but they didn’t figure out how they could get out of the press conference.

Christie Keith: You’re kidding.

Marion Nestle: Astounding. So he went through the whole scientific thing with me in great detail – totally plausible. And I said gee, this is really great, can I quote you? And he said of course you can. And he called me back and hour later and said, uhm, no. And then somebody not to be named went to a meeting where they heard somebody from Procter & Gamble speak and they had notes there and I had access to those notes. I wanted to used them in the book and I was denied permission. And then I’d tell the story about going to this dinner party and discovering that the former CEO of Procter & Gamble is sitting next to me at this dinner party and I though oh, there is a God. And so I asked him if he would – if could put me in touch with somebody at Procter & Gamble and tell them that it would be okay for them to talk to me.

And he got the head of PR to get in touch with me and then I did something really stupid and I sent him a list of quite precise questions, asking for confirmation of dates and that kind of thing because I was trying to construct a timeline that I put in the book, which is very very difficult to do, as you can imagine. And he wrote back and said they were in litigation and he couldn’t talk to me.

Christie Keith: When I speak about the pet food recall, one of the things that I say because of course because I’m known as an advocate of home-feeding and a long time practitioner of it, people would ask me to get up and rant and rail against the evil pet food industry. And I said well, you know, there’s two sides to this. On the one hand, I believe in small local fresh whole foods, so yeah. But on the other hand, Procter & Gamble, because of its size, its consumer tracking ability as a gigantic corporation that produces many different consumer products, was in a unique position to have information that no one else really was able to compile, and they have a brand that they needed to protect – unlike Menu, who no one had ever heard of – and they have laboratories, they have the infrastructure not only to know there was a problem, but to check up on it themselves.

Marion Nestle: The story I heard from this guy was that – and he checked it and he got back to me about it – was that somebody called the consumer hotline on the can and said there’s a problem with this SKU. And then another call came in about the same SKU within a day or two. The person called Menu Foods, and Menu Foods said you know, we got wheat gluten from a new supplier. And Procter & Gamble said that’s it – we’re doing a recall, just like that. Just like that. So then they forced Menu Foods out of it. So that’s the Procter & Gamble side. And then they were able to put – they put two research groups together to look for what the toxic product was. They couldn’t figure it out. And it was very hard to identify because the melamine and cyanuric acid were so tightly linked that they couldn’t separate them and they couldn’t figure out what it was until they separated them, which they had to do. Which took them a while to figure out how to do. And then they could get peaks on their various kinds of chromatograms. But he said they worked five days, 24 hours a day.

Christie Keith: But see, this is the upside of corporate America.

Marion Nestle: Yeah. But they never told anybody. What’s the big secret?

Christie Keith: Well, it must have to do with their litigation. You know? It must relate to timeline issues or liability or something. I think that Procter & Gamble, based on what I know – which may not be everything – but based on what I know, to me they’re heroes of the pet food recall.

Marion Nestle: Well, I thought so too. They may have a deep dark secret and they don’t want to –

Christie Keith: Well, it was very eye-opening because some of these little boutique companies got caught and the biggest manufacturers in the pet food world got caught. It was just the sheer ubiquitousness of the Chinese-imported protein ingredients. I mean that, to me, was the biggest eye-opening thing of all.

Marion Nestle: Yeah. Who knew? And then all of that was exposed. I have a chapter on China in the book in which I talk about that. I have a chapter about FDA, in which I talk about the impact of this thing on the FDA and what all the FDA people –

Christie Keith: Now is this something in your forthcoming book are we talking about “Pet Food Politics”?

Marion Nestle: Yeah, yeah. You got, originally half the book. Because then I put all the rest of the stuff in. So that’s all in there. And there’s a chapter about how the pet food industry responded and all the stuff about melamine. So that’s probably new when you got that original thing sent to you. So it ends up being a fairly complete story that ends up with your fabulous quote.

Christie Keith: I was so proud. Thank you.

Marion Nestle: And again, I tried to let people speak for themselves, so I have – not only the jaw-dropping excerpt from the Congressional hearing, but also excerpts from the FDA teleconference, which you were in on. And that’s actually the part of the book that I read when I’m doing reading. Those excerpts – because I think they’re just astounding, with the reporters desperately trying to get what seemed like the most basic information and the FDA just all over the place.

Christie Keith: Oh, I know. When they were denying that there were any other companies in the pipeline for recalls, and yet there were recalls being announced during the conference. They’re either lying or they’re so out of the loop. You know – there’s no other explanation for that.

Marion Nestle: I worked for government – I know what the explanation is. I totally understand it. Starting from the first teleconference in which somebody asked – I forget who it was – Sundloff I guess, who the broker was who had imported the stuff and they said we don’t know. But that was the exact day, if my timeline is right. That was the day the FDA came sniffing around and going through their stuff.

Christie Keith: I don’t remember now what it was, but I was trying to track down a statement that was clearly incorrect and I kept pushing and pushing and pushing and the explanation I was finally given is yes, people at FDA knew that but the spokesperson – whoever it was, I forget – he didn’t know.

Marion Nestle: Well then why was he the spokesperson on the issue? Okay. Yeah. You know they had this – at the end of the year they had a teleconference for bloggers, and I was invited to participate in that. And – in fact, I tell that story in the book – but the FDA said we’re doing this because we had this little problem with pet food last year where a few cats got sick. And the bloggers had a big role in sort of tracking all of that, so we thought it would be good to reach out to bloggers. I hardly could get past that. And I went back and listened; they only had that up on the web for about a week afterwards. I must have listened to it ten times – I surely didn’t hear him right. A few cats got sick.

Christie Keith: I guess I’d like to wrap this up asking what your prescription for fixing this is.

Marion Nestle: Oh, I think we need a new food safety system. The Government Accountability Office, which is this watchdog agency of the government, has argued at least since 1990 that we must have a single food safety agency – one. And that it needs to be created, it needs to be given authority over farm to table food production. And until we have that we’re going to continue to have these problems. And they’ve been saying this for almost 20 years.

And I agree – I don’t know what other solution is possible, I don’t know whether any solution is possible given the kind of government that which have. And now that the economy is tanking it’s hard to know whether it’s possible or not. But everybody ought to be supporting the kind of thing that Rosa DeLauro, who’s the Congresswoman from Connecticut, is proposing. Which is some version of this. Because we do not have a farm to table food safety system, and right now it’s fragmented amongst two agencies that don’t talk to each other.

Christie Keith: Right. And one of whom is responsible, in effect, not just with safety but with promoting the industry of American farming as well.

Marion Nestle: So there’s that complication and there’s also the complication that it separates animals from plants, which is an artificial separation, given the fecal contamination of tomatoes and lettuce and all the other things – spinach – and all the other things.

Christie Keith: What about labeling? Would you like see pet food labeling? Or human labeling for that matter.

Marion Nestle: I don’t think that pet food should be labeled with nutrition fact labels because you don’t want to encourage people to eat it – it’s way too high in calories. And it’s disgusting – but that’s beside the point. So I don’t mind the separate labels, but I absolutely think they should have calorie labeling.

Christie Keith: Wow. You hit one of my pet peeves.

Marion Nestle: Oh, good.

Christie Keith: Isn’t that kind of manipulative, Marion?

Marion Nestle: Which?

Christie Keith: To say that if we put an accurate information on the bag, that gives pet owners information about the food we are paying our money for and buying for our animals, the kind of information we can easily interpret because it’s what we’re used to, that we should be denied that useful, accurate information because someone might eat pet food?

Marion Nestle: Oh, now you’re going to persuade me otherwise. I don’t think I’ve thought about this very carefully. Let me think about it for a minute. I mean, it could say – well, I suppose if people like it, it’s okay to eat. We have a chapter in our new book about do people eat pet food. That was a fun chapter. And do people eat pets and do pets eat pets? So we deal with all of those. But the people eating pet food one is interesting. Let me think about that for a minute.

Christie Keith: If you really think about the millions and millions of pet owners in this country and how many millions and billions of dollars we’re spending on pet food, and how badly served we are being by the nutritional information on the labels – and surely people know they’re not supposed to eat pet food. I mean, do you really think it stops them that they look at the label – you think they really look at the label and go –

Marion Nestle: I think the force of your argument has persuaded me. I don’t think I can defend that position. And I don’t think I want to defend that position.

Christie Keith: I mean, when you look at a label, you can’t even tell how many calories the food has.

Marion Nestle: Without question you should have calorie labels.

Christie Keith: You also cannot evaluate macro-nutrient ratios, which if you look at the research in cats in particular-

Marion Nestle: You can, but you have to go through complicated manipulations.

Christie Keith: Yeah. You can’t just glance at it and say you know – and so much of the information is given to you in ranges, which is completely unacceptable in human food. When you’re a person you’re supposed to know what you’re eating, and not simply have well, there’s been 1 percent and 2 percent calcium in this food. What does that even mean? I want to know how many grams of calcium are in a serving – that’s what I want to know.

Marion Nestle: That’s an interesting thing. We had to write companies to find out. We were into salt particularly, and that was sort of interesting. So we went to a lot of trouble in the new book to try and figure out how to decode that stuff. But you’re right – if it was a human food label, you wouldn’t have to do any decoding. Just look at it and it’s just all there.

Christie Keith: And I think that part of the reason that they fight us on this so much of wanting human style nutritional labeling on pet food is that in fact the foods do vary from batch to batch a little bit more than is consistent with the type of labeling we do on human food.

Marion Nestle: I have no doubt that’s true.

Christie Keith: And again, I’m not saying there’s anything horrible about that. I don’t believe that it’s helpful to have the food be absolutely 100 percent the same every single solitary time, as long as it’s wholesome and nutritionally adequate each time. I don’t know why that’s a big deal but I think that must be part of the reason why they don’t want to get into these labels. But at any rate, I want it as a consumer; I want it very much. And as an advocate for my animals, I want to know what’s in there.

Marion Nestle: I think I’ve been persuaded. I just hadn’t thought about it very carefully.

Christie Keith: Is there anything else I have not asked you that you wanted in particular to get out there?

Marion Nestle: Well, I wrote the book to turn people into activists. I think everybody should be a food safety activist, and whether it’s for pets or for people it doesn’t really matter because it’s all the same. And I think pets are worth fighting for, because you love them and because they’re part of the food system in a way that inextricably linked. And if it works for pets, it’s going to work for people. The hallmark of a democracy is what it does to defend the rights of the most vulnerable segments of the society, and in this particular case, they were pets. How is that different? I don’t see it as different.

(Photo of Dr. Nestle by Morgan Ong.)