Food and pet food: Not on the label

04.sep.08
The Economist

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12051443

In the spring of 2007 contaminated pet food killed thousands of cats and dogs in America. “Pet Food Politics” by Marion Nestle, one of America’s leading scholars of food politics, provides a vivid and detailed account of the affair and its aftermath. The book appears to be aimed at pet-lovers. Ms Nestle is shown hugging a dog in the jacket photo, and there are glowing quotes from the editors of Whole Dog Journal and The Bark. But it deserves a wider readership. Ms Nestle uses the scare, which probably killed around 4,500 animals, to illuminate the connections between the food supplies of humans, farm animals and pets, and to highlight the broader failings of food regulation.

The outbreak was caused by shipments of wheat gluten and rice-protein concentrate from China that had been adulterated with melamine and cyanuric acid, two cheap chemicals that are rich in nitrogen. Since the usual test for protein in animal feed just measures the level of nitrogen, these chemicals can be added to far more expensive feed ingredients without anybody noticing. Both chemicals can be tolerated in small amounts but are harmful in large doses, and they are even more dangerous when combined, producing crystals in the urine and causing potentially fatal kidney damage.

The contaminants also found their way into the human food chain, since “salvaged” pet food (left over from the production process) is fed to chickens and pigs, and wheat gluten also goes into feed for fish and farm animals. The concentrations involved were much lower there, but Ms Nestle’s point is that pet food was merely the part of the food-supply system where the wider problem of contamination and lack of monitoring became apparent.
The researchers who pieced together what went wrong are Ms Nestle’s heroes; her villains are the regulators and the bosses of the pet-food companies who were reluctant to look into what caused the problem and to recall their products. This put pet-owners (or “pet guardians” as some of them strangely prefer to call themselves) in the agonising position of being unsure which foods to feed their pets.

Ms Nestle explains how the structure of the pet-food industry made things worse. Most of the dodgy food was produced by one American supplier, Menu Foods, which made it on a contract basis for several large companies. It switched to a Chinese source of wheat gluten to save money, and the contaminated product then went into dozens of different products made at its factories. Lax regulation in China was a contributing factor: the contaminated products may have been mislabelled to avoid inspections, but such inspections were rare in any case.

So was it the industrialised, globalised, outsourced food-production system that killed thousands of pets? Ms Nestle does not quite go that far, though she worthily implies that, despite the extra cost, a “local food” approach to making pet-food would be safer and would “promote the viability of rural communities”.
That said, Ms Nestle points out that America itself had the same problems with food contamination during its own anything-goes spurt of economic growth, in the late 19th century. Just as those problems, exposed by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle”, led to an overhaul of food regulation in America, so last year’s contamination scare led to a crackdown in China. The government sent out 33,000 inspectors, who conducted over 10m inspections and shut down 150,000 unlicensed food companies. China also said it would establish systems for food recalls and export inspections. Zheng Xiaoyu, who headed its food-and-drug regulator, was convicted of taking bribes and was executed.

Ms Nestle’s book ends with a plea for another overhaul of America’s regulatory regime, which is divided between several different agencies and fails to reflect the interconnected nature of today’s food-supply systems for humans and animals. She would like more “country of origin” labelling on food of all kinds, and more funding and authority for America’s overstretched Food and Drug Administration, the main body responsible for food safety.
She compares the pet-food crisis in America to the outbreak of mad-cow disease in Europe, which led to a collapse of public trust in food regulation. She hopes the pet-food affair will be a wake-up call for everyone. As Ms Nestle puts it: “Advocacy for policies good enough to protect pets also means advocacy for policies that protect people.”