- Who knows what kind of shit is adulterating our imported
and domestic food supply? But whatever it is, it's about to hit the fan.
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- Months after dogs and cats started dropping dead of renal
failure from melamine-tainted pet food, American consumers are beginning
to learn how long and how WIDELY this contaminant has also poisoned the
human food supply.
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- Last week, as California officials revealed that at least
45 people are known to have eaten tainted pork, the USDA announced that
it would pay farmers millions of dollars to destroy and dispose of thousands
of hogs fed "salvaged" pet food.
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- But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
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- Through the salvaging practice, melamine-tainted pet
food has likely contaminated America's livestock for as long as it has
been killing and sickening America's pets - as far back as August of 2006,
or even earlier. And while it may seem alarmist to suggest without absolute
proof that Americans have been eating melamine-tainted pork, chicken and
farm-raised fish for the better part of a year, the FDA and USDA seem to
be preparing to brace Americans for the worst.
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- In an unusual, Saturday afternoon joint press release,
the regulators tasked with protecting the safety of our nation's food supply
go to convoluted lengths to reassure the public that eating melamine-tainted
pork is perfectly SAFE!
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- In a fit of reverse-homeopathy, the press release steps
us through the dilution process, tracing the path of melamine-tainted rice
protein through the food system. The rice protein is a partial ingredient
in pet food, we are told, which is itself only a partial ingredient in
the feed given to hogs, who then "excrete" some of the melamine
in their urine. And, "even if present in pork," they reassure
us, "pork is only a small part of the average American diet."
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- How comforting.
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- But the press release reaches its Orwellian best in its
insistence that there is no evidence of any "human illness" due
to melamine exposure:
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- "While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
systems would have limited ability to detect subtle problems due to melamine
and melamine-related compounds, no problems have been detected to date."
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- Translation: "We are unable to detect such problems,
but don't worry, no such problems have been detected."
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- It is hard to read this as anything but a pre-emptive
press release, a calculated effort to reassure the public that it is safe
to eat trace quantities of melamine. just days before they inevitably reveal
that Americans have in fact been consuming it unawares for months.
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- Menu Foods, the company at the center of the controversy,
has recalled product dating back to November 8, 2006. Manufacturing forty
to fifty percent of America's wet pet food, the salvaged product from their
massive operations must have surely contaminated livestock feed nationwide.
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- And it gets worse. Tomorrow the New York Times will report
from China, detailing how nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, produced from coal,
is routinely ground into powder and mixed into low-grade wheat, corn, soybean
or other proteins to inflate the protein analysis of animal feed:
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- The melamine powder has been dubbed "fake protein"
and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying
feed that provides higher nutrition value.
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- "It just saves money," says a manager at an
animal feed factory here. "Melamine scrap is added to animal feed
to boost the protein level."
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- The practice is widespread in China. For years, animal
feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into
feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine
scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
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- Many animal feed operators advertise on the Internet
seeking to purchase melamine scrap. And melamine scrap producers and traders
said in recent interviews that they often sell to animal feed makers.
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- "Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal
feed, such as fish feed," says Ji Denghui, general manager of the
Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company. "I don't know if there's
a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,'
so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If
there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."
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- "The practice is widespread in China," the
Times reports, and has been going on "for years." And it is not
just wheat, corn, rice and soybean proteins that should be suspect, but
the animals who feed on it, including all imported Chinese pork, poultry,
farm-raised fish, and their various by-products. Despite FDA and USDA efforts
to allay concerns about consuming melamine-tainted meat, the health effects
are unstudied, and the permissible level is zero. If China could impose
a three-year (and counting) ban on the import of U.S. beef after a single
incident of Mad Cow disease, then surely the U.S. would be justified in
imposing a ban on Chinese vegetable protein and livestock products due
to such a prevalent, industrywide contamination.
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- And if in the coming weeks this ban is finally imposed,
the question we must ask government regulators is. why so late? Why did
they wait until our children licked the last remaining drop of bacon fat
off their fingers before alerting the public to the potential health risk,
however low? It seems inconceivable that the regulators tasked with overseeing
the safety and purity of our nation's food supply did not at least imagine
the potential scope of this crisis back in early March when they first
learned that Chinese wheat gluten was poisoning dogs and cats. Indeed,
the very fact that they were so quick to focus in on melamine as the adulterating
agent suggests they at least suspected what they were facing.
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- It may make for entertaining TV, but popular shows like
CSI get forensic toxicology exactly backwards. You don't run a substance
through a mass spectrometer and 30 seconds later get a complete readout
of its chemical makeup. Rather, you painstakingly look for specific chemicals
or groups of chemicals one at a time, until you find the offending toxin.
Once you get beyond the basic "tox screen," forensics is as much
art as science - investigators use evidence and intuition to narrow the
search to those compounds that are most likely to be the culprit.
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- And so it begs the question as to why - in the face of
an apparent wheat gluten contamination that reportedly killed nine out
of twenty dogs and cats in Menu Foods' quarterly taste test - would FDA
scientists test for melamine, a chemical widely believed to be nontoxic?
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- Why? Because they thought they might find it.
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- Lacking adequate cooperation from FDA officials one is
constantly forced to speculate, but given the circumstances it is reasonable
to assume that the search for melamine was prompted by the "nitrogen
spiking" theory, rather than the other way around. Based on their
knowledge of the evidence, Chinese agricultural practices, the globalizing
food industry, and perhaps prior history, the FDA hypothesized that unscrupulous
Chinese manufacturers may have intentionally adulterated low quality wheat
gluten in an effort to pass it off as a high-protein, high-value product.
And nothing would do the job better than melamine.
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- According to one synthetic organic chemist, melamine
is by far the perfect candidate. It is high in nitrogen (66-percent by
weight), nonvolatile (ie, it doesn't explode,) and dirt cheap. It is also
- at least according to both the scientific literature and chemical supply
catalogs - widely considered to be nontoxic. For FDA officials, the mystery
never seemed to be how melamine made its way into wheat, rice and corn
protein, but rather, why it was suddenly killing dogs and cats.
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- The technical answer may center on the unexpected interaction
between melamine, cyanuric acid, and other melamine by-products, but the
practical answer may be much more pedestrian. Some samples of adulterated
wheat gluten reportedly tested as high as 6.6-percent melamine by weight,
an off the chart concentration that was likely the accidental result of
some less than thorough mixing. Had this accident never occurred - had
cats, with their sensitive renal systems, not been the canary in the coal
mine of melamine toxicity - we might never have known that our children
and our pets were being slowly poisoned by Chinese capitalism.
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- Well, despite the FDA's best efforts, now we know.
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- UPDATE: The NY Times piece is now online.
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