Let’s Ask Marion: What’s Up With China’s Toxic Food Chain?

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: Well, here we go again. I was astonished, as were you, by the news that China’s biggest manufacturer of infant formula has just recalled 700 tons of melamine-tainted milk powder. As David Barboza reports in Saturday’s New York Times, “the formula is implicated in the death of one infant, and at least 432 others have been afflicted with kidney problems.” Supposedly, this stuff wasn’t imported to the US, but, as you note, the FDA has issued a warning that it may have found its way onto the “grey” market.

Melamine and the cutthroat, corner-cutting manufacturers who used it in the production of pet foods are, of course, the primary culprits in your latest book, Pet Food Politics, which thoroughly documents China’s food safety problems as well as our own.

In the book, you note that in the aftermath of the tainted pet food debacle, the Chinese government launched a new food safety campaign and declared, in January of this year:

Gao Qiang, China’s vice minister of health claimed at a press conference on Saturday, “This is a severe food safety accident.”

You must be our foremost authority on melamine-adulterated foods, now, so I have to ask you, in the vulgar vernacular of the blogosphere, WTF? Or, if you prefer, what the hell?

Dr. Nestle: Astonished doesn’t begin to describe it. The point of The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, the subtitle of Pet Food Politics, is that the 2007 pet food recalls were an early warning of disasters to follow. By the time the book went to press in May this year, we were already dealing with the heparin crisis. This was a completely analogous situation in which Chinese producers substituted chondroitin sulfate for heparin because the heparin assay only looks for sulfur, apparently. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen. Protein assays test for nitrogen and don’t care whether it comes from protein or melamine. Chondroitin sulfate and melamine are a lot cheaper than the drugs or food ingredients they replace.

In Pet Food Politics, I trace the use of melamine—fraudulent and not—back to the mid-1960s. David Barboza, the intrepid New York Times reporter based in China, actually got animal and pet food producers to confess that they had been fraudulently adding melamine to feed for years. My guess is that these producers had been adding it in lower doses, got greedy, and upped the dose or used sloppier formulations that contained cyanuric acid. You need a lot of melamine to damage kidneys. But when melamine is mixed with cyanuric acid, it crystallizes in kidneys at very low doses. If it could be added to food for cats, dogs, and farm animals, why not add it to other foods? If nobody is checking—which, apparently, nobody is--you have a good chance of getting away with it, especially if the animals are eating other foods as well.

But infant formulas? These are just like pet foods in that the animal or baby is completely dependent on the one product for complete nutrition. So as with pet foods, there is a good chance of doing great harm and getting caught. Officials didn’t get upset about pet foods because they view dogs and cats as “just pets.” Infant formulas get everyone’s attention. And you can find plenty of Chinese infant formula in Chinese markets in the U.S. It’s doubtful that getting rid of them would be on anyone’s priority list for enforcement.

As for what’s going on in China, good luck. It’s the Wild West over there, with foods being made by millions of small backyard producers and a food safety system absolutely unprepared to deal with the scope of the problem. We are talking here about rampant early capitalistic development, just like what we had in the United States prior to 1906 when Congress passed the first food and drug laws. Chinese officials know they have a problem and maybe now that the Olympics are over they can get on it.

In the meantime, we can all exercise personal responsibility and buy local. We also should exercise social responsibility and insist that (1) companies test their products for dangerous contaminants, (2) companies inspect the suppliers of their ingredients, (3) Congress gives the FDA the authority to regulate imported foods more effectively, and (4) Congress demands enforcement of the new Country-of-Origin-Labeling laws that are supposed to be in effect by the end of this month.

Kat: Uh-oh. Your response begs a follow-up question. Speaking of adulteration, have you seen this article from Sunday’s Chicago Tribune about the watered-down COOL standards? As consumer watchdogs Consumers Union and Food and Water Watch tell the Tribune, there are “giant, giant loopholes in the law." Specifically, foods that are considered “processed” are exempt from the COOL standards, and the USDA is defining “processed” so broadly that it’s severely reducing the number of foods that will be required to carry the labels.

Here are a couple of the more head-scratching examples:

In a word, oy. It seems as though the food industry, having fought the COOL standards for the last few years, is now resigned to the fact that they are going to be implemented, so their new strategy is to undermine the standards by limiting their application as much as possible.

This makes your oft-repeated edict to “avoid processed foods” more timely than ever, but it also compels me to ask, what will it take to put the “us” back in the USDA? Will they ever stop kowtowing to Big Food and start looking out for the little guy?

Dr. Nestle: I had not seen the article but certainly was aware of the problem(s). Congress passed COOL years ago, but then postponed implementing it (except for fish—a fishy story in itself) until now. Why? Because the food industry hates the very idea. I can totally understand why and the pet food and infant formula scandals are great examples. If you knew that the foods you were eating had a good chance of being produced someplace where nobody was minding the store, you might buy something else.

The problem for the food industry is that so much of our food comes from elsewhere. On the order of 80% of our shrimp come from Asia, for example. In the course of working on Pet Food Politics, I met an official of a pet food company who agreed to tell me where the ingredients in his products came from (provided I never mentioned his name or the name of his company). He could tell me the name of the ranch that raised the meat in those foods but the other ingredients constituted an international feast. You have to assume that foods and ingredients come from overseas unless the companies tell you otherwise.

Is this good or bad? I think it’s great that we support farmers in developing countries but I want to have the choice. And the choice isn’t mine if the country of origin isn’t labeled. This is a huge consumer protection issue and it would be nice if our congressional representatives took it seriously. As for the USDA, it and the FDA need some serious depoliticizing. Will we get that in the next administration? Only if we organize, lobby, and exercise our democratic rights as citizens. And start working on the next farm bill, of course.