AlterNet: Pet Food Politics: Why Our Pets Still Aren't Safe

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Pet Food Politics: Why Our Pets Still Aren't Safe

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet. Posted September 10, 2008.

The author of Pet Food Politics exposes how the '07 pet food crisis happened and why it is a sign of a larger problem with our own food system.




In 2007, American pet owners found out about a large-scale experiment the food industry carried out on our pets. What happens if you streamline, centralize and outsource food production with no goals other than profit? In the case of pet food, the system worked until it didn't. And when it didn't, thousands of dogs and cats died due to eating more than 100 brands of pet food contaminated with melamine and cyanuric acid. Like a dead canary used to alert miners of methane and carbon monoxide, our dead pets are a warning about our own food safety.

Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, recognized the significance of the 2007 pet food crisis immediately. She did what our government should have done: She researched how melamine and cyanuric acid could have entered the pet (and human) food supply under the guise of wheat gluten and chronicled the story from start to finish in her newest book, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine.

Nestle points out in previous books that it can be hard to prove the effects of any one food because humans eat diets of many foods, making it almost impossible to identify the effects of any specific one. Pets serve as our canaries because they do eat diets consisting almost entirely of one food. Also, the pet food business is even more centralized than the highly consolidated human food supply. With difficult nutrition and taste specifications and expensive manufacturing equipment required to make pet food, companies find it most economical to outsource production to specialized operations like Menu Foods, the company responsible for importing the tainted wheat gluten. When the Chinese supplier substituted wheat flour dressed up with melamine and cyanuric acid for wheat gluten, pets died on a mass scale. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/97989/pet_food_politics%3A_why_our_pets_still_aren%27t_safe/