How is bulk wheat gluten transported?

[hedgehog]

My theory is that the wheat gluten is being contaminated between the manufacturers and the end users. Truth to tell, a lot of our food could be contaminated this way. All it takes is an independent trucker hauling a chemical in his tanker to one company. He rinses out the tanker, loads up with a food grade ingredient and delivers that to another company. The people selling the ingredient run a clean plant, the people buying it are running a clean plant. It's just that no one knows about the toxic residue that's left over in the tanker.

[havocmom]

1. Always a good thing to consider. The further the food travels, the greater the risk

for contamination/spoilage.

Excellent point you make about the issue of what is used to clean the containers.

[uppityperson]

2. Don't worry, there are governmental programs involved with making sure this doesn't happen.

I am amused and appalled that it has taken a pet food problem to wake up many people (not here, speaking of john/jane q. public) to the problems of food safety issues. Not amused by what has happened, or what can happen, but that jqp considered themselves being cared for safely until fifi and fido got sick and now, well, they have had their eyes opened a bit.

In response to your OP hedgehog, indeed.

[drm604]

3. I'm pretty sure that would be illegal.

Not that it couldn't happen, but if you're assuming that tankers are legally allowed to carry anything with just a rinse in between then I think you're mistaken. I think anything that carries bulk food can only carry bulk food.

Of course, people don't always obey the law so any thing's possible.

[havocmom]

5. Only illegal if people get caught, seems to be the way it works today

And since the chances of being inspected keep dropping the longer we have the Corporate Serving GOP in charge of agencies...

[hedgehog]

7. This is one reason that so many people are opposed to allowing Mexican truckers

to carry their loads away from the border.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. Hey, yeah, let's blame the Mexicans.

Why not. We're already blaming the Chinese.

[hedgehog]

14. I didn't mean to blame the Mexicans for this particular problem.

I was referring to the charge that Mexican regulations on equipmnent nspections are not as tight as various state and federal regulations. In other words, a trailer that would be condemned in the US might be legal to run if licensed in Mexico.

[havocmom]

30. Calm down, not blaming Mexicans, rather treaties that prevent inspection!

:eyes:

Whether Chinese GRAIN or Mexican TRUCKS, the problem is CORPORATIONS, not ethnic or national groups.

Jeeze

[drm604]

9. Like I said, people don't always obey the law.

And you're correct that the current federal government isn't exactly big on enforcement of regulations. But some people on this thread seem to think that it's regular accepted practice for someone to just rinse out a tanker and reuse it for anything they want. That's not the case. That's not to say that it couldn't happen, but I strongly suspect that whatever happened happened in China which is even laxer than the U.S. in it's regulations and enforcement.

[hedgehog]

6. I'm not sure it is illegal. I remember the issue coming up a few years back,

but I don't remember how it was resolved. I've worked a couple of jobs involving shipping and receiving and it was real eye opener to me. I expected that most truckers work a general route running back and forth for a couple companies. From what I saw, a lot of truckers never know what they're going to be hauling day to day or where they're going to be going. It doesn't take any malice for a guy to haul chemicals one day, rinse out his tanker and think that's sufficient, and haul food grade ingredients the next day. Even the purchasing department may think they're dealing with a reliable shipping firm, but if that firm is relying on independent truckers, then how would they know what that trailer was hauling the day before?

[Rosemary2205]

11. How many independent truckers own their TRAILERS

I know quite a few who own the cab. I don't know any who own the trailer.

[nolabels]

25. Maybe 1 in fifty, mostly it would be the dirt haulers..........

I have been fixing class 8 and 9 trucks for 25 years yet never of heard of an independent owning a tanker.

[Eurobabe]

18. Discovery Health had a segment on mystery diseases

a while back about a salmonella outbreak in MN, WA, ID. A bunch of kids were sickened. They tracked it to ice cream, and found out that the truck had been hauling liquid raw eggs. The trucking company cleaned the truck inside, but FAILED to change the o-ring seal at the valve opening, and voila -- Sam and Ella came for dessert!

Some of these people now have permanent arthritis and joint disorders from the salmonella virus.

All because of a small oversight.

[havocmom]

4. deleted

Double post due to getting an error message saying the @)!&#@ thing DIDN'T post.

Are we gonna be buggy today, or just me?

[magellan]

8. But is it in fact a problem with wheat gluten?

This thread implies there's a problem with Nutro dry, but Nutro says there's no wheat gluten in their dry foods:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=512700

I don't know, just sharing the info. Maybe this is another problem, one isolated to Nutro. But the symptoms sound very similar.

I think we need to remember that there's a very high suspicion that wheat gluten is the culprit, but nothing's been proved yet.

[hedgehog]

12. What I'm suggesting is that the problem isn't in the wheat gluten,

but in the entire industrial agriculture/processed food chain. I looked at some whole wheat tacos at the store yesterday and the list of ingredients ran to 20 separate items! Now tell me that homemade tacos have 20 separate ingredients! A lot of those ingredients themselves are mixtures of other items (flour only starts with ground wheat!). Now show me how each and every ingredient used is monitored and inspected from manufacturer through transport to the end consumer.

[magellan]

17. So basically, cross-contamination

...from all the junk they insist on spraying/injecting/inserting into food, making it 1000 times more susceptible to contamination and about as healthy.

Got to agree with you there. I think that's what is making finding the source of the pet food contamination such a bugger.

:thumbsup:

[drm604]

19. Hasn't it been confirmed that the wheat gluten contains a toxin?

Maybe there's more than one issue here, which is a very scary thought. Once could be a mistake, but if two different ingredients have been contaminated...

On the other hand, this could (I'm emphasizing "could", please don't jump all over me) be a case of mass hysteria. Pets get sick all the time for all kinds of reasons but in the current environment if your pet gets sick you naturally become suspicious of the food.

[magellan]

20. There's disagreement

I think the lab in NY said it was amni -- whatever the hell the name of the rat poison is. Subsequently, an Orlando vet successfully treated a sickened dog with Leucovorin, which counteracts the affects of the rat poison. (The rat poison is also a cancer drug, that's where the Leucovorin came into play.)

The FDA on the other hand say they didn't find rat poison, but melamine. However, tests on dogs 50 years ago giving much higher doses of melamine than found in the food showed NO toxicity. The dogs were on heavy doses of the stuff for a year.

Whatever the culprit, suspicion has fallen on it being contained in the wheat gluten imported from China. Everyone seems to be less hazy on that, but even that much is still not 100% proven.

[hedgehog]

21. I think you may be at least partially correct (but I could be wrong!)

I tend to agree that any pet owner who has lost an animal in the last six months is going to be wondering if the animal was poisoned. On the other hand, if all the food was as contaminated as some of the batches that were tested, we'd be seeing thousands of animals dead and dying across the country. That suggests an intermittent problem to me. If so , it'll be a bear to ever find out what happened because the exact conditions will be hard to duplicate.

I don't think people are in as much danger as animals simply because people tend to eat a variety of foods while our pets tend to eat one or two things exclusively.

[drm604]

29. You make a very good point

about people eating a variety of different foods. I've been concerned about possible contamination of the human food supply, but what you say makes sense.

[hedgehog]

31. Although, doesn't this make you wonder about all the people who are

really in distress from nebulous diseases that doctors can't track down like fibermylagia or chronic fatigue syndrome? How in the world would anyone connect them to a brief chemical exposure? (I want to make clear, these people are in real distress. The problem is that their symptoms are hard to quantify and without a microbial infectious agent it's hard to give them a round of antibiotics and declare them cured, so some in the medical Establishment claim they aren't really sick!!)

[drm604]

33. I don't think that those are related to current contamination of wheat gluten.

This appears to be a new issue related to one or a few contaminated batches. People have been talking about fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome for years.

I'm not the least bit surprised that current medical science can't find the cause of every case of human distress. They're not omnipotent and the workings of the human body are not fully understood. It stands to reason that there may be unrecognized disorders that we have no tests or treatments for. Just because we can't diagnose these problems it doesn't mean that they're necessarily due to food contamination. I just don't see any logical connection.

[hedgehog]

35. How do we know that this is the first time this has happened?

[drm604]

41. It's not.

A Google search will very likely turn up a number of past instances.

[garybeck]

13. but I thought the plastic chemical theory is not the case anyomre

I can't keep up but I thought two independent labs had done some testing and they disagree with the theory that the plastic chemical is present.

[hedgehog]

15. That's what has got me up on this soap box.

I doubt that all the pet food is contaminated or we'd be seeing a lot more dead animals. I think what we're looking at is pet food that has been contaminated with different chemicals at different times. If someone is careless or ignorant about how an ingredient is transported, that would explain differing levels of contamination and different types of contamination. Alternatively, a processor is using the same equipment to handle different chemicals and not properly cleaning the equipment when switching over from one to another.

[napi21]

23. I hve never worked for Menu Foods, but I have worked for several

food manufacturers, as well as a pet food manufacturer. At least where I worked, EVERY ingredient that came into our facility was tested BEFORE it was released to inventory.

The fact that the contamination problems all appear to be isolated to two Menu Food factories, but NOT their factory in Canada, and it also doesn't seem to be at other pet food manufacturers tells me the problem is most likely in the manufacturing process OR how those two facilities STORE their inventory. I'm 99% positive that every step and ingredientisbeing tested very carefully right now at those two facilities.

[hedgehog]

27. Exactly !

I'm thinking the contaminated material was missed in testing precisely because it was a slug of bad stuff. Samples taken throughout the load might have missed a pocket of bad stuff. Think of it as a biopsy that happens to miss the tumor.

Here's another possibility - we used to receive rail cars of grain that had been treated with packets of chemicals (I think it was methyl bromide - this was 30 years ago) placed on top of the load. The plant sanitarian had to put on a mask, open the hoppers, remove the packets and allow the car to air out before the grain was transferred to our silos. Sometimes there was a problem because he could only find one packet. The cars had to be emptied by hand so the second packet could be found.

Now imagine that somewhere along the way, someone treats a load of wheat with rat bait. Someone else processes the wheat without removing the bait and/or the dead rats. Now, try to trace that screw-up!

[C_U_L8R]

16. By very large companies

who happen to be cozy with the republicans (hence the media blackout)
Cargill.. Agland... Archers Daniels Midland... etc..

[rockymountaindem]

22. By the mega-freighter "Glutenus Maximus" n/t

[valerief]

24. But if we don't get our wheat from China, how will we EVER get any wheat?

:sarcasm:

[gkhouston]

26. it's an extremely fine powder, so I'd be surprised if it were transported

in the sort of truck used to transport liquids. I'd expect the gluten to be extracted from the wheat at a factory and transported either in large sacks (for bulk stores like Whole Foods) or in the for-the-shelf packaging, but that's just a wild-ass guess.

[hedgehog]

28. Large sacks or 55 gallon drums?

If the drums were bought used, that's another way that contaminants could be introduced.

How about large sacks stored or shipped next to large sacks of something else? Could that introduce some cross contamination?

[gkhouston]

32. My guess would be large sacks. If they were stored next to something

else, or on top of an improperly cleaned surface, perhaps they could be contaminated that way.

[napi21]

34. The only reason I find that scennario hard to believe is because

the contamination appears to be very wide spread. Your scenario would play out well if there had been a dozen or so bags contaminated, but this seems to be much bigger than that.

There IS a process where they take the gluton(from the wheat berry)from the wheat. IT's entirely possible it was THERE where the contamination occurred.

[gkhouston]

42. but if the contamination is happening during the wheat berry processing

wouldn't it be likely that wheat flour would also be contaminated? :scared:

[napi21]

43. Not necessarily. It would depend on what stage of the process was

contaminated. If it was after separation, then no.

[hedgehog]

36. I forgot about that!

Setting something down in a puddle of something else Or having something drip down from an overhead shelf is a common occurence in warehouses if my experience is at all typical.

[gkhouston]

38. it doesn't even have to be an obvious puddle, depending on the

contaminating substance, I'll bet.

[leftofthedial]

37. in the wallets of wealthy white men

[havocmom]

39. We keep the dog food in a big, tightly sealed container.

The last bag we bought was different: Bag was different. Kibble looked AND SMELLED different. Dog's reaction was DIFFERENT. He really didn't want to eat it. Acted like he was being punished and only took a few bites once in awhile. He is 120 pounds so, I watched him for three days. He didn't want the kibble, but acted hungry.

Not only threw away the suspect kibble (it was not on a list SO FAR). We threw out the $35 container too. Not gonna put something else in it due to suspicions about the safety of what we had just dumped out.

Just got done making another batch of dog food for my big boy, who loves the stuff momma has been making him with ingredients out of my pantry. If those ingredients are tainted, we all die together.

[hedgehog]

40. Even if they are contaminated, he's now getting fed a variety of things

from a variety of sources, so the exposure is going to drop.

[havocmom]

44. Yep, not a lot of any one carb source is probably better.

Carb sources I am using:
Potatoes, barley, brown rice, oatmeal, 7 grain hot cereal.

Protein sources I am using:
Ground beef and/or turkey, eggs (local farm fresh from neighbors - we are real lucky there), lentils, split peas, powdered non-fat milk, parmesean cheese. Sometimes some fish in the mix.

Fats, just a little to metabolize other nutrients and keep his skin good:
olive oil, butter, some vitamin E capsules squeezed into the mix

Vitamins:
tomatoes, parsley, carrots

It all works. Proportions and ratios available in many good books on making pet food.

Whip it up, divide into small batches, freeze.

I want my big boy around a long time.