Poisoned bread and the media circus

The 2007 pet food crisis is still going strong. It looks more like a human interest (media, governments, corporations) story than pure food contamination incident. (Not that I have any trust in food safety in China, or don't have my own cats to worry about.)

The intrinsic risk of large-scale, centralized food processing

First, there is no way to make food 100% safe. Unless apples are banned from human consumption, eventually a bad one will turn up as human food somewhere. Whether it is eaten out of hand, used in an apple pie, or mixed with 10,000 other apples in a plant to produce apple sauce, however, greately changes the scale of contamination.

More decentralized food production and processing is probably not mucher safer per batch, and even less so by quantity (need to make many more smaller batches to fill the same quantity). Yet it is a lot more robust, i.e. when contamination occurs the scale will be much smaller. This is the difference between the 1996 Odwalla juice recall (one brand, recall complated in 48 hours) and the great spinach recall (most of the brands were under suspicion, and it took the FDA weeks to sort out which is actually affected).

Corporate free lunch

One prominent suggestion is tightening customs inspection. Since when did the US customs (or customs of any country) become the chief quality control agency, and is supposed to pinpoint exotic contaminations? As long as the white powery stuff imported is not heroin, their work is done.

According to ChemNutra, melamine (assuming that's the real deal) is "simply not on the radar screen for food ingredient suppliers". That's tough. But it seems pretty reasonable that whose making a profit in this business ought to shoulder the most responsibility. They don't call it "business risk" for no reason!

Another puzzle: Reportedly, the adulteration in the gluten is so high that "visible crystals" can be seen in the finished pet food. Well, shouldn't that ring a bell at Menu Foods, whether melamine was on the chemical radar or not?

Media circus

The suspicion on gluten from China emerged as early as March 30, when FDA halted import of wheat gluten from the suspected seller. A full month passed without much media discussion on food safety in China. Then, over the weekend of Apr. 29-30, huge expose came out on International Herald Tribune and New York Times, screaming about widespread melamine use in China. Now, almost all mainstream media outlets have picked it up (try searching for the price of melamine, and all you get is this s**t). While the FDA has to request special visa to get into China, these major newspapers already have staff inside the country, and can hire local freelancers if necessary. On Dec 5 last year, NYT even reported a Chinese domestic case of fake lard. Now that US food (at least pet food) supply is at stake, why did it take them so long to report?

Besides melamine, there is another chemical suspect called cyanuric acid. The mainstream media kindly explains it as "a chemical used in pool chlorination". I did some research and guess what? It turns out this stuff is also fed to cattles in the US(not to milk cows due to regulation). I can see why the reporter's reasoning though: a "pool chorination chemical" in fluffy's dinner sounds a lot more sinister than "cattle dietary supplement". Plus Archer Daniels Midland may not want consumers to know that, either.

ChemNutra's only business appears to be importing "nutritional and pharmaceutical chemicals" from China to the US. Meanwhile NYT claims melamine spiking of feed is widespread and an "open secret" in China. Putting these together, at least one party is lying because

• If ChemNutra is telling the truth (that they are taken in by an exotic chemical in feed), then melamine use in adulteration is not common in China. But NYT would be lying.
  
• If NYT is telling the truth, then ChemNutra (as a specialized importer from China) is being negligent. What's the point of using an importer who has no clue about a common kind of adulteration in the supplying country?
  

Silence from China

There is a news blackout on this inside China right now, and the PRC government is making as little comment as possible. I doubt they did this to protect a few small peddlers of gluten, or for a more sinister purpose such as a planned poisoning of US food supply. The most obvious explanation is that any public yielding to FDA will foster domestic demand of food safety. To clean up the food supply, a lot of stones have to be turned over. The "miraculous" 9% annual GDP growth then is likely to end. Without that miraculous growth, a lot of other issues will be open for discussion, such as pollution and corruption...

Considering the low level of food safety in China, and how much time passed without a major contamination in the US from imported food from China, in a sense the FDA is doing a pretty good job. If import keeps going, however, one day you'll hit the lottery.

My pet theories

1. Someone in China -- either direct exporters like Xuzhou Anying, their suppliers or an individual insider one of the companies -- intentionally adulterated gluten. Due to ChemNutra's negligence, the contaminated batch reached to Menu Foods. Menu Foods could have checked the ingredients better but chose not to, either, for cost purposes.
   
2. ChemNutra may knew about the adulteration but pretends it didn't. Why not? For all they knew melamine is not particularily toxic. Should s**t hits the fan, they could always point a finger at the Chinese supplier.
   
3. Menu Foods may knew about it too, but figure they can afford it. A brand label has a lot more stake in this scandal, because there are a lot of other brands for consumers to choose from (i.e. the market is fragmented). But Menu Foods is just a nameless contracted manufacturer, and the largest one in north America (they produce for 17 of the top 20 retailers, 5 of the top 6 brandeds). That's a monopoly situation. After this thing's over, I'll bet that brand labels will keep using Menu Foods, because they have the scale of production and low cost (which is goes down with increasing scale) to outbid smaller producers.
   

To be continued...