Melamine Is In Our Food.

From horsesass.org (H/T Memeorandum):

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. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  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. [...]

Another way melamine has entered the food supply is in "imported Chinese pork, poultry, farm-raised fish, and their various by-products," because, says a headline in tomorrow's (today's) New York Times:

Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China

They frankly call it "fake protein."  Horsesass.org goes on:

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.

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?

Why?  Because they thought they might find it.

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.

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.

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.

Read it all, and the TImes piece too.

Comments

[karen]

He had me all the way up until he said..."by Chinese capitalism."

Thank God i'm organic because i've never even heard of this melamine thing. We were more worried about animal by-products as fillers in our feed- esp things like blood-protein. That's just gross-- and how diseases are spread.

[amba]

Yeah, turning cows into cannibals -- disgusting and unnatural.

It was some kind of a lefty website, I think.

[karen]

:0)- that's ok. It's just that no one can ever seem to remain neutral anymore, you know? They(we) have to throw in that identifier- that barb that puts the blame on the exact opposite of all(our) own beliefs.

It's accusatory and begs retaliation.

[Dave Schuler]

It's worse. Check back at my place tomorrow.