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When Meat Meets Maker

I thought I’d really finished blathering about meat consumption with my last post, but, um, no. A couple posts ago I described making cat food for the kitties–the commercial stuff is a 12-hour bus ride away, in Delhi. Since I started making my own cat food, a number of folks have emailed me with helpful hints on making sure the result has all the different nutrients a cat needs. Most Western recipes call for commercial vitamin supplements of some sort or another, that are also not at all available here. The way the food supply works, most humans are lucky if they manage to get all the nutrients they need, let alone pets or livestock. A number of folks here are on vitamin supplements courtesy of the Emergency Medical Fund. But I digress.

At any rate, I’m getting used to the whole process of cat food production. While searching for ways to make the whole process more efficient and nutritious, I often found myself wishing for the good old days of just grabbing a bag of crunchy cat chow nuggets from PetCo.

Then I found out about the pet food recall. And the reasons for it.

It’s hard to imagine a more cutting indictment of the whole food-manufacturing industry. A Chinese manufacturer of wheat gluten spiked their product with melamine in order to increase the reported protein content. On paper, the stuff looked super-nutritious. In reality, a lot of dogs and cats started dying of kidney failure. So now a supposedly “limited” pet food recall is in progress, affecting 57 brands of cat food and 83 brands of dog food. The real kicker, though, is that wheat gluten is commonly used in people food, too–and as a bonus, a lot of “factory farm” hogs are fed on “salvaged” pet food. The investigation being conducted by a totally overwhelmed FDA is being expanded to look at the human food supply. Meantime, about 6,000 hogs get to meet their maker ahead of schedule, without being consumed afterwards, because their meat might poison humans. The latest evil turn in this whole ugly story is that a rice protein, also used in commercial pet food, has been discovered to have been contaminated with melamine.

What the fuck?

Let’s review: so you have pet food containing wheat gluten and rice protein, neither of which is a food dogs or cats normally hunt in the wild anyway, and animal “byproducts” being fed to livestock consumed by people. Wheat gluten on its own is a common additive used in any number of human food products, so there’s at least three different ways for melamine to reach your digestive system.

Editrix’ Note: The news just gets worse. The latest news on this whole fiasco is that the wheat gluten is contaminated with melamine and cyanuric acid–which crystallizes immediately when it mixes with cat urine. We’re talking cat kidney problems within hours. No word on what happens to people. The number of pets lost is now over 4,000; 17,000 people have issued complaints; and the whole food sustainability issue is now the hot topic at a lot of dinner tables.

All of this really makes me wonder what food I’ll be eating when I eventually return to the States.

May 1st, 2007 Posted by admin | India | 3 comments