Today’s Update on the Pet Food Recall—4/3/2007

Chinese say: “Don’t blame us!”

There’s been one interesting development in the continuing-to-unfold story of the Menu Foods pet food recall. Officials of the Chinese exporter that supplied the presumed-to-be contaminated wheat gluten and officials of the Chinese government have spoken up to deny a role in the problem:

China denied Monday that pet food ingredients exported to the United States are to blame for the recall of more than 60 million cans of cat and dog food and the deaths of 14 animals.

Even so, Mao Lijun, managing director of Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. of Peixian, China, says his company is investigating the possibility that its wheat gluten — an ingredient in commercial pet foods — was contaminated with the chemical melamine, used in the manufacture of plastics and as a slow-release fertilizer.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an import alert Friday authorizing the detention of any wheat gluten imports from the Chinese firm. All the samples of wheat gluten from this supplier have tested positive for melamine, says Ellen Morrison, director of the FDA’s Office of Crisis Management.

Chinese officials said Monday that an initial investigation by the government’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine found that China has not exported tainted pet-food ingredients to the USA and Canada. “The poisoning of American pets has nothing to do with China,” said the report, published in the official People’s Daily website.

However, the Chinese report focused on aminopterin, the rat poison initially found in a sample of the recalled pet food by a New York state laboratory. Since that report last week, the FDA has cited melamine as the source of the problem.

Mao insists that the discovery of melamine, if it is confirmed, would be the first time this has happened in China. “We are fully co-operating with the investigation,” says Mao. “We are helping the authorities. We know that the sale of agricultural products to the USA is a sensitive area. We do not refute the news, but we need to know more about it.”

The FDA does not yet know how the chemical got into the wheat gluten. What is certain is that it shouldn’t have been in food. “This is not an acceptable additive to food. It shouldn’t have been there,” said FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach in a Monday briefing.

Wheat gluten is the protein found in wheat flour. It is used to add protein and thicken pet foods. It also is used in human foods. In Chinese cuisine, wheat gluten is often used as a meat substitute in vegetarian dishes.

The Chinese supplier sells both animal-feed-grade wheat gluten and human-food-grade gluten. Menu Foods, which manufactured most of the recalled pet foods, has said that the wheat gluten it used was human food grade.

There is “no evidence” to suggest that any of the wheat gluten from the melamine-positive lots got into the human food supply, says von Eschenbach.

The cited article goes on to describe the Chinese inspection process.

Frankly, I think that the Chinese have erred in issuing this denial until more is known about the nature and source of the contamination.

Let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope math. The amount of pet food involved in the original recall is being widely quoted as 60,000,000 cans. Assuming a 6 oz. can and, say, 1 oz. of wheat gluten per can (probably conservative) that’s

60,000,000 oz. = 3,750,000 lb. = 1,875 tons

A standard shipping container probably holds about 25 tons of wheat gluten so that would be 75 of the shipping containers you see being hauled around by semis, loaded onto ships or even planes.

Wheat gluten (seitan) is an important food item in China. For the not-particularly-appetizing-looking details see here. Food is cultural. What looks absolutely delicious to you may look completely disgusting to the average Chinese man or woman and vice versa.

China produces something like 90 million tons of wheat per year. A lot of that goes into the production of wheat gluten. As the Chinese become richer they’re consuming less wheat gluten and more meat. (If you’re interested in the details on Chinese wheat production you can find some here.

As much as 16% of the content of wheat is protein i.e. gluten. So, if all of that Chinese wheat was used to produce wheat gluten (it isn’t), that could be as much as 15 million tons of wheat gluten. That 1,875 tons is pretty small by comparison—a little over .01% of the total. Still, .01% of any food being poisoned sounds like a lot to me.

Certainly the small proportion of the total Chinese production involved is no consolation to the, possibly, thousands of pet owners who’ve lost their pets.

I still wonder, since the wheat gluten involved in the recall was designated as food i.e. human consumption quality, how do they know that none of it got into our food supply? How do they know it won’t in the future?

One more thing: you might want to check out this Q&A on the pet food recall from CBS.

Here’s how things stand as of today, April 3, 2007. At least 400 and possibly more than 3,000 pets have been killed as the result of eating contaminated food manufactured by Menu Foods (and other makers). Two substances so far have been suggested as being responsible: aminopterin, used as a rat poison in Asia, and melamine, used as a fertilizer in Asia. Wheat gluten imported from China is suspected as the carrier of the substances. Aminopterin is a known toxin; the toxicity of melamine has not been established (the only study I know of tested dogs for a year with a huge amount of melamine in their diets without notable toxicity). Neither aminopterin nor melamine have any place in either animal or human food. As of this writing no one knows for certain what is causing the pet deaths or where it came from.