The Melamine Meow
Coal is wonderful stuff. You can burn it to make smoke, or break it down chemically to make roofing tar, plastics, and fertilizer. Not all of it, though. There’s always some gunk left over, called melamine. So how do you dispose of stuff that’s not even fit for tar and fertilizer?
You feed it to your cat.
It’s a venerable Chinese custom, now globalizing its way to Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and the U.S., where 60 million packages of pet food have been recalled.
In recent years, according to the Times, Chinese food safety scandals have included fake baby formula, soy sauce made from human hair, cuttlefish soaked in calligraphy ink, and eels fed contraceptive pills to make them long and slim. Hmm.
And now, melamine. So far it’s killed 16 pets in the U.S., made at least 14,000 of them sick, and gotten into the feed of 6,000 hogs you might have encountered as pork chops or bacon, except that they’ve been quarantined.
But why would Chinese companies use melamine in pet food ingredients? Because in tests it mimics super-nutritious, high-protein content. And it’s cheaper and harder to detect than urea, the previous contaminant of choice.
It’s just business. They’re saving money, as is our government, which keeps cutting the number of food inspectors at U.S. ports. They’re so understaffed that last year they tested only one in every 429 of the 8.9 million incoming food shipments.
When there’s a war on terror to be fought in Iraq, who has money for silly frills like protecting the nation’s food supply?