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In 2005, the FDA required certain categories of manufacturers to keep records about the source, transporters, and recipients of their products.  Recently, the Inspector General of the FDA’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, conducted an exercise to see whether traceability was working.  Inspectors bought 4 samples of 10 different food products (e.g., bottled water, oatmeal, tomatoes) at retail stores and attempted to track their supply chains.  Oops.  It only could trace 5.  For another 31, it could make educated guesses.  But nearly 60% of food facilities handling these products could not complete the tracing and 25% did not know they were supposed to.

The FDA, says the Inspector General, needs statutory authority to require producers to know their supply chains and everybody involved needs some education about how to do this.  No wonder we are still getting daily recalls of products containing peanut better.  Statutory authority means Congress.  I wish Congress would get busy on this!

The interesting part about this latest recall – now 2 million pounds and involving 74 products so far – is how the Salmonella contamination was discovered.  According to a lengthy account in USA Today, a small nut company in Illinois, Georgia’s Nut, routinely tests for Salmonella and found the bacteria in nuts purchased from Setton Pistachio of California.  Georgia’s Nut recalled products distributed in the Chicago area.  This company also produces a trail mix for Kraft Foods.  It notified Kraft Foods, which also promptly recalled its products.

I’m guessing that Georgia Nut must follow a HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) plan.  HACCP is a science-based food safety procedure that requires analyzing where contamination might occur in production processes (hazard analysis), taking steps to prevent contamination at those critical control points, and using pathogen testing to make sure the steps were followed and the plan is working.

HACCP, as I keep complaining, is only required for meat and poultry production on the USDA regulatory side (where is it poorly enforced) and for sprouts, fresh juices, seafood, and eggs on the FDA side.  The producers of everything else are supposed to follow Good Manufacturing Processes, which are considerably less rigorous and, as we saw with the peanut butter recalls (more than 3,800 products from 200 companies) and their health consequences (nearly 700 sick, at least 9 deaths), clearly do not work.

How about HACCP for all foods?  Worth a try?

April 3 update: USA Today reports that Setton Pistachio has not yet issued its own recall (note: this is a good reason why the FDA needs the authority to order recalls), that its California plant passed recent inspections with relatively minor violations, but that its sister plant on Long Island is a mess.  USA Today also reports that Setton Pistachio has had positive tests for Salmonella for months.  What did the company do with the contaminated pistachios?  A mystery.

The FDA is announcing the “voluntary” recall of certain pistachio products.  Certain, in this case, means a mere million pounds of products from Setton Pistachios of Terra Bella, CA.  These appear to be contaminated with multiple strains of Salmonella. As with the peanut butter recalls, pistachios are used in many different kinds of products.  The FDA learned about the problem from Kraft Foods, which found Salmonella in its Back to Nature Trail Mix. Nobody has gotten sick yet, but stay tuned.  The FDA has a brand new pistachio recall page on its website.  Now you can keep track of pistachio recalls along with the peanut butter recalls which continue to come in every day and now add up to nearly 4,000 products.

Will this ever end?  While waiting for Congress to approve the appointment of Dr. Margaret Hamburg as FDA Commissioner, her deputy, Joseph Scharstein, has just taken over as acting commissioner.  These new officials will have plenty of work to do to get this mess under control.

For this one, I answered a bunch of questions and responded to a letter to the editor from Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.  He took me to task for exaggerating the inadequacies of our our food safety system.  He’s right.  I exaggerated.  But he should know better than anyone how badly the system works.  He was in charge of the pet food recalls in 2007 and is now in charge of the current peanut butter recalls.

As we have learned all too often, dishonest food companies cut corners on food safety any time they can get away with it.  That is why inspections are absolutely necessary.  Right now, the inspection system is largely voluntary and all too easily corrupted.  In a series of articles in the New York Times, we now learn that some of the peanut butter caught up in the recent recalls was Certified Organic, and that the plants had passed inspection by USDA-licensed organic certifiers.

As for conventional foods: today’s front-page article expands on flaws in the food inspection system.  Inspectors, for example, are paid by the plants they are inspecting (oops).  Here’s my favorite quote, attributed to Mansour Samadpour, a food safety consultant: “The contributions of third-party audits to foods safety is the same as the contribution of diploma mills to education.”

When I was doing the research for my book, Safe Food, I visited a plant that manufactured meat products.  The plant manager told me that you could butcher a dog in front of the onsite USDA inspector and he would never see it.  I believed him: inspectors only see problems if they know what to look for.

All of this makes me think that inspections need to be done by independent agencies that are rewarded for finding problems, not ignoring them.  Mandatory HACCP (standard food safety procedures) with testing and inspection would help too.   And if the organic food industry wants the public to believe that organic foods are better, it must make sure that production methods meet organic standards in letter and spirit.  Otherwise, why bother to pay more for organic foods?

The USDA needs to close loopholes and insist on the integrity of the inspection system. The FDA needs to figure out a way to get its inspection needs under control.  These are issues for Congress to handle.  I keep wondering:  How bad do things have to get before Congress does something useful about food safety?

The FDA has its hands full these days, what with peanut butter, no commissioner, and Daschle withdrawing for consideration as secretary of Health and Human Services (the FDA’s parent agency).  Even so, the FDA is concerned about weight loss supplements that it considers fraudulent, and has now gone after 70 of them.  The FDA has a lot on its plate, as it were, and let’s hope the new administration figures out a way to make oversight of the food supply a priority.

February 10 update: the New York Times has a long piece on this problem.  Turns out that a lot of these so-called herbal products actually contain weight loss drugs of one kind or another.  They are not supposed to.

One of the first things President Obama did on his first day in office was to freeze last-minute regulations squeezed in by the Bush administration, among them Country of Origin Labeling (COOL).

On January 15, cutting it close, the USDA  issued final rules for COOL for meat, poultry, and fish, as well as for plant crops: fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables as well as, oddly, peanuts, pecans, ginseng, and macadamia nuts. The rules were supposed to take effect March 16. They excluded foods that were cooked, cured, or smoked, or mixed with other food ingredients (examples: chocolate, breading and tomato sauce). These were the same as previous versions and full of loopholes (see previous posts on the topic). I thought the lame-duck rules were better than nothing, but now it seems we are starting over.

Big question: will the Obama administration make the rules better or worse?  Fingers crossed.

Order from your local independent bookstore or Amazon or UC Press or Barnes & Noble.

Summary

Pet Food Politics is an account of the pet food recalls of 2007 and their implications for the health of dogs and cats, but also for the FDA, food safety policy in the United States and China, international food trade, and the pet food industry itself.  What started out as a few cats sick with kidney disease ended up as an international food safety scandal.  The book traces the origins of the scandal back to China, where pressures to produce food ingredients at the lowest possible cost led unscrupulous manufacturers to add an industrial chemical, melamine, to wheat flour and sell it under the guise of wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate ingredients in pet foods.

Pet Food Politics provides a timeline of the events and charts of the distribution chain of the tainted ingredients.  It describes the 40-year history of the use of melamine as a food adulterant.  And it explains how melamine mixed with one of its by-products, cyanuric acid, spontaneously formed crystals that blocked the kidneys of cats and dogs.

Melamine, of course, is the same chemical implicated in the Chinese infant formula scandal of 2008.  In that incident, 294,000 infants became ill with kidney disease, and at least eight died.  Hence the book’s subtitle: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine–a warning of flaws in our food safety system.

The story told in Pet Food Politics demonstrates how food for people, farm animals, and pets is really much the same.  We only have one food system.  A safety problem in any part of it affects food for all.  The pet food recalls should have warned us all that the food safety system needed fixing, and right away.  The peanut butter recalls of 2009 show what what happens when such warnings go unheeded.

BLURBS

“Marion Nestle has emerged as on of the most sane, knowledgeable, and independent voices in the current debate over the health and safety of the American food system.” –Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and Omnivore’s Dilemma

“Pet Food Politics reads like a detective story in which each new clue points to a greater crime than the one we started out investigating.  Marion Nestle makes an overwhelming case for the inadequacy of our present system of monitoring food safety.”  –Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation

“The production of pet food–and its parallels to the manufacturing of human food–should be of concern to everyone, not just those who love animals.  In her expert examination of the pet food industry, Dr. Nestle tells a story as compelling as a mystery.  You’ll never look at the pet food aisle the same way again–or your own food either.”  –Gina Spadafori, Universal Press Syndicate pet care columnist and best-selling pet book author

REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS

Review of Pet Food Politics among reviews of several books about dogs in the Financial Times (U.K), April 18, 2009: “A serious investigative tome with a faintly ridiculous title.”

Interview with Christie Keith on Pet Hobbyist, February 1, 2009.  “Transcript: Dr. Marion Nestle and Dr. Mal Nesheim, Pet Food Politics and What Pets Eat.”

Sacramento Bee, January 20, 2009. Gina Spadafori and Marty Becker: “Bookhounds will love last year’s best.”

Pet Connection, January 10, 2009.  Gina Spadafori: “Turning the page: Last year produced some must-read books for pet lovers.”

Pet Connection blog, January 6, 2009. “Pet Food Politics: an interview with Dr. Marion Nestle.”

November 15, 2008  Interview with Evan Kleinman on Good Food, KCRW (Los Angeles) on Pet Food Politics (scroll down to 11:50 a.m.)

October 21, 2008  Interview with Brittney Andres at Mother Jones (audio and print): Pet Food Politics

October 1, 2008  Interview with Eating Well about Pet Food Politics (September/October issue)

<!–[endif]–>September 30 Marshal Zeringue posts page 99 of Pet Food Politics on his Page 99 Test site.  “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” –Ford Madox Ford

September 30 Interview with Emily Kaiser on Food and Wine “Mouthing Off” blog site about Pet Food Politics

September 28 Interview with Toronto Star on pet foods and foods safety

Review in the Atlantic Monthly, September 29, 2008.  Corby Kummer, “Back to The Jungle.”

Interview with Tracie Hotchner on Dog Talk about Pet Food Politics

Interview with Michelle Nijhuis of Grist (Environmental News and Commentary) about Pet Food Politics, 9/19/08.

Miriam Morgan’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 2008. “What’s new?  Pet Food Politics a wake-up call.”

Jill Richardson’s review on AlterNet, September 10, 2008. “Pet Food Politics: why our pets still aren’t safe.”

Interview with Jill Richardson at UC Press blog site, September 10, 2008.

Review in The Economist, September 4, 2008.  “Why pet-food safety matters, even to people who do not have pets.”

Podcast in The Economist, September 4, 2008.

Interview with University of California Press about Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (click on arrow under the book cover), June 17, 2008

Interview with Kim Campbell Thornton about Pet Food Politics at PetConnection.Com, March 14, 2008.