Let me rant for a moment

Once again, there is some toxic thing wrong with crap from China. News of this current outrage (cadmium in child's trinkets ) was posted on a homeschooling board I frequent, & here was my response (so that those of you who don't waste spend valuable time on that board can be privy to my rants too. Complete with spelling errors! I cannot spell "jewelry".)

"I wish I could get my ire up over this but I'm out of energy on this issue. It's been like this for YEARS - lots of countries have done testing, there's an outcry, politicians look serious on tv & insist changes are coming to consumer protection and THEN? Nothing changes. AND consumers keep buying the crap. Toys, jewellry, pet food, baby formula, vitamins - over and over and over.

This is why I try really, really hard to avoid buying anything from China. What really bugs me is stainless steel - it's getting almost impossible to buy kitchen stainless steel items which are made anywhere except China. Well, color me cynical, but I don't believe it's all 18/8 & if I can at all avoid it, I refuse to buy it.

Time to speak with our $'s.

Oh and yeah, it would be really nice if the gov't actually put some power into the FDA etc. But the big business pressures battle it every step of the way (oh, no! we don't want government interference! We'll self-police! We're ethical capitalists!),& at the end the consumer is the one who suffers."

So yeah. That's it. Stop buying this crap already. If it's Made in China, think 10 times about whether you really really need it or whether you can find another alternative - yes, even if it costs a bit more. It's not going to change until WE change.

if you eat, read this

If you're a pet owner, you really MUST go hang out at Pet Connection and read their blog posts. They're consistently fast to consolidate the information coming out about the contamination of food.

Key notes:
-the recall has expanded several times. The FDA's current list has over 5,500 items on it. Check and check again to make sure your pet food is not on the list. Don't trust the stores; in many cities, people are finding recalled foods on the shelves.
-three different ingredients are implicated: wheat gluten, rice protein concentrate, corn gluten. IMO, until all routes of contamination are traced, it is advisable to avoid foods with these ingredients.
-new contaminants have just been identified, including cyanuric acid.
-some of the contaminated ingredient was sold as hog feed.

Even if you're not a pet owner, you should go read the Pet Connection site & then you must ask yourself about the safety of human food. What exactly are we putting on our tables? The ingredients for many processed foods in the human food chain are imported from countries with lax regulations and extensive environmental pollution. They are not tested upon importation. We don't know there's a problem until there is a spike in illness. The possibilities for accidental or intentional contamination are very real. This is a huge vulnerability of our society.

Imagine a slow acting toxin. Something that doesn't kill you after the first bite, but after a couple months of consumption, begins to build up in your liver and kidneys. Imagine that its effect on people varies, so patients will be coming in a variety of symptoms depending on their age & general health before exposure to the toxin. Imagine the contaminant was in an ingredient commonly used in the production of baked products such as cookies and breads. Imagine that the ingredient was widely sold and distributed throughout North America over an extended period of time, and that the major brands of snack foods and breads have all been contaminated, because it turns out they're all made in 5 plants throughout North America.....

OK, so I've been plotting a suspense novel & I can imagine these things quite easily. What do you think? Totally implausible or really terrifying?

CNN steps up

Last night Anderson Cooper's 360 Degrees did a small segment on the pet food recall. (read the transcript here) One of the contributing editors of Pet Connection was there and the nation finally heard some numbers other than '16 confirmed'. At Pet Connection, the self reported numbers of pets affected is over 9000, & as of 7 pm last night "1,434 dogs dead, 1,751 cats".

If you lost a cat or dog in the last few months, consider if it may have been kidney failure as a result of tainted food. If you need to read up on the symptoms, Pet Connection has a section describing the acute renal failure which is affecting these pets. I think this is much bigger than anyone in Canada is saying. Consider it even if you pet didn't consume any of the recalled products - that list is changing all the time and I don't think we have the final word on what the actual contaminants are and in which products.

And today on the CNN website, a really nice quote:

Dr. Donald Strombeck said the Amazon.com sales rank for his book "Home-Prepared Dog & Cat Diets: The Healthful Alternative" jumped from below 60,000 to about 1,000 after the recalls.

The retired professor of veterinary nutrition at the University of California, Davis, challenged the common assertion that owners should not feed their pets table food.

When he began practicing veterinary medicine in the 1950s, he said, most pet owners fed their pets scraps from the table, keeping the risk of contamination low.

"The pet food industry doesn't want people competing with them," Strombeck said. "An animal can basically eat the same things we eat. They're not going to develop a deficiency."

The CBC website meanwhile ran a story on home-made foods complete with a stern warning from the CVMA about how potentially dangerous and time consuming that is. And, "Scientific nutritional analysis has yet to be conducted in the same way it has with commercial pet food." Of course the fact that the CVMA website is emblazoned with an advertisement for Hill's as their platinum sponsor is completely unrelated.

Some other good sources for info on the recall

Howl 911
Itchmo

are we sure about human food?

Just quickly -

Del Monte is recalling some of their pet food products because of the tainted wheat gluten.

Del Monte confirmed the wheat gluten was a food grade additive - meaning it could well be in the human food chain.

Ref. Pet Connection

For folks in the US, your FDA is at least doing a semblance of something. Doesn't sound like it's doing much, and at least one of your Senators is calling for an overhaul of the system but at least it's there. In Canada, we're getting nothing. Nobody seems to be looking at this at all. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency apparently deals with human food, and livestock feed but not with pet food. There's absolutely nothing on their website about the current pet food recall. We're on our own up here in the North.

Trust Us - we're the experts

Here's something that makes me so mad I get a little twitch by my eye.

The BC Veterinary Medicine Association has a coming event listed:

Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 6:30 PM
Nutrients vs. Ingredients
Separating the Science from the Marketing Spin & BARF and Update.
Location: Best Western Inn, Kelowna, BC
Date: April 11, 2007
Time: 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
CE hours: 2

BARF, btw, stands for biologically appropriate raw foods (or bones and raw foods, depending on whom you ask). The CVMA continues to be opposed to both raw foods and home prepared diets. They will tell you over and over again that commercially prepared food is more scientific, it's tightly controlled, it's tested. (What a bunch of crap, as North American pet owners are finding out this week.) So I was a bit surprised to see this seminar being offered and wondered whether the more open minded among the profession were finally making some inroads on this topic. And then I read this:

Sponsored by: Nestle Purina Petcare

Right. That will be in an impartial seminar presenting the science of BARF. Presented by Nestle Purina?

As some of you know, I'm an IBCLC, and some of the most important actions being taken in the lactation field are aimed at getting formula companies OUT of teaching doctors and nurses, OUT of offering infant feeding inservices, OUT of the universities, OUT of the conferences. Because formula manufactures come in with tons of advertising, and with sophisticated marketing techniques. One of the problems is that physicians and veterinarians, like many intelligent people, bristle at the idea that they would be subject to manipulation and advertising. Their argument seems to be: only stupid people are subject to that kind of manipulation, I'm not stupid, therefore I can be impartial. It doesn't work that way. These companies are spending tons of money to buy your allegiance and your support. Believe it.

Until veterinarians stop allying themselves with food manufacturers, stop marketing - & sometimes downright pushing, these products in their offices, I'm going to be very sceptical of what a veterinarian says about a particular food. Call me cynical - go ahead! But when you've been wined and dined, and chummed up by a rep, and then stand to profit from selling the product, you're not impartial. Even if you don't stand to profit, I think you have to admit you may have been biased by the information presented, which was not impartial to start with.

Check out some of these links:
Your Whole Pet: Real food for dogs is easier than you think

We cheerfully accept that kibble is a wonderful way to feed our dogs, when we rarely choose to live on Ensure meal-replacement drinks ourselves. ...

... the human race and its assorted domesticated animals have managed to survive and reproduce for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years, without the assistance of the modern food-manufacturing plant. This isn't a license to feed dogs a poorly constructed diet -- but rather a little reality check on the idea that your dog requires such a precise, nutritionally specific diet that you need finely calibrated laboratory equipment and a degree in nutrition to make his dinner. Aside from the willingness to do it, you really just need a few balanced recipes and the same measuring spoons and cups you'd use to make a cake from a mix.

Pet owners have been sold the idea that there's something inherently different about "people food" and "dog food." There isn't. Food is food. Recipes are recipes. It doesn't need to be processed into pellets to be "dog food." Putting together a varied, nutritious canine diet in your own kitchen takes some awareness and some thought, but it's genuinely no more (or less) difficult than putting together a healthy, nutritious diet for yourself.

PetConnection.com is maintaining self-reporting database of people whose animals have become sick or died after eating the recalled food. Yes, it's self-reporting, and they have several statements about the possible pitfalls of this system, but nevertheless, it's eye opening. As I write this, the total is over 1000 pets reported deceased.

They also report that the poison has been identified: rat poison in the wheat, which was apparently imported from China (which seem incredibly strange to me, being in Canada! You'd have thought we'd have enough wheat here.)

And they link to a business professor talking about the shattered illusions that if you were buying the premium expensive brands, you were getting something special and different.

The Dolittler - a blog of a vet, discusses the feelings of vets at getting no advanced warning from the manufacturers here.

From this veterinarian’s point of view—and from my insight as a former marketing executive—they f----- up big time. Unless Menu Foods didn’t inform their own customers (the likes of Iams and Eukanuba whose production was outsourced to them)—and I don’t think that’s likely—these brands should have done back flips to set up company-wide protocols for dealing with the crisis.

And vets should have been informed—if not on Friday (or sooner) then at least by Monday morning. Yet even our distributor was caught off guard. One finally faxed us a list of their products on recall. But our Eukanuba distributor? Not a peep. Our Hill’s distributor? Silence. Calling them reveals more confusion than it offers answers.

And if you're in Canada, the foods most likely being pushed by your vet are the "exclusively available through your veterinarian" Royal Canin and Medi-Cal (which is owned by Royal Canin). Royal Canin is the subject of a class action lawsuit claiming deadly amounts of Vitamin D in their food. This is completely unrelated to the current pet food recall.

In the end, it's like everything else - you need to educate yourself, read, learn, listen to advisors you trust, and make up your own mind.

I'm still feeding my animals a commercially prepared diet but I'm not certain I'll continue. I'm very aware that the entire industry got its start just like the artificial baby milk industry - waste products that couldn't be used somewhere else + enterprising companies + convenience + marketing = BIG INDUSTRY. Both industries have grown, both have changed, both do produce useful and valuable products which have improved quality of life. But both are also driven by profits and strongly divisive marketing aimed at convincing the consumer that it's not possible to feed your baby or your pet without their products.

What do you think? Have you been affected by the recall? Do you think differently about pet food now? What about the entire food supply safety, what with the spinach and peanut butter etc recalls? None of us are self-sufficient so how do you look out for the safety of your loved ones? And just how much do you trust the experts - the scientists, the vets, the doctors, the FDA?