Tainted pet food: Flour, in disguise, is the culprit

Source: USAToday

The contaminated ingredients from China that led to the massive pet-food recall were both actually flour, mislabeled to look more valuable than they actually were, federal officials said Tuesday.

The flour, thought to be wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, contained melamine to appear higher in protein, the Food and Drug Administration speculated.

The mislabeling went undetected by pet-food makers who used the ingredients, the importers who imported them and the FDA for weeks.

The FDA also said some of the contaminated product was used to make fish feed sold to U.S. fish farms. There's no evidence that any of the fish were eaten by humans, but the health risk would be low, said David Acheson, FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-05-08-fda-melamine-fish_N.htm

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I wonder if regular wheat flour is being tested from China and the Netherlands. I add the Netherlands because some of the wheat gluten there is from China as well according to this article here ( http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/search/s_500724.html )

As of 4/27 the FDA had an import alert to check wheat gluten and several other things but not plain wheat flour -
http://www.fda.gov/ora/fiars/ora_import_ia9929.html

the FDA just can't get a handle on it

food supply, for whatever reason, is an act of terror.

think it was going to get having our food supplied by communist red China a country that had always hated us? :wtf:

I should have put "communist red china" in quotes cause I was immitating what types like McCarthy always said. I was making a slap at the CONservatives and "commie" haters who in the end overlooked that as long as they could make a buck by importing goods from a country they thought of that way. x(

An act of terror is intentional. This is greed. Fraud. NOT terror.

Don't overuse that word. That's what the Right does.

Sounds like another reason to have some recreation at a nice resort for our representatives to help our food makers make the "right" decisions for the FDA.

is involved is that it is labor intensive and their government keeps the currency artificially low (and the standard of living is quite low for most Chinese). Higher quality and safety are a small price to pay for American wheat gluten.

Adding melamine increases the protein content of wheat gluten, but some very clever crook bypassed even the gluten production and just added melamine to the "raw product." What a savvy FDA. Only took them two months to look inside the flour bag! Meanwhile, the Chinese government hasn't bothered to inform Hong Kong or some other provinces of the tainted "wheat gluten," but that is minor compared to the exploding pigs they are trying to hide--and farmers are foisting off their dying stock at "deep discount" to the unsuspected.

China can't produce enough food to feed itself. A government official assures us we are getting the best (the best is exported). Why don't the Chinese people matter? Why don't they amend their soils, deal with their polluted rivers, soil, and air, and stop paving over farmland so they can feed themselves? It is obvious that the government can't control the food outlaws, so I want honest labeling here so I never have to play Russian Roulette when eating "wheat ingredient" in some pasta of unknown provenance.

Not so great of a deal for the US, huh? We have been paying premium prices for plain old flour (plain except for the added melamine, that is) when we're up to our eyeballss in US-produced wheat. At the very least some of our pets have not been getting the amount of protien we thought they were getting. You would think that China owes us big refunds on account of this fraud but don't hold your breath.

that may not have been a problem.......

Sounds familiar... a little like the US in the late 19th century.

A century of hard-won social progress right down the drain.

Back to the law of the jungle.
Those that have get.
Those that don't get screwed.

Who needs government regulation?

An immune response to these ingredients?

were deliberately and maliciously poisoning our pets have stopped doing so.

The CHINESE deliberately defrauded American companies, from what I can see. Let's hope this is a lesson for those of us who would TRUST the Chinese to be honest in business dealings......

that is being sold as wheat flour.......

They doctored the flour to make it look higher in protein so it would pass as gluten or RPC.

But I think you can bet the FDA is looking at that as we speak.