According to the AP report, the FDA and other experts claim that the chemicals’ presence in U.S.-manufactured infant formula is not related to the Chinese incident, but is a consequence of normal manufacturing processes:

Melamine is used in some U.S. plastic food packaging and can rub off onto what we eat; it’s also contained in a cleaning solution used on some food processing equipment and can leach into the products being prepared.

The AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get data on two of the companies from the FDA. Those companies and their products [note: see update with correction below] are:

• Mead Johnson’s Enfamil LIPIL with Iron, which contained 0.14 parts per million (ppm) melamine.
• Nestle’s Good Start Supreme Infant Formula with Iron, which contained 0.247 ppm cyanuric acid.

A spokesman for the third company, Abbott Laboratories, said that the company’s own tests detected melamine in some of its products at levels “far below the health limits set by all countries in the world, including Taiwan, where the limit is 0.05 parts per million.” Abbott, the maker of Similac, did not say in which of its products the melamine was detected.

Last month, in updating its “Interim Safety and Risk Assessment of Melamine and its Analogues in Food for Humans,” the FDA said that it “cannot establish a level of melamine and its analogues in these products [infant formula] that does not raise public health concerns.” (In contrast, the FDA’s safe level for these chemicals in all other food products besides infant formula is 2.5 ppm.) In other words, back on October 3, the FDA said that any amount of melamine or its related chemicals in infant formula was a problem.

Today, however, the FDA contradicted itself. Agency spokeswoman Judy Leon said that the FDA allows anything below 250 parts per billion [0.25 ppm] of melamine in infant formula, and that “there’s no cause for concern or no risk from these levels.”

But considering that the incidence of kidney stones in U.S. children is skyrocketing and no one knows why, we here at What on Earth Are We Eating can’t help but be concerned.

Updated Thursday, 11/27/08: According to a new AP report, the spreadsheet with test results that the FDA provided on Tuesday contained an error. On Wednesday, FDA spokeswoman Judy Leon said that the FDA had incorrectly switched the names of the Mead Johnson and Nestle products on the spreadsheet. Thus Nestle’s Good Start had the melamine while Mead Johnson’s Enfamil had the cyanuric acid. The corrected data:

• Nestle’s Good Start Supreme Infant Formula with Iron had two positive tests for melamine on one sample, with readings of 0.137 and 0.14 parts per million.
• Mead Johnson’s Infant Formula Powder, Enfamil LIPIL with Iron had three positive tests for cyanuric acid, at an average of 0.247 parts per million.

Update II, Friday, 11/28/08: The FDA sets a new “safe” level for melamine and cyanuric acid in infant formula of 1 ppm. This contradicts both FDA spokeswoman Judy Leon’s statement the previous day that the safe level was 0.25 ppm and the FDA’s October 3 statement that there is no safe level of these substances in infant formula. Since the only thing that has changed since October 3 is that melamine and cyanuric acid were found in U.S. infant formula at levels below 1 ppm, it’s obvious that these new standards (both the 0.25 ppm level mentioned on November 27 and the 1 ppm level set on November 28) were not based on adequate science. (In fact, in the FDA’s updated risk analysis, the only study referenced is a 13-week rat study.)

This is the FDA’s explanation for how the formula became contaminated:

Melamine is not naturally occurring and is not approved to be directly added to food in the United States. However, melamine is approved for use as part of certain food contact substances. Low levels of melamine are present in the environment and trace amounts may occur in certain food commodities as a result of approved uses.

But there’s another possible source of the melamine contamination: the milk used in the infant formula may have come from cows that ate animal feed containing melamine. We have previously reported on the presence of melamine in U.S. animal feed, and it has also been found in Chinese animal feed.

This week, the FDA halted the importation of all milk products from China until they are tested and proved free from melamine contamination. This action followed a string of recalls over the last couple of months:

• White Rabbit candy (September 26)
• Mr. Brown coffee mix (October 1)
• Blue Cat flavored beverages (October 3)
• YILI milk drinks (October 10)
• Koala’s March cookies (October 17)
• Fresh and Crispy Jacobina biscuits (October 29)

In 2007, melamine contamination of pet food ingredients imported from China was responsible for the deaths of cats and dogs throughout the U.S. The affected animals developed kidney stones and eventually kidney failure.

The problem resurfaced this year when thousands of Chinese babies became ill and at least four died after drinking infant formula made from milk adulterated with melamine. Just like the American pets, these children suffered from kidney stones and kidney failure.

According to news reports, many Chinese milk producers have been boosting their profits by diluting their milk with water and then adding melamine to give the illusion of a normal protein count. Recalls of products containing Chinese milk products have occurred worldwide, from Cadbury chocolate sold in Asia and Australia to chocolate coins in Canada. Two weeks ago, melamine was found in Chinese eggs and animal feed, raising the possibility that many more foods are contaminated.

The FDA claims that no illnesses linked to melamine in Chinese food products have been reported in the United States. But is it just a coincidence that doctors in the U.S. are seeing a steep rise in the incidence of kidney stones in children, some as young as 5 or 6?

“The older doctors would say in the ’70s and ’80s, they’d see a kid with a stone once every few months,” said Dr. Caleb P. Nelson, a urology instructor at Harvard Medical School who is co-director of the new kidney stone center at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Now we see kids once a week or less.”

According to that NY Times article, the increase has been attributed to high salt intake and not enough liquids. But have American kids really increased their salt consumption that dramatically in the last two or three decades? I remember loving Fritos way back in the ’60s. We here at What on Earth are We Eating are skeptical.

But China isn’t the only culprit. Not by a long shot.

Today we call your attention to this depressing article by Tom Mueller in the August 13th New Yorker. It seems that for at least the last 16 years and probably much longer, olive oil merchants in Italy have been scamming the world, passing off other, cheaper types of oil as the real thing. Some excerpts:

In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union, prompting the E.U.’s anti-fraud office to establish an olive-oil task force. (“Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks,” one investigator told me.)…

Zaramella, a garrulous sixty-six-year-old former businessman, has made oil from olives grown on his small farm in Umbria since 1985. He began to study olive oil systematically when he found that the local farmer who tended his trees had been cutting his oil with sunflower seed oil. “Fraud is so widespread that few growers can make an honest living,” he told me…

“My experience over a period of some fifty years suggests that we can always expect adulteration and mislabelling of olive-oil products in the absence of surveillance by official sources,” David Firestone, an F.D.A. chemist who was the agency’s olive-oil specialist from the mid-sixties to 1999, told me.

Some of the techniques mentioned in the article include substituting hazelnut and sunflower seed oil for olive oil, labeling olive oil from other countries as ‘Made in Italy,’ and adding industrial chlorophyll and beta-carotene to soy oil to make it look and taste more like olive. Oil marketing companies that have been affected in the past include Nestle, Unilever, Bertolli, and Oleifici Fasanesi.

According to a Canadian food inspector interviewed in 2000, 20 percent of the olive oil products he’s investigated turned out to have been adulterated.

And two years ago, ABC News reported that Krinos Foods of Long Island City, NY, one of the country’s largest importers of Greek food, was selling adulterated olive oil under its ‘Hermes’ brand. The same company was caught eight years earlier, and, according to the New Yorker article, again in 2006.

The good news is that hazelnut oil, at least, is supposed to be just as good for you as olive oil, so even though you’re being ripped off, it won’t make you sick!

But then in March, America’s pets began dying.

The ensuing uproar revealed the FDA’s woefully inadequate ability to protect us from an ever-increasing flood of toxic food imports, and eventually led to Congressional hearings. One of those hearings, held on July 17, was devoted to the FDA’s planned “reorganization.” You may not want to sit through the whole 5 hour and 40 minute hearing, so we did it for you. Here are a few highlights from the testimony:

1:03 – David Nelson, an investigator for the House Committee, reports that he visited the FDA’s San Francisco office and found that

“it is physically impossible for that office to perform more than a cursory review of most imports. The San Francisco office has four entry reviewers to oversee 4000 entry lines per day. A typical reviewer’s day involves examining 600 food entries, 300 medical device entries, 25 reagent entries, and 25 drug entries on a computer screen. That’s about one entry every 30 seconds. That’s the time they have to decide whether or not they even recommend sending an inspector out to physically look at the goods or to take a sample.”

1:49 – Mr. Nelson reports on a method that companies exporting fish to the U.S. use to evade import alerts. An exporter of large fish like tuna and swordfish will submit five consecutive tests, done by private, unaudited, uninspected, and uncertified labs, of samples taken from very young fish that haven’t yet accumulated dangerous levels of mercury and other heavy metals. Once those results have been submitted, FDA rules allow that exporter to be removed from the import alert, after which it is free to resume shipping its contaminated large fish.

1:51 – Investigator Kevin Barstow elaborates, “One FDA employee told me that with the private labs, the bottom line is money. I spoke with the owner of a private lab who says that he can point out numerous private labs that will guarantee you good test results.”

3:34 – Dr. Richard Jacobs, a chemist at the FDA’s slated-to-be-closed San Francisco lab, reports that his lab was instrumental in the analysis of melamine and its byproducts during the recent pet food scandal.

3:50 – A congressman asks seven members of a panel, five of whom are FDA employees working in facilities that are slated to be closed, to grade the FDA’s performance, on a scale of 1 to 10, in “protecting the American people and guaranteeing food safety.” The two non-FDA employees on the panel, one a scientist at Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the other a former FDA commissioner, give the FDA an abysmal score of “1″, while the FDA employees are not quite as harsh, rating their agency’s effectiveness from “2″ to “5.” [Incidentally, the next day one of their bosses objected to their testimony in a department-wide email. Some of them took it as intimidation, and complained.]

Nine days after this hearing, the FDA temporarily suspended its field reorganization plan. The following day, July 27, the House of Representatives passed a version of the Farm Bill that includes a provision that would bar the use of funds for closing or consolidating FDA field laboratories, district offices or district office inspection or compliance functions. The Senate has yet to take up the Farm Bill, and President Bush has threatened to veto it, but for now, the Democratic Congress has saved the day.

We admit it. Neither one of us had ever heard the term “locavore” before we read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book a couple of months ago (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle– great for reading out loud, if you’re so inclined). But given Eric’s organic gardening ways and my preferences for fresh and unadulturated foods, it’s an approach to eating that appeals to us: cut down on the amount of fossil fuels being burned to transport foods across long distances; know where your food is coming from; support local farmers. We like it. Barbara, you’ve made converts of us!

Meanwhile, like everyone else, we’ve been tempted in our blog entries by the joys of alliteration (who can resist the Chinese Chickens?) as well as the colorful, gross-out images that have been coming to us in media accounts of food safety practices in China and elsewhere abroad. But recently we’ve noticed a rather disturbing trend. Some discussions of the seemingly benevolent choice to “eat locally” have crossed over into something a little darker: there’s a familiar note of protectionism and fear present–and a bit of racism, too. Like the familiar rants about “sending our jobs overseas,” and “saving our jobs for Americans,” these threads suggest some folks want to close the U.S. borders and hide from the world.

In last Sunday’s Washington Post, Jeff Yang wrote a thought-provoking article about this phenomenon. He noted that fringe pundits have been speculating that China has been deliberately “waging a secret biowarfare campaign to destroy the United States from deep, deep within — planting WMDs in the Wal-Mart cart, if you will.” He remarks:

“China has been portrayed as a nation blind to hygiene and blissfully unconcerned about recent reports of food contamination. That’s troubling, because it reinforces the notion that befouled food is the consequence of a foul culture. Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain may have said it best in a 2006 Salon interview in which he noted that there’s “something kind of racist” about culinary xenophobia: “Fear of dirt is often indistinguishable from the fear of unnamed dirty people.”

We want to be clear that we are not arguing for protectionism here. Nor do we think it is realistic to think that the U.S. could halt imports of food from Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere at this point. What’s more–as the amusing cartoon from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette points out, the U.S. isn’t doing such a great job of exporting high quality foods to the rest of the world, either. What we are saying is that, given the dramatic changes have occurred in our food system over the past decade, we need better systems to ensure that the foods we eat have been produced using decent safety standards.

Well, we’ve all heard the stereotype that making policy is like making sausage…you probably don’t want to know what’s in there! So, for those of you who like stickers and labels, you may well get them. But the Associated Press notes that some compromises have been made along the way in order to get those Band-aids–er–stickers. Namely, the Committee agreed, ” to soften penalties and burdensome record-keeping requirements that had concerned many food retailers and meatpackers who opposed the law.”

Ractopamine?

From the Post article:

“It’s fed to a large majority of the pigs in the United States,” said Jim Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute Foundation. “It simply results in more high-quality, lean pork and less fat.”

…AND some stressed-out piggies. From a USDA study:

[Use of] ractopamine has been…accompanied by…reports of effects on the behavior of the pigs, making them ‘hyperactive’ and more susceptible to transport stress…At the end of the 4-week study, [ractopamine-treated pigs] had higher heart rates than control-fed pigs and higher levels of circulating stress hormones.

Ractopamine is a beta agonist, a class of chemical that includes drugs used to treat asthma and premature labor. One of the beta agonists, clenbuterol, has been in the news lately since it’s been used to make women look more like Paris Hilton, weightlifters more buff, and pork meatier:

A total of 336 people have been poisoned in Shanghai since September 13 [2006], in the city’s largest clenbuterol poisoning case. The chemical can reportedly cause damage to the human nervous and cardiovascular system…Most of the pigs have been traced to neighboring Zhejiang where rearing pigs on clenbuterol, known locally as “lean meat powder”, is widespread.

Which might explain why China has not joined the 23 countries—including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Mexico (but not Europe)—who have approved the related chemical, ractopamine, for use in food production.

Whatever else might emerge from the Great Imported Food Scandal and Trade War of 2007, we certainly are learning a lot about what on earth we are eating.

Today China executed Zheng Xiaoyu, who had headed its FDA from its founding in 1998 until he was fired in 2005 for accepting bribes—over $800,000 worth—and for approving faulty drugs that were blamed for at least 10 deaths.

Convicted and sentenced to death on May 29 after a two-week trial, Zheng had filed an appeal on June 13, and we were wondering whether China would go through with the execution, seeing as how Zheng’s actions were nothing out of the ordinary in China. Corruption there has been described as “pervasive,” “rampant, “widespread,” and “massive,” (that’s right, all within one article). But the recent food and drug safety scandals demanded a scapegoat, and Zheng, although arrested two years ago, was conveniently available. As the Chinese proverb says, you gotta kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.

We here at What on Earth are we Eating think that focusing on whether foods and products are “China-free” is beside the point. Yes, it’s true that many Chinese manufacturers have been taking shortcuts in the production of their goods–both for domestic use and for export–and that the quest for lower prices has had costs for safety. But, ultimately, the problem is not that Chinese foods and products are inherently suspect. It’s that the F.D.A. is inadequately equipped to ensure that imported foods are safe, no matter which country they come from.

Update: We’ve removed the “China-Free” sticker image, since some commentors have been taking Eric’s inexact rendition of a map of China very personally. (Yes, we know Taiwan and China are two different countries, guys!)

It’s interesting that this post has drawn more reaction than any other we’ve written thus far. Hmm…it seems that people like stickers! And slogans! And–understandably–a way to feel more in control. –But “No China” stickers won’t deal with the fundamental problem here. Whether we like it or not, our food is now being produced worldwide. We can’t be certain that careful standards–or ANY standards–have been applied to ensure this food is safe.

So what’s the solution? More inspections? Certification of specific facilities in countries that will be exporting their goods to us? How much would changes on this scale cost? Who would pay for them? These are big, headache-inspiring questions. In this past Sunday’s Washington Post, Joel Achenbach quoted Robert Clark of George Mason University as explaining our current food system this way:

“There’s a world below our level of awareness that affects everything we do — the quality of food we eat, the water we drink, the clothes on our back. They’re delivered by systems that are so complex, most of the people who are actually in the system don’t understand them.”

It’s not surprising that people would rather just buy products with “China Free” stickers (even if they DO lump China and Taiwan together) and hope that will be enough to keep them safe.

Today the FDA announced that it has found “recurrent contamination from carcinogens and antibiotics” in several kinds of “farm-raised seafood” imported from China, including shrimp, catfish, eel, and a couple of mystery fish known only as “basa” and “dace.” But the FDA is not recalling anything, and is only requiring that exporters provide information that demonstrates that the exporters have implemented steps to ensure that their products do not contain these substances. Great. The substances, by the way, are the antibiotics nitrofuran, malachite green, gentian violet, and fluoroquinolone. The first three are carcinogenic, and the last is banned (in the U.S., not China) because its overuse could lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

The NY Times explains that this is a big deal, because the U.S. imports an ever-increasing amount—currently 81%—of its seafood, and 21% of that comes from China. The Times writer helpfully adds that in the last two months for which data is available, the FDA rejected 117 shipments of Chinese seafood for containing “filth,” salmonella, pesticides, or veterinary drugs.

The Times article has a link to a recent report by Food and Water Watch on seafood safety hazards and the FDA’s inadequate response to them. Seems that our poor little FDA can only afford to inspect about 2% of imported seafood shipments (out of 860,000 last year). It does sensory tests on 1.3% and lab tests on 0.6% (down from 0.9% in 2003). It rejects 0.16% (down from 0.36% in 2003). So currently it’s rejecting about 8% of everything it looks at or tests. If we extend that 8% rejection rate to the uninspected shipments, it could mean that more than 67,000 shipments of toxic seafood are sold to U.S. consumers every year. And if they’re rejecting only 0.16% instead of 0.36% because they’re so overworked they’re seeing double, then the numbers really shoot up. If that’s not enough to put you off your grilled scampi, there’s one more thing. Remember those shrimp feed pellets we’ve been exporting to other countries? They’re glued together with…that’s right, melamine! It’s all coming together!!!

Oh…and the reason shrimp farmers use all those antibiotics? If they didn’t, their shrimp would be laden with dangerous bacteria.