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Silly us. Karen and I shared some grilled shrimp and a bowl of beef pho at a little Asian café in our neighborhood last Sunday, and afterwards we didn’t feel so good. Now we know why…
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.
On Tuesday, the government of China did something it’s never done before—put out a press release bragging about the high number of food safety violations it’s dealing with. It claims that its inspectors have uncovered 23,000 violations, and that it’s recently shut down 180 food plants.
From David Barboza’s NY Times article:
Regulators said 33,000 law enforcement officials combed the nation and turned up illegal food making dens, counterfeit bottled water, fake soy sauce, banned food additives and illegal meat processing plants. “These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department told the state-run media.
China Daily, the nation’s English language newspaper, said industrial chemicals, including dyes, mineral oils, paraffin wax, formaldehyde and malachite green, had been found in everything from candy, pickles and biscuits to seafood.
Regulators said they also learned that sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid were being used to process shark fin and ox tendon.
These industrial chemicals are often toxic or corrosive and can be used in everything from drain cleaners, detergent and fertilizer to surfboard wax.
Photo of a worker at a Chinese chicken farm from the Washington Post
The prospect that chicken hatched, raised, cooked, and frozen in China could soon be on the menu at your kid’s school was the subject of a couple of letters to the editor in the Washington Post this week (not available online). First, on Monday, May 28, Richard Raymond, the USDA’s Undersecretary for Food Safety, wrote a letter critical of Harold Meyerson’s May 23 op-ed “Chicken Roulette,” in which Meyerson, citing Rick Weiss’s May 20 story “Tainted Chinese Imports Common,” had written:
“Under pressure from U.S. agribusiness, which wants more entry to the Chinese market—something the Chinese will not grant absent more entry to our market—the Agriculture Department is reportedly inclined to change its rules and let China send us its chicken undisguised.”
Weiss had reported that the Chinese are offering a quid pro quo: you let us send you our chicken, and we’ll lift our 4-year-old ban on U.S. beef.
Photo of feed pellets from http://www.rivards.com
In an interesting twist on the melamine contamination saga, FDA officials announced on Wednesday that an Ohio company has been putting melamine into its animal feed ingredients for quite some time. They added that there’s no reason to be alarmed—it wasn’t very much melamine, and it’s probably not dangerous anyway. Next thing you know there’ll be a minimum daily requirement for the stuff. The company, Tembec BTSLR of Toledo, a subsidiary of a Canadian forest products company, said that it put melamine in a resin that is used to hold feed pellets together. Tembec sold the resin to a Colorado company, Uniscope, which incorporated it into two products:
Aqua-Tec® (“pellets made with Aqua-Tec lasted from one to eight times longer in water than pellets made without”) and Xtra-Bond® (“used in wild game feeds, base/premix pellets, calf creep feeds, range cubes, blocks and urea feeds where improved weatherproofing is desired.”).
Improved weatherproofing? Won’t dissolve in water? That melamine is so useful! But, unfortunately for shrimp farmers who don’t want their feed pellets to dissolve before the shrimp can eat them, the products have now been recalled. The FDA said it is not yet sure whether or not some of the contaminated feed was exported to China.
What on Earth Are We Eating? 