Pet Food Politics by Marion Nestle

Author:Marion Nestle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2008-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

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REPERCUSSION #1: CHINA’S FOOD SAFETY SYSTEM

China is so large in population and developing so rapidly that keeping up with events in that country is a formidable undertaking. But anyone who knows anything about the history of food safety in the United States will recognize what is happening with food safety in China. In the light of history, the fraudulent addition of melamine to wheat flour is neither unusual nor shocking. It is precisely the kind of fraud perpetrated by food producers in the United States in the heady years of booming commercial development prior to 1906. That year, of course, was the turning point in U.S. food safety regulation. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his muckraking account of the horrors of the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking plants. His sensational account of those horrors appeared after decades of food adulteration scandals, but it caught public attention as none of those previous scandals had managed to do. Within a few months of its publication, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which gave federal agencies the authority to create—and to enforce—regulations designed to ensure the safety of the food supply. As Stephen Mihm explained in the Boston Globe in August, 2007:

What’s happening halfway around the world may be disturbing, even disgraceful, but it’s hardly foreign. A century and a half ago, another fast-growing nation had a reputation for sacrificing standards to its pursuit of profit, and it was the United States . . . Like China’s poisonous pet-food makers, American factories turned out adulterated foods and willfully mislabeled products. Indeed, to see China today is to glimpse, in a distant mirror, the 19th-century American economy in all its corner-cutting fraudulent glory.

In passing off wheat flour as wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate, the Chinese were doing what unregulated food producers have always done: whatever they can get away with. Food regulations keep most food producers honest, especially when the regulations are thoughtfully designed and strictly enforced. In a country like China, in which food manufacturing is widely dispersed among untold numbers of small producers and regulations are nonexistent or just starting to be developed, an “anything goes” environment is only to be expected. It often takes a crisis to make governments realize that they need to take action. The pet food recalls were just such a crisis.

In the context of unregulated free enterprise, it is easy to understand why the first reactions of Chinese officials and company managers were, as one commentator put it, “petulant, passive-aggressive, [with] a lot of denial” of their responsibility for anything having to do with tainted ingredients. It is also understandable that when the FDA requested permission to go to China to investigate, Chinese officials might have wanted to postpone the intrusion until they could take care of the problems on their own. Indeed, the result was predictable. When the Chinese finally relented and permitted FDA officials to visit, the Americans had nothing left to do. The Chinese had already closed down the two suppliers of the tainted protein ingredients and had arrested the managers of those companies.

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