China

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: Well, here we go again. I was astonished, as were you, by the news that China’s biggest manufacturer of infant formula has just recalled 700 tons of melamine-tainted milk powder. As David Barboza reports in Saturday’s New York Times, “the formula is implicated in the death of one infant, and at least 432 others have been afflicted with kidney problems.” Supposedly, this stuff wasn’t imported to the US, but, as you note, the FDA has issued a warning that it may have found its way onto the “grey” market.

Melamine and the cutthroat, corner-cutting manufacturers who used it in the production of pet foods are, of course, the primary culprits in your latest book, Pet Food Politics, which thoroughly documents China’s food safety problems as well as our own.

In the book, you note that in the aftermath of the tainted pet food debacle, the Chinese government launched a new food safety campaign and declared, in January of this year:

Gao Qiang, China’s vice minister of health claimed at a press conference on Saturday, “This is a severe food safety accident.”

You must be our foremost authority on melamine-adulterated foods, now, so I have to ask you, in the vulgar vernacular of the blogosphere, WTF? Or, if you prefer, what the hell?

Dr. Nestle: Astonished doesn’t begin to describe it. The point of The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, the subtitle of Pet Food Politics, is that the 2007 pet food recalls were an early warning of disasters to follow. By the time the book went to press in May this year, we were already dealing with the heparin crisis. This was a completely analogous situation in which Chinese producers substituted chondroitin sulfate for heparin because the heparin assay only looks for sulfur, apparently. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen.  Protein assays test for nitrogen and don’t care whether it comes from protein or melamine. Chondroitin sulfate and melamine are a lot cheaper than the drugs or food ingredients they replace.

In Pet Food Politics, I trace the use of melamine—fraudulent and not—back to the mid-1960s. David Barboza, the intrepid New York Times reporter based in China, actually got animal and pet food producers to confess that they had been fraudulently adding melamine to feed for years. My guess is that these producers had been adding it in lower doses, got greedy, and upped the dose or used sloppier formulations that contained cyanuric acid. You need a lot of melamine to damage kidneys. But when melamine is mixed with cyanuric acid, it crystallizes in kidneys at very low doses. If it could be added to food for cats, dogs, and farm animals, why not add it to other foods? If nobody is checking—which, apparently, nobody is--you have a good chance of getting away with it, especially if the animals are eating other foods as well.

But infant formulas? These are just like pet foods in that the animal or baby is completely dependent on the one product for complete nutrition. So as with pet foods, there is a good chance of doing great harm and getting caught. Officials didn’t get upset about pet foods because they view dogs and cats as “just pets.” Infant formulas get everyone’s attention.  And you can find plenty of Chinese infant formula in Chinese markets in the U.S.  It’s doubtful that getting rid of them would be on anyone’s priority list for enforcement.

As for what’s going on in China, good luck. It’s the Wild West over there, with foods being made by millions of small backyard producers and a food safety system absolutely unprepared to deal with the scope of the problem. We are talking here about rampant early capitalistic development, just like what we had in the United States prior to 1906 when Congress passed the first food and drug laws. Chinese officials know they have a problem and maybe now that the Olympics are over they can get on it.

In the meantime, we can all exercise personal responsibility and buy local. We also should exercise social responsibility and insist that (1) companies test their products for dangerous contaminants, (2) companies inspect the suppliers of their ingredients, (3) Congress gives the FDA the authority to regulate imported foods more effectively, and (4) Congress demands enforcement of the new Country-of-Origin-Labeling laws that are supposed to be in effect by the end of this month.    

Kat: Uh-oh. Your response begs a follow-up question. Speaking of adulteration, have you seen this article from Sunday’s Chicago Tribune about the watered-down COOL standards? As consumer watchdogs Consumers Union and Food and Water Watch tell the Tribune, there are “giant, giant loopholes in the law." Specifically, foods that are considered “processed” are exempt from the COOL standards, and the USDA is defining “processed” so broadly that it’s severely reducing the number of foods that will be required to carry the labels.

Here are a couple of the more head-scratching examples:

In a word, oy. It seems as though the food industry, having fought the COOL standards for the last few years, is now resigned to the fact that they are going to be implemented, so their new strategy is to undermine the standards by limiting their application as much as possible.

This makes your oft-repeated edict to “avoid processed foods” more timely than ever, but it also compels me to ask, what will it take to put the “us” back in the USDA? Will they ever stop kowtowing to Big Food and start looking out for the little guy?

Dr. Nestle: I had not seen the article but certainly was aware of the problem(s). Congress passed COOL years ago, but then postponed implementing it (except for fish—a fishy story in itself) until now. Why? Because the food industry hates the very idea. I can totally understand why and the pet food and infant formula scandals are great examples. If you knew that the foods you were eating had a good chance of being produced someplace where nobody was minding the store, you might buy something else.

The problem for the food industry is that so much of our food comes from elsewhere. On the order of 80% of our shrimp come from Asia, for example. In the course of working on Pet Food Politics, I met an official of a pet food company who agreed to tell me where the ingredients in his products came from (provided I never mentioned his name or the name of his company). He could tell me the name of the ranch that raised the meat in those foods but the other ingredients constituted an international feast. You have to assume that foods and ingredients come from overseas unless the companies tell you otherwise.

Is this good or bad? I think it’s great that we support farmers in developing countries but I want to have the choice. And the choice isn’t mine if the country of origin isn’t labeled. This is a huge consumer protection issue and it would be nice if our congressional representatives took it seriously. As for the USDA, it and the FDA need some serious depoliticizing. Will we get that in the next administration? Only if we organize, lobby, and exercise our democratic rights as citizens. And start working on the next farm bill, of course.
 

Last December, the White House simply refused to open an e-mail from the Environmental Protection Agency because it contained the unwelcome conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health and therefore need to be regulated. The EPA finding was a response “to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment,” the New York Times reported last Wednesday.

Faced with the proverbial inconvenient truth, the White House not only refused to open the e-mail, they ordered Jason Burnett, the EPA official who sent the document, to “recall it,” according to the Washington Post.

Burnett, who has, not coincidentally, since resigned, told the Post:

I’d accuse the administration of foot-dragging, but that implies some kind of forward movement, however glacial (now, there’s a word that’s headed for extinction, thanks to climate change.) The dinosaurs who’ve been dictating our energy policy in this country are as encased in asphalt as the fossils at the La Brea Tarpits, and just as unlikely to budge.

Jon Stewart highlighted this new low point from the Petro-Pusher-In-Chief on the Daily Show last Wednesday with a segment called “Be Patient—This Gets Amazing:”

The new version of the EPA ruling, according to the Times, “offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.”

Well, sure, nobody likes to get bad news. But what you have to understand about this bizarre episode is that the e-mail actually contained some good news that the Bush Administration desperately wants to squelch--specifically, the finding “that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years,” as the Times noted. Why? Because the Carbon Cartel can’t afford to sanction anything that might wean us off our dependency on Big Oil.

Of course, the Big Three fought higher fuel efficiency standards, too, on the grounds that it would be bad for business. Now that GM’s stock has plunged to a 53-year low, you’ve gotta wonder how much worse could business be? Why didn’t the U.S. auto industry anticipate the higher gas prices that have made American cars a bad buy for cash-strapped consumers?

Maybe they were referring to the same deliriously rosy projections that the Transportation Department relied on when it made its own fuel-economy proposals, which, as the Times reported, were “based on the assumption that gasoline would range from $2.26 per gallon in 2016 to $2.51 per gallon in 2030…”

Could these guys bury their heads any deeper in the tar sands? The price of oil may rise and fall, but the era of cheap oil is GONE FOREVER, as Paul Krugman points out in his Friday column, and nothing’s gonna bring it back.

The stock market tanked Thursday in the wake of predictions that the cost of oil could rise to $150-$170 a barrel, and a gallon of gas could cost $7 by the year 2010. As Krugman notes, a lot of folks are clinging to the notion that higher gas prices are a temporary phenomenon fueled by speculation. Others insist that the solution lies in offshore drilling.

But Ted Koppel put it all in perspective on the Daily Show Thursday night, where he dropped by to plug his upcoming four-part series on China for the Discovery Channel, The People’s Republic of Capitalism. As he told Jon Stewart:

Oil is just another raw material like copper or lumber, whose prices have also jumped as more folks in China and India ascend to the ranks of the newly minted middle class. Increased demand for oil is simply going to outstrip the supply, regardless of whether we drill offshore or in Alaska.

If America truly is, as Sean Hannity is fond of saying, “the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth,” we can hardly blame China for wanting to live like us. Unfortunately, in order for us to maintain the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed, Americans—who make up just four percent of the planet’s population—use about 25% of the world’s resources. For the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth, we sure suck at math.

Oh well, we can always borrow a page from the White House playbook for how to handle reality when it comes knocking: don’t open the door. Just pretend you’re not home. Gotta send those facts with their liberal bias packing.

Did Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration, literally lose his head on Tuesday? Chinese officials declined to say what method of death was deemed fitting for Xiaoyu’s execution, but in any case, he’s dead now. His crime? Taking some $823,000 in bribes to approve drugs that proved unsafe and killed at least 10 people.

“Corruption in the food and drug authority has brought shame to the nation,” Yan Jiangying, deputy policy director of the State Food and Drug Administration, told the NY Times. “What we will have to learn from the experience is to improve our work and emphasize public safety.”

All these horror stories about China’s lethally lax standards and toxic products (antifreeze-flavored toothpaste is just the latest) have given our Asian rival a big black eye, but in some departments, China’s actually more progressive than we are.

While Lou Dobbs has compulsory conniptions over the impending arrival of cheap Chinese cars to our shores, we can’t sell American cars to the Chinese because the Ailing American Automakers Formerly Known As The Big Three can’t meet China’s fuel efficiency standards.

And Home Depot sells made-in-China sheets of plywood that are so full of formaldehyde they’re too toxic even for the Chinese, who are nonetheless willing to produce this product just for the U.S. market.

Our stores are so dominated by made-in-China goods that trying to live for a whole year without buying anything made in China is the latest literary stunt. But China’s paying a terrible price for its unregulated manufacturing, with air and waterways so degraded that “about 460,000 people die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air and drinking dirty water,” according to a preliminary report from the World Bank. The Financial Times claims that Chinese authorities are asking the World Bank to sit on these shocking figures out of fear their revelation would spark a riot.

But Chinese officials needed to manufacture some good pr, get a “message: we care” kinda vibe going, if you will, and what better way to do that than to demonstrate zero tolerance for government officials who accept money from corporations to look the other way and approve unsafe products?

May I make an immodest proposal and suggest that we try this tactic in the U.S.? After all, we’ve had a spate of deaths linked to drugs the FDA approved as a favor to Big Pharma despite evidence that the drugs in question had serious and even fatal side effects. And lobbyists routinely bribe our politicians to ignore legislation such as the Country of Origin Labeling Laws, which would tell us where our food comes from, because the corporations that manufacture our food are afraid that informed consumers might pass up their products if they’re forced to bear those three little loaded words, “Made in China.”
Since so many Americans supposedly support the death penalty, I hardly think it’s un-American to suggest that we execute government officials who accept money in return for doing the bidding of Big Pharma or Big Food. The only problem with this scenario is that it might turn Capitol Hill into a ghost town.

Mississippi’s Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner, Lester Spell, has ordered Chinese catfish off store shelves all over Mississippi after samples tested positive for illegal antibiotics. The antibiotics, banned by the FDA, have been known to cause allergic reactions and nerve, muscle and heart problems. Health officials in Arkansas and Louisiana are awaiting the outcome of tests on samples of imported seafood sent to the FDA, which has yet to issue a recall.

A ban on Chinese catfish would surely be a boon to American catfish farmers, who’ve been struggling to stay afloat in a flood of competition from Asian aquaculture. Imports of Chinese catfish reportedly doubled in the U.S. last year, making life harder than ever for U.S. catfish farmers in the already down-at-the-mouth south.

This morning, a group of southern Senators, led by Republicans Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, tacked an amendment onto yesterday’s prescription drug safety bill that authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to inspect seafood for antibiotics and other contaminants already banned by the FDA. Their concern for the health of their constituents, including, presumably, the sizable southern seafood industry, is heartening.

As Louisiana’s Daily Advertiser notes, “Beyond the antibiotic threat, Asian catfish are often raised in "latrine ponds" - the Chinese system of channeling human and other waste into ponds used to raise fish.”

By contrast, American fish farmers, such as the farmers’ cooperative Delta Pride, raise catfish in ponds in the Mississipi Delta that “produce clean, white-fleshed fish with little collateral damage to the surrounding environment, “ as Jay Weinstein notes in The Ethical Gourmet, the book I always turn to when I have questions about aquaculture.

Weinstein adds that domestic catfish logs far fewer food miles than its Asian competitors, and “also supports an ecologically sound food production system in our own country, improving living standards in a traditionally poor region.”

Matt makes a killer cornmeal-crusted catfish po-boy, and you can bet he wouldn’t dream of buying catfish from Asia. American catfish is still pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of things. Of course, Chinese catfish is even cheaper, if you don’t count the consequences of relying on illegal antibiotics and toxin-filled aquafarms. Mississippi’s done the math, and it adds up to this: when it comes to catfish, buy American.

Yum Brands, proud parent of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, has had a spell of bad yuck recently. First came the Taco Bell E. coli episode. Then came the vermin-filled video that quickly went viral, starring the rat pack who turned a West Village Taco Bell into their very own after hours supper club.

Nothing slows fast food sales faster than viruses and varmints, and, sure enough, Yum Brands announced Wednesday that its overall U.S. operating profits fell 11% in the first quarter.

Yum Brand shares promptly soared to a record high on the New York Stock Exchange.

It’s not that Wall Street’s bullish on bacteria, or unperturbed by pests. Strong sales are what floats investors’ boats, and Yum Brand’s got ‘em—in China.

Sales have been terrific in the land where formica’s a food additive, more than offsetting the decline in U.S. earnings.

We learned last week that Chinese food producers routinely add melamine, a coal-derived chemical, to a wide variety of grain-based food products. The practice is widespread and appears to have been going on for more than fifteen years, according to an account in the China Post:

Call it a culinary culture clash. We say “contaminant,” they say “revenue enhancing additive.”

No wonder Yum Brands finds plenty of takers for its take-out in China. Apparently, if you taint it, they’ll say “yum.”

When we welded our wagon to China’s economic engine, did we sign on to an environmental train wreck?

I’m glad the Chinese government’s hired clean tech trailblazer William McDonough’s design firm to create a green blueprint for six new cities and a village--who better to help China bind its ever-widening carbon footprint than McDonough, the internationally influential green architect and designer who turned Ford’s River Rouge factory green and helped Nike create a biodegradable sneaker?

But China may have misinterpreted his “Waste = Food” concept. I’m pretty sure McDonough doesn’t advocate putting pulverized scraps of plastic in pet food, or making soy sauce out of human hair (not to mention lard out of sewage.)

The premise of McDonough’s environmental manifesto, Cradle to Cradle, co-written with Michael Braungart, a former Greenpeace activist turned sustainability scholar, is that every product we make should be non-toxic and biodegradable, or else endlessly recyclable. It’s a utopian vision for a garbage-and-pollution-free future.

Maybe McDonough’s tilting at wind turbines, but his ground breaking, earth saving designs have been hailed by environmental activists and not-so-crunchy corporatists alike. Steven Spielberg reportedly wants to do a documentary about McDonough’s heroic eco-endeavors.

And Chinese officials recognize the need to tackle the problems their overheated economy poses for the planet. In fact, while we fume about all the greenhouse gases China’s spewing, they may actually leave us in the dust when it comes to cutting carbon emissions.

But while the Chinese government may be leaning green, its business sector has been caught red-handed pumping up its profits by dumping chemicals into our food supply. The confirmation that melamine has been routinely added to animal feed to cut costs makes you wonder what else they might be putting in the food they’re shipping to our shores.

The other day we asked our friend Sue, who’s been to China several times, whether she would trust Chinese produce that’s labeled organic. “No way!” was her emphatic response.

And yet, more and more of the organic food we buy in the U.S. is coming from China. Supposedly, our food manufacturers have to rely on imports because American farmers simply can’t grow enough organic produce to meet the ever-growing demand.

I accepted this notion at face value until my friend and fellow NYC Food Systems Network colleague Christina Grace, a farmers’ market maven, pointed out that it really comes down to the fact that Big Food would rather cut corners and buy cheap from China than support America’s small family farms.

After all, it’s a terrific boon to the corporate bottom line to be able to do business with suppliers who can manufacture their products without the added expense of such niceties as worker safety or environmental protection.

Of course, here at home, the agencies entrusted to protect us aren’t doing such a bang-up job of things, either. It doesn’t help that the FDA’s budget keeps shrinking even as food imports rise. Welcome to Small Government, a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Food.

The USDA’s going to compensate the pork producers for the millions of dollars they’ll lose when they euthanize those 6,000 melamine-tainted hogs. Bereaved pet owners, on the other hand, will get nothing.

So taxpayers get stuck with the bill for Big Ag’s habit of salvaging substandard pet food and feeding it to the pigs. The dead dogs and cats? Just collateral damage. You know, like all those Iraqi civilians.

First, the dogs and cats got kidney failure. Now, some 6,000 hogs in seven states will have to be euthanized after consuming tainted feed. Chickens may have eaten melamine-contaminated food, too.

Oh, and then there’s the three hundred or so hogs that have already been slaughtered and shipped off to market. Suddenly bringing home the bacon sounds slightly sinister.

The FDA expressed confidence a few weeks ago that the tainted wheat gluten hadn’t entered the human food chain, but they acknowledge now that plastic-polluted pork may indeed have entered our food supply.

Still puzzling over how a chemical used to make plastic found its way into the food chain? The evidence suggests not a random or accidental contamination, but rather a systemic and deliberate reliance on melamine, which is high in nitrogen, to artificially elevate the protein content of wheat gluten, rice protein, and other grain-based products used in animal feed as well as human food products.

Melamine is only mildly toxic, but experts have detected a second contaminant in the tainted pet food called cyanuric acid, which, when combined with melamine, appears to prompt the formation of crystals in urine, which in turn can cause kidney failure.

Cyanuric acid has all kinds of useful applications, apparently; it’s good for stabilizing the water in outdoor swimming pools and hot tubs, as well as boosting the protein content in food.

As Kitty Pilgrim reported Thursday on Lou Dobbs Tonight:

Making lard from sewage? Suddenly, the Yes Men’s “reBurger” satire seems more prescience than parody.

Can California garlic growers find a level playing field in a flat world flooded with cheap Chinese garlic?

America’s largest garlic grower, Christopher Ranch, had 1,200 acres of garlic growing a decade ago. Now, the California company grows less than 300 acres of garlic, thanks to competition from China.

This year, for the first time ever, the amount of garlic Americans buy from China will exceed California’s total garlic production. And no wonder; a 30-pound box of Chinese garlic wholesales for around $15, versus $28 for California garlic.

Mike Mantelli, Christopher Ranch’s general manager, told the NY Times “The Chinese garlic totally caught us off-guard and knocked us down.”

Our government spends over $15 billion annually to subsidize the five commodity crops favored by agribusiness: corn, cotton, rice, wheat, and soybeans. Garlic farmers, along with growers of lettuce, strawberries, broccoli, and other so-called “specialty crops,” have never received any such handouts.

And they’ve never had to ask, either. These farmers have managed to grow $52.2 billion worth of crops on just 11 million acres, according to the NY Times. Compare that to the commodities growers, who required 215 million acres—and billions in subsidies—to generate an expected $52 billion in revenues this year.

But American produce farmers fear they’ll be washed up by the red tide of Asian exports. So California’s garlic growers have teamed up with about 75 growers of everything from nuts to flowers to lobby for changes to the federal farm bill. They’re asking not for subsidies, per se, but rather for money to help them market their products, and to support research and conservation.

Agriculture secretary Mike Johanns seems receptive to the produce growers’ lobby, which submitted a bill in September asking for more than $1 billion to help them compete domestically and abroad. It doesn’t hurt that the farmers seeking help come from politically critical states such as California, Arizona, and Florida.

Small scale farmers have a greater chance to change our nation’s agricultural agenda than they have in ages, thanks to Democrats like Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, the next chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Harkin authored the Conservation Security Program in the 2002 Farm Bill, which supported better stewardship of our farmland but was chronically underfunded. He also founded the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable program, which provides free fresh fruit and vegetable snacks to students in eight states. We can look forward to seeing the expansion of such progressive policies with Harkin at the helm.

So family farmers have more friends in high places, now, but the forces of globalization are surely more powerful than America’s agricultural policy makers. And agribusiness may balk at having smaller farmers get a slice of the subsidy pie. Tom Philpott of Grist summed up the current state of affairs a couple of weeks ago in a post entitled “Celebrate, but Organize:”

You can start by supporting your local garlic farmer, if you’re lucky enough to have one. We’re blessed with the very best, the legendary Keith Stewart, whose garlic is so good it’s out of this world, according to the blurb from the NY Times on the back of Keith’s marvelous memoir, It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: “Keith’s Farm grows garlic from another planet compared with the stuff in supermarkets.”

Garlic season’s nearly over in our region, so we stocked up last Saturday at Keith’s stall in Union Square. How long will we be able to hoard ten heads of garlic when we can’t help adding two or three or four cloves to every dish we make? What will we do when we run out? I guess we’ll have to get our garlic from California, because the price of garlic from China is just too high.

Thanks to Tom Friedman’s fearless forays into the backwaters of Bangalore and Beijing, we know that the world is flat. It may have been a well-rounded place when Columbus set sail, but what we’ve got now are boatloads of cheap produce from Asia and South America flooding the western world’s markets.

Pears from Chile and tomatoes from China have forced French farmers to throw in the trowel in droves. The NY Times provides a sobering snapshot of a French farming town in the south of France, Châteaurenard, where apple orchards and grapevines have been supplanted by pre-fab warehouses, auto-parts dealers and a poultry processing plant.

The number of farms in France has plummeted to 590,000, “one-fourth the number 50 years ago. A third of the French earned their living by farming then; today less than 5 percent do,” according to the article. A way of life is vanishing because our globalized food chain has pulverized French farmers’ profits.

Take the local tomato canning factory in Châteaurenard; it’s now owned by a Chinese company that ships tons of tomato paste from China to can in France.

“I used to grow tomatoes, wonderful tomatoes,” one French farmer told the Times. “But price is everything. The Chinese don’t want to pay. So I stopped.”

French youth, understandably, see no future in farming. “You work like a beast on the farm, and there’s no real sense of dignity,” according to Laurent Ioss, the head of the town’s youth social services program. The word “peasant” has become a synonym for “idiot,” Ioss says.

Is it provincial to think that farmers in Provence should be able to make a profit?