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During the past couple of weeks there has been a massive pet food recall in North America. The news says over 9,000 cats and dogs have died due to wheat gluten containing melamine, which causes kidney failure. The FDA reported that 15 animals had died – they are the ones they tested.
Agricultural labs in Canada and the USA say the pet food is contaminated with a rat poison called Aminopterin.
Here’s what I don’t understand:
With all this technology why do they still have to test this tainted food on animals?
Why are two reputable testers coming up with completely different answers?
The wheat gluten was imported from China – which seems odd to me as North America is one of the worlds largest producers of wheat.
Now they are saying there will be stricter tests for imported ingredients hmmmm let’s just hope it hasn’t contaminated any human food……makes me very sad to think of all those poor animals and their owners suffering and I wonder when the powers that be actually knew about this and how long before they made it public.
Here is one answer:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration blocked imports of wheat gluten from a Chinese company Monday. The agency identified the company as the source of the tainted wheat gluten that caused a massive pet-food recall last week. Given how much wheat is produced by American farmers, why do we need to import wheat gluten?
Because it’s cheaper than buying domestic gluten. We may be the world’s largest exporter of wheat, shipping 1 billion bushels to other countries in last year’s growing season. Yet we export relatively little wheat gluten. To extract the gluten from wheat, you have to separate it from the starch, by repeatedly washing and kneading wheat flour. But only four U.S. companies go through this process; last year, they produced roughly 100 million pounds of wheat gluten, about 20 percent of the domestic demand.
Almost two-thirds of the more than 400 million pounds we imported came from European Union countries. That’s because the Europeans use wheat starch to make sweeteners, which leaves them with a lot of extra gluten. The United States, on the other hand, relies on corn for sweeteners—thus the high-fructose corn syrup in our sodas. Add in Europe’s wheat subsidies, and EU nations can sell their wheat gluten for a low price. U.S. wheat-gluten-makers say EU prices are sometimes below American production costs.
slate .com
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