China gets into our food again?

This letter was in our morning paper.....maybe someone in the business might enlighten us as to the validity of the information.


Letters to the Editor: Dec. 3, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008


What are we eating?

Per Lou Dobbs on CNN last week, China's latest food scandal, milk laced with melamine, has killed at least four infants and sickened tens of thousands of babies in China. Melamine is an industrial waste that many Chinese food processors scoop up and use as a filler. Due to melamine's high nitrogen content, it can fool testing and pass as a protein. The result is kidney damage.

We in America need to investigate the origin of our food products, because, yes, Chinese ingredients (including milk products) are on the shelves of area grocery stores offered by Nestle, Cadbury, and Mars Inc., in products such as Oreos, Snickers and M&Ms.

After 15 minutes of trying to dodge the question, a Kraft Foods representative reluctantly admitted to me that every ingredient used in Kraft products is imported from China, with the exception of wheat. That cured me of Kraft. (Oscar Mayer, Maxwell House and Capri Sun are Kraft subsidiaries, by the way.) The only apple juice that appears to be a product of the U.S. is Martinelli's - the rest is from China. Does the U.S. not have enough apples? Albertsons recently recalled its ginger (from China) due to melamine content. Remember melamine-tainted dog food and the melamine-tainted blood-thinning drug Heparin? Again, from China.

When expressing my concerns at supermarket staff, the frequent and dull response I hear is "Yuk, yuk, there's something wrong with everything." Not everything, but consistently products from China.

But it's not just melamine; it's also lead, and thankfully, the FDA has banned five different types of Chinese fish farmed in raw sewage. It's time to educate ourselves as to the sources of our food and medicine, and we need to demand better labeling. Remember, there is tremendous power in boycotting.

Kathleen Moffett

Redding

This letter was in our morning paper.....maybe someone in the business might enlighten us as to the validity of the information...The only apple juice that appears to be a product of the U.S. is Martinelli's - the rest is from China.

I don't know about the larger issue but the idea that there is only one brand of US apple juice is clearly someone who spends too much time in supermarkets!!

Karen, I'm not ITB but I'll take a crack at this. IMHO, there's just enough truth here that you might think this lady knows what she's talking about. Mostly, though, this is overblown. I suspect the reaction she got from both Kraft and the grocery store came when they realized she was nut case and just wanted to end the conversation. Not that we shouldn't be concerned about food safety in a globalized market but I don't think this level of hysteria is justified. See below for some more comments.

Per Lou Dobbs on CNN last week, China's latest food scandal, milk laced with melamine, has killed at least four infants and sickened tens of thousands of babies in China. Melamine is an industrial waste that many Chinese food processors scoop up and use as a filler. Due to melamine's high nitrogen content, it can fool testing and pass as a protein. The result is kidney damage.

True, in a sort of garbled way. Melamine isn't used as "filler" but, as I understand it, rather to spoof protein tests on otherwise substandard milk. The tests look for nitrogen and so melamine's high nitrogen content works. The mechanism for the kidney damage is more complex than just high nitrogen.

After 15 minutes of trying to dodge the question, a Kraft Foods representative reluctantly admitted to me that every ingredient used in Kraft products is imported from China, with the exception of wheat. That cured me of Kraft. (Oscar Mayer, Maxwell House and Capri Sun are Kraft subsidiaries, by the way.)

Extremely unlikely. Oscar Mayer - beef imports from China? I don't think so. Maxwell House coffee? China isn't noted for coffee growing. I seriously doubt "every ingredient" used by Kraft is imported from anywhere, let alone China.

The only apple juice that appears to be a product of the U.S. is Martinelli's - the rest is from China. Does the U.S. not have enough apples?

It turns out China does grow a lot of apples. Some quick Googling tells me that China grows 65% of the world's apples and that apple juice concentrate imports have been rising fast. It's a stretch to say that everything other than Martinelli's is from China, though - I read that 40% of our apple juice is from China. Of course, the trick is telling which is which since labeling usually doesn't say. There's no reason to worry about melamine in apple juice since nobody is going to test apple juice for protein content. Of course, that doesn't rule out other problems.

Albertsons recently recalled its ginger (from China) due to melamine content.

True - and false. There was a problem with Chinese ginger but it wasn't melamine (how would you add plastic resin to ginger and why would you do it?). The problem was pesticide contamination.

When expressing my concerns at supermarket staff, the frequent and dull response I hear is "Yuk, yuk, there's something wrong with everything."

This is the dealing-with-a-nut-case factor, I think.

Re apple juice safety and how much from China, the following link will answer a lot of those questions.
http://www.usapple.org/consumers/juice_safety.cfm

To me, the key segment of that article (as Mark noted) was the business about every ingredient used by Kraft coming from China. That really doesn't make much sense. That said, we are seeing more and more food products around the world that have detectable level of melamine in them, baby formula in the US being one example. The levels are a small fraction of what was found in the Chinese milk, and there's no indication that there's any harm caused to anyone at such low levels. (The milk in China that sickened and killed so many infants had extremely high levels of melamine in it.) It's likely that such trace levels are due to contamination from either sanitizing agents or from plastic components used in the production of the food products as these levels wouldn't do anything to increase the apparent protein levels. Part of the issue here is that no one has ever looked for melamine in food at low levels. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that its been in our food for decades and that at such levels, it passes through the body with no effect at all.

That's not to say that a lot of work isn't currently being done to get more info on the prevalence of melamine in the food supply, its potential health effects, and its sources because there is a huge amount of such research happening. It will just take a while to get it all figured out. In the meantime, if you want to limit potential exposure then you'd want to eat the way most of us here already do. Stay with local products, avoid highly processed foods, go with organic milk, grass-fed beef and pork, etc.

That said, we are seeing more and more food products around the world that have detectable level of melamine in them, baby formula in the US being one example.

The key word here is "detectable". Consider that the human palate can detect trichloroanisole (TCA, the chemical that produces the "corked wine" taste/smell) in concentrations as small as a few parts per trillion. Modern scientific analysis gear can similarly detect contaminants such as melamine at completely harmless levels of parts per billion.

It's one thing for an unscrupulous foodstuff producer to be actively adding melamine to a food product to boost nitrogen assays, as was done in China in the recent pet food and baby formula scandals there (both of which have resulted in illness and fatalities).

It's another thing for some of your food processing equipment to be made of or coated with melamine (its legitimate use is as a component in plastics), which happens to leave harmless parts-per-million or parts-per-billion traces in the food. This appears to be what happened in the case of the infant formula found to "contain melamine" in the USA.

Relative to our standards for food quality, there's no question that China is still in the 19th century, prior to the passage of the US Pure Food and Drug Act. We need to be very vigilant about anything coming from China until it gets its act together. But we also need to avoid unwarranted alarmism and paranoia.

-Paul W.

Exactly, Paul. I haven't seen solid numbers yet, but from what I've heard the Chinese milk had melamine levels in the hundreds or thousands of parts per million. I believe the levels in the infant formula here were in the 200 part per billion range. That's a pretty big difference. It will be interesting to see what other food products contain melamine at similar levels.