Herdshares, Melamine and the Crazed Priorites of the 'Regulators'

I wonder what sort of regulatory model we have arrived at that finds it commendable to break up small groups of people wanting to raise and consume a natural product with no harmful properties and yet ignores a massive, fraudulent, intentional contamination of food with industrial toxins.

By Jack Kittredge / The Rag Blog / January 2, 2009

[Jack Kittredge is a former political activist and SDS member who is now an organic farmer in Massachussetts. A version of this article appeared in the newsletter of the Massachussetts Chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA). This is an excellent piece, pointing to the serious dangers of melamine and the skewed priorities of the FDA and other “regulators,” and we think it deserves a wider audience.]

Some friends involved with the Northeast Organic Farming Association have recently been finding and passing along fascinating (if somewhat chilling) news about developments on the industrial and local food fronts.

Frank Albani forwarded a 13-page document that is the first clear explanation I have seen on melamine. Melamine is the white powder derived from petroleum used in the production of plastic goods. It has nearly the same chemical structure as the milk protein casseinate, but with extra nitrogen ions. It has been added to milk and other foods as a very cheap way to boost the apparent protein content of the food.

If ingested, however, the extra nitrogen ions prevent the compound from being absorbed or excreted by the kidneys. It eventually forms kidney stones that block the tubes that cleanse and excrete urine. This leads to intense pain, swelling, bleeding and eventual death. Emergency surgery can remove the stones, but by then there is often irreversible kidney damage and life-long dialysis, or regular blood-washing hooked up to a machine in a hospital, is necessary.

In 2007 over 50,000 United States cats and dogs died suddenly and investigators found that pet food from China contained high levels of melamine. Starting in 2008 an increase in the number of infant kidney stone cases in China was reported. In August of 2008, the Chinese milk powder Sanlu tested positive for melamine. In September, pressured by New Zealand, China tested a broad line of milk-based food products, many of which showed melamine content. New Zealand, Australia and most EU nations issued recalls and public warnings. The US, however, remained silent.

Billions of dollars worth of milk-based Halloween and holiday candy continue to pour out of China to our shores. Some of the familiar brand names offering products containing dairy ingredients from China include: Kraft, M&M, Nabisco, Nestle, and Snickers.

So much for news on the industrial food front. On to the local angle.

Steve and Barbara Smith operate Meadowsweet Dairy in the Finger Lakes region of New York and process raw milk from their cows into products like yogurt, butter and cream for the 120 shareholding families in their herdshare. (In case you haven’t heard of herdshares, they are legal arrangements whereby consumers purchase a share of a herd of cows and hire a farmer to milk the cows and provide the consumer with the milk—or milk products—from the cow he or she already owns. The idea takes advantage of the almost universal exemption for owners of cows to legally consume their cow’s unpasteurized milk products.)

I interviewed the Smiths for the “Families and Farming” issue of The Natural Farmer in 2001 and found them to be warm and wonderful NOFA farmers and parents, and their lemon kefir simply delicious!

Despite no cases of health or other problems with Meadowsweet Dairy, however, New York’s Department of Agriculture and Markets has been trying to shut them down. In the Empire State, raw milk permits allow the farm to sell just unprocessed raw milk -- no cream, butter, yogurt, or other “processed” raw milk products. They apparently see the herdshare as a ruse and an attempt to sell raw milk products outside the law.

Jill Ebbott alerted me and several others to the excellent blogs by David Gumbert regarding federal and state efforts to shut down raw milk dairies, including the Smiths’. Most upsetting when I read these was the news that a New York state court has now ruled against the Smiths, Judge John C. Egan, Jr. saying that herdshares give no exemption from regulation. He ruled that the shareholders were consumers “based on the plain meaning of the word” and that the state had the power to search the dairy, open and seize containers and products, and regulate its operations.

The state is now aggressively following up on this victory by going against other local farmers. In a late November press release the Department of Ag and Markets says their inspectors are organizing squads “dedicated to administering and enforcing the State’s food safety laws and regulations to protect the public health…”

I sometimes wonder what sort of regulatory model we have arrived at in this country that finds it commendable to break up small groups of people wanting to raise and consume a natural product with no harmful properties and which they believe is healthful for their families, and yet ignores a massive, fraudulent, intentional contamination of food with industrial toxins.

I don’t want to believe that there is a deeper villain here. Could it simply be easier to go after the Smiths and the local families they serve than to pick a fight with large corporate food companies that have lawyers and PR departments and friends in high places? Could it be that the FDA is just acting out the anti-regulatory beliefs of the Republicans while the NY zealots are responding to a liberal, Democratic and big government agenda?

Or are some of my friends right -- those who believe that our public health enforcers’ fetish for sanitizing is a conscious effort to squeeze out the small farmer and food artisan, leaving only one food system, the industrial, global one. Then, with a population half sick and with no alternatives to regain natural good health, the pharmaceutical and food conglomerates will have us where they want us.

As Gumpert concludes, we have an important fight on our hands -- for the sake of our health and our family’s health, we need to keep small farmers and food producers alive and thriving. And as Michael Pollan suggests, we need to stop buying any product of the food industry that needs to have a label; it is no longer a food. If enough of that happens then we can have our sustenance from men and women who know us, want our trade, and are willing to hold to high standards to deserve it.

Also see The Real Melamine Story: The FDA Isn't Protecting Us by James E. McWilliams / The Rag Blog / Dec. 29, 2008

Thanks to Allen Young / The Rag Blog

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The Real Melamine Story : The FDA Isn't Protecting Us

Dr. Stephen Sundlof says traces of melanine in baby food "perfectly fine." Photo by Paul J. Richards / AFP / Getty Images.

Conscientious consumers who have followed the melamine story are appropriately outraged. Some have written off the FDA as hopelessly corrupt and proposed that we all protect ourselves by eating locally grown food. But self-imposed culinary isolationism isn't going to solve this problem.

By James E. McWilliams / December 29, 2008

It's been more than a year and a half since the Chinese melamine story first landed in the U.S. press, but the ripple effects continue to spread. Three months ago, the contaminant showed up in baby formula. (The earlier scare was limited to pet food.) In the last couple of weeks, we've learned that China is now investigating more than two dozen cases of animal feed contaminated with melamine, and its health officials have identified 17 other illegal food additives that demand scrutiny—including boric acid and Sudan Red dye.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has now resorted to random spot checks of hot dogs, chicken nuggets, frozen pizzas, and other foods processed with milk powder, and scientific organizations are discussing better ways to detect melamine in the global food supply. From the looks of it, this sprawling scandal will be with us for some time.

The deepening severity of the problem stands in sharp contrast to the continued insouciance of the Food and Drug Administration. When Canada voiced concern over milk-powder imports from the United States in late September, an FDA spokeswoman gave a dismissive response: "The public health crisis is in China." When, over the next several weeks, the administration finally discovered melamine in baby formula sold here in the United States, its first order of business was to set up a conference call to warn the companies that produce 90 percent of the world's milk powder—Abbott Labs, Mead Johnson, and Nestlé. But when it came to the general public, the FDA remained silent—at least until the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the test results and published the news in late November. The Department of Agriculture declared (PDF) that it will follow the lead of the FDA on the melamine issue, which is why it's only just now begun to take action.

Conscientious consumers who have followed the melamine story are appropriately outraged. Some have written off the FDA as hopelessly corrupt and proposed that we all protect ourselves by eating locally grown food. But self-imposed culinary isolationism isn't going to solve this problem. Once milk power enters the nation's commercial bloodstream, it's difficult to avoid. The powder appears in a dizzying array of products—caramelized candies, whey protein supplements, power bars, powdered drinks, nondairy creamers, and baking mixes, among others. We don't have to persuade every American to avoid every one of these products. Instead, let's fix some of the obvious flaws with the FDA so the agency can start doing what it's supposed to do.

Over the course of the scandal, the government made three major mistakes. All of these have become part of the FDA's standard operating procedure, and each could be remedied with proper legislative action. The first involves the arbitrary adjustment of allowable levels of a contaminant. On Nov. 26, the agency confessed on its Web site to being "currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns." A day later, just after the milk-powder news hit CNN, Dr. Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's Center for Food Safety, described the baby formula results as "in the trace range, and from a public health or infant health perspective, we consider those to be perfectly fine." (The administration made a similarly arbitrary decision a few weeks ago concerning mercury levels in seafood.) Melamine is an adulterant. How can it go from being unsafe one day to being "perfectly fine" the next? If the FDA cannot answer this question—that is, if it has no scientific evidence to justify the flip-flop—the change should not be legally permissible.

The second mistake is to use the risk of acute poisoning as a reference for setting contaminant standards. There is a long tradition of business-friendly regulatory agencies avoiding reference to studies of chronic exposure when setting legal trace limits. The Department of Agriculture, for example, ignored long-term effects when it set fruit-residue limits for arsenic-based insecticides in the 1930s. The situation with melamine has been no different. Legal limits in food other than infant formula sit at 2.5 parts per million, a rate that is by most accounts relatively safe with respect to acute toxicity. As a toxicologist at the Minnesota Department of Public Health recently told me, however, there's not a single study out there on the impact of long-term, low-dose exposure to melamine. Meanwhile, we have seen a mysterious but dramatic increase in kidney stones among children and young adults. Medical doctors are largely confused about the underlying cause and more often than not blame obesity. But melamine is known to cause kidney problems like these, and long-term exposure could be responsible for the larger trend. In that case, the FDA would be forced to reduce allowable trace amounts to zero—which is exactly where they should be until studies of chronic exposure suggest otherwise.

A third mistake has to do with the FDA's tendency to regulate finished products at the expense of raw materials. By choosing to monitor the safety of imported food items instead of the ingredients that go into them, the FDA not only ignores the intricate nature of global food production but opens the door for Chinese wheat gluten, rice gluten, and milk powder to enter the U.S. food supply without the benefit of stringent regulation. To make matters worse, our so-called "country of origin" labeling laws don't apply to individual ingredients in packaged food products. It might seem unwieldy to require a separate label for each foreign ingredient in a can of soup, but the inconvenience would force the FDA to protect our food supply at its most vulnerable points.

These are grave problems, but there's an achievable regulatory solution for each of them. If the FDA were required by law to provide scientific evidence when it changes adulterant standards and to rely on studies of both acute and chronic toxicity when it set those standards, it would be far more difficult for the bureaucrats to coddle corporate concerns. Add to that a requirement for country-of-origin labeling for all imported foodstuffs, and we're more likely to escape major health scares like this in the future. Short of becoming a nation of locavores in a globalized world, that may be the best we can do.

[James E. McWilliams is the author of American Pests: Our Losing War on Insects From Colonial Times to DDT and an associate professor of history at Texas State University.]

Source / Slate

The Rag Blog

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