Marion Nestle: Melamine taint - old problem has new urgency

A woman looks at the milk products with a notice board reading "Free of Melamine, feel safe to take" on display at a supermarket in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, on Oct. 9, 2008. A woman looks at the milk products with a notice board reading "Free of Melamine, feel safe to take" on display at a supermarket in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, on Oct. 9, 2008. Photo: AP Photo: AP Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Marion Nestle: Melamine taint - old problem has new urgency 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Editor's note: Nationally recognized nutrition expert Marion Nestle answers readers' questions in Food Matters, written exclusively for The Chronicle. E-mail your questions to food@sfchronicle .com, with "Marion Nestle" in the subject line.

Q:Every day we hear about more foods from China with melamine. First it was infant formula, now it's candy in New Zealand, croissants in Japan, M&M's in South Korea, and coffee drinks in the United States. Explain, please.

A: You may be puzzled, but I am appalled that melamine waste from Chinese plastic dinnerware is in so many foods, particularly infant formula. China admits to 54,000 cases, 14,000 hospitalizations and four deaths from kidney stones among infants fed formula laced with melamine. These numbers are undoubtedly underestimates.

Melamine is in milk powder for only one reason: greed. You can dilute milk and cover up the dilution by adding melamine. The test for protein in foods looks for nitrogen. Melamine is 67 percent nitrogen (the rest is carbon and hydrogen). Nitrogen is used to make protein and shows up as protein on tests. You can get away with substituting melamine for protein unless food safety officials are checking for it. Clearly, they were not.

They should have been. Milk adulteration has a long history and melamine has been fraudulently added to animal feed for at least 40 years. Most people never heard of melamine until last year's pet food recall of 60 million cans and pouches. These contained an ingredient that caused kidney disease in cats and dogs. That ingredient turned out to be wheat flour laced with melamine. Some Chinese suppliers sold that adulterant in the guise of wheat and rice glutens.

In researching my latest book, "Pet Food Politics," I traced the history of melamine adulteration back to the 1960s when veterinarians in South Africa tried to use the chemical as a source of nitrogen for sheep. They thought that bacteria in the rumens of sheep could convert melamine nitrogen to body proteins. They were wrong. Melamine formed kidney crystals and killed the sheep.

That finding did not stop unscrupulous producers from adding melamine to animal feed. This practice was so common in the 1970s that Italian scientists invented a test to look for "melammina" in fish feed. They found melamine in nearly 60 percent of the tested samples.

As demonstrated by scientists at UC Davis, melamine itself is not particularly toxic to cats. But when it is mixed with one of its by-products, cyanuric acid, it forms crystals in kidneys at very low doses. It does so in infants, too.

Ideal adulterant

Melamine is a perfect adulterant. It is cheap and hard to detect. Remember Melmac dishes? These were so popular in the 1950s that you can still buy them on eBay. Most melamine dinnerware is now made in China. The process involves heat and formaldehyde and yields wastewater heavy with melamine and its by-products. To recycle the water, these chemicals must be removed. The resulting "scrap" is produced in prodigious amounts and is there for the taking.

My guess is that unscrupulous Chinese producers have been adulterating foods with melamine for years, but the booming dairy industry provides a new opportunity. Milk is expensive. You can buy melamine scrap for practically nothing, substitute it for the proteins in foods - wheat gluten in pet food and milk in infant formulas - and sell these foods at the price of the real thing. That substitution is unlikely to be detected - unless you add so much melamine that pets or infants get sick.

Let's not, however, get too xenophobic about China. What's happening there today is exactly like what happened in the United States during those heady late 19th century years of unregulated rapid industrialization and unbridled capitalism. Checks on rampant food adulteration only became possible after Upton Sinclair's book, "The Jungle," induced Congress to pass food and drug laws in 1906.

Taking action

The remedy is clear. Countries need to clean up their food safety programs. The challenge facing China is that 80 percent of its food is produced by small countryside operations. It must enact and enforce food safety regulations that apply to that system.

We need to do everything we can to expedite such regulations. On our side, this means no-nonsense inspections, import refusals and trade agreements with tight safety provisions.

It also means urging Congress to give the Food and Drug Administration resources adequate to do this job or, as some forward-thinking members have suggested, create a new food safety agency with the authority and resources to oversee the food supply from farm to table.

While waiting for all this to happen, we have some choices. For the moment, it's best to just say no to imported foods and ingredients supposedly made with milk or soy powder, unless they are certified free of melamine and other toxic contaminants. But for this, it helps to know where foods and ingredients come from.

Ask before you buy

As of September, Congress requires country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for many foods. Unfortunately, COOL has loopholes entire container ships could sail through. If you can't find or don't believe the origin of the foods you buy, ask. Let the stores, product manufacturers and your congressional representatives know that you care about where your food comes from. Tell them that you consider origin labels essential for protecting your family against unsafe food.

I gave "Pet Food Politics" the subtitle "The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine" for good reason. Untold numbers of cats and dogs died last year from melamine poisoning. Their deaths should have warned governments to check for melamine in other foods and to enact and enforce more effective food safety regulations. We - and the Chinese - deserve better food safety oversight. In this era of food globalization, all countries need safety regulations more than ever.