There’s
an excellent op-ed
in today’s New York Times by a professor from Texas State University. The industrial
chemical melamine has been at the center of several food safety scandals
involving Chinese products, ranging from animal feed to milk and eggs. This
op-ed, however, shows how melamine presence could be a severe problem for American-made
products already, due to lax regulations of animal feed and fertilizer, used to
grow domestic goods. First, the column talks about problems with melamine
affecting American kids:
Given the pervasiveness of
melamine, it’s always possible that trace elements will end up in food. The
F.D.A. thus sets the legal limit for melamine in food at 2.5 parts per million.
This amount is indeed minuscule, a couple of sand grains in an expanse of
desert that pose no real threat to public health. Moreover, the 2.5 p.p.m.
figure is calculated for a person weighing 132 pounds — a cautious benchmark
given that the average adult weighs 150 to 180 pounds.
But these figures obscure
more than they reveal. First, while adults eat about one-fortieth of their
weight every day, toddlers consume closer to one-tenth. Although scientists haven’t
measured the differential impact of melamine on infants versus adults, it’s
likely that this intensified ratio would at least double (if not quadruple) the
impact of legal levels of melamine on toddlers.
This doubled exposure might
not land a child in the hospital, but it could certainly contribute to the
long-term kidney and liver problems that we know are caused by chronic exposure
to melamine.
A
good point, and something that we should be more concerned about, given what we’ve
seen in China. Another alarming note:
Fertilizer companies
commonly add melamine to their products because it helps control the rate at
which nitrogen seeps into soil, thereby allowing the farmer to get more
nutrient bang for the fertilizer buck. But the government doesn’t regulate how
much melamine is applied to the soil. This melamine accumulates as salt
crystals in the ground, tainting the soil through which American food sucks up
American nutrients.
And,
besides simple produce, it turns out American consumers may be ingesting
melamine from wheat gluten made in China, which is used with a host of domestic
products:
More ominous, the United
States imports most of its wheat gluten. Last year, for instance, the F.D.A.
reported that millions of Americans had eaten chicken fattened on feed with
melamine-tainted gluten imported from China. Around the same time, Tyson Foods
slaughtered and processed hogs that had eaten melamine-contaminated feed. The
government decided not to recall the meat.
There’s
many other good points in this op-ed, which is clearly worth reading. But it’s
sad that our food industry practices have grown and expanded so quickly that
the government either didn’t want to or doesn’t have the means to track what’s
really going into our diets.
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Dylan Blaylock
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