something to chew upon

he amount of meat humans eat is immense. In 1965, 10 billion livestock animals were slaughtered each year. Today, that number is 55 billion. More chickens are killed in the US every year than there are people in the world, and there are one billion cattle alive, weighing twice as much as the human population.

All that livestock needs land, which places pressure on wildlife habitat and forest. Livestock is the world’s largest land user. Grazing occupies 26 per cent of the earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface, and feed crop production uses about one third of all arable land.

And what about all that manure? In traditional, sustainable systems of agriculture, manure is part of a holistic cycle: it’s fertiliser. But in modern agriculture, this waste is not cycled through the farm because there’s just too much of it. Instead, waste is stored in manure “lagoons,” which emit methane and, even worse, nitrous oxide.
Meat production requires staggering amounts of land, water, and energy, as compared to plant foods. A 2010 UN report explained that western-type dietary preferences for meat would be unsustainable in future, given that the world population is forecast to rise to 9.1 billion by 2050. Demand for meat is expected to double by this date, and meat consumption is already steadily rising in countries such as China, which once followed more sustainable, vegetable-based diets.

A person existing mainly on animal protein requires ten times more land to provide adequate food than someone living on vegetable sources of protein. Far more energy is put into animals per unit of food than for any plant crop because cattle consume 16 times as much grain as they produce as meat. It takes 16 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef.

Animal farms use nearly 40 per cent of the world’s total grain production. In the US, nearly 70 per cent of grain production is fed to livestock. If humans continue to eat more and more meat, it means we’re not just going to use far more land and water, but we’re also going to manufacture much more chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We will thus be creating far more pollution and greenhouse gases.

Modern farming (both meat and non-meat production) is heavily dependent on chemicals, which leads to the emission of the major greenhouses gases: carbon dioxide from the use of fossil fuels for machinery and to produce the chemicals needed, nitrogen oxide (300 times more potent than carbon dioxide) from the use of chemical fertilisers and methane (animal flatulence) from factory farming.

It has been estimated that livestock contribute to about 9 per cent of total human related carbon dioxide emissions, 37 per cent of methane emissions and 65 per cent of nitrous oxide emissions. This includes carbon dioxide emission from deforestation in Central and South America, attributed to livestock production.

Factor in that a gallon of gasoline is used to produce a mere pound of grain-fed beef, and you begin to appreciate that meat production is a very fossil fuel, resource-intensive industry.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, “Ranching-induced deforestation is one of the main causes of loss of some unique plant and animal species in the tropical rainforests of Central and South America as well as carbon release in the atmosphere.”

A 2010 report from the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Panel of Sustainable Resource Management declared: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth and increasing consumption of animal products… A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”
Environmental vegetarians are calling for a reduction of the consumption of meat in the ‘developed’ world. According to the United Nations Population Fund, “Each US citizen consumes an average of 260 pounds of meat per year, the world’s highest rate. That is about 1.5 times the industrial world average, three times the East Asian average, and 40 times the average in Bangladesh.”

Scientists at Cornell University have advised that the US could feed 800 million people with the grain that livestock eat.




Meat production also places a great strain on fresh water, which is likely to become an increasingly scarce resource in the coming years. John Anthony Allan, professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, argues that the average meat-eating US citizen consumes five cubic meters of water compared to half of that which vegetarians consume. But not all meat is equally water-intensive.

He says that beef requires 15,500 litres of water per kilogram compared to chicken, which needs 3,900 litres per kilogram. So, at the very least, consumers could think about reducing their beef consumption since it requires the most unsustainable water footprint.

In her book, Stolen Harvests, environmentalist Vandana Shiva says that for every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. She also states that the water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.

The great Ogallala aquifer in the US is the largest body of fresh water on earth. The water in it is left from the melted glaciers of the last Ice Age. It is not replenished from rainfall. Author John Robbins notes that more than 13 trillion gallons of water are taken from the aquifer every year. More water is withdrawn from the Ogallala aquifer every year for beef production than is used to grow all the fruits and vegetables in the entire US. Robbins states that it’s only a matter of time before most of the wells in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico go dry, and portions of these states become scarcely habitable for human beings.
This is a salutary reminder of what other countries may face in future if their meat consumption increases dramatically.





Of course, other arguments against eating meat or using animal products have been around for a long time, well before global warming and climate change appeared on the scene. Various religious and philosophical traditions believe that humans should not kill, maim, torture or exploit fellow beings for food or other purposes.

But kill, maim, torture and exploit we do. Take chickens as just one example from the many that we could take. For the past half century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens — broilers and layers. They have different bodies, engineered for different ‘functions.’ Layers make eggs and broilers make flesh. Over the past 50 years, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time. Chickens once had a life expectancy of 15 to 20 years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly by 400 per cent.

All male layers in the US, comprising more than 250 million chicks a year, are destroyed. Most are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled to the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top. Others are also sent fully conscious through macerators.

So, if global warming isn’t enough to make people think twice about going vegetarian or reducing their meat consumption, the cruelty we inflict on other species may well do.

In many respects, thanks to its various traditions, India has a definite head start when it comes to not eating meat. This is just as well considering 17 per cent of the global population live here on a mere two to three per cent of the planet’s land, and the country is already facing water shortage issues and dwindling wildlife habitat.

According to a 2006 State of the Nation Survey, 31 per cent of Indians are vegetarians, while another nine per cent consumes eggs. India also has a system of marking edible products made from only vegetarian (non-animal) ingredients, with a green dot in a green square.


Consider the fact that the next time you eat a meal of rice and vegetables, you could be taking in more than 40 times the amount of pesticides that an average North American person would consume for a similar meal. India is one of the world’s largest users of pesticides. Lady’s finger, cabbage, tomato and cauliflower in particular may contain dangerously high levels and fruits and vegetables are sprayed and tampered with to ripen and make them more colourful. Research by the School of Natural Sciences and Engineering at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore reported in 2008 that many crops for export had been rejected internationally due to high pesticide residues.

Shiva argues that this type of intensive chemical-industrial agriculture, with its reliance on vast amounts of fresh water, fertilisers, pesticides and the like, is destroying biodiversity and contributing towards climate change, not just in India but worldwide. It might have increased food production in the relative short term, but it has been at a terrible cost to the environment and is ultimately unsustainable.
Modern industrial farms rely on fossil fuels, from powering machinery to petroleum-based chemicals used to create artificial soil fertility, protect against pests and stave off weeds. It is this use of fossil fuels on farms and the manufacture of fertilisers and other agricultural chemicals that negatively impact the environment. For Shiva, the answer is to return to basics by encouraging biodiverse, organic, local food systems.

She argues that small, biodiverse, organic farms, especially in less developed countries, are totally fossil fuel-free. Energy for farming operations comes from animal energy and not machinery or the fertilisers manufactured down at the local polluting chemical factory, and soil fertility is built by feeding soil organisms via recycling organic matter.

Making the required shift away from modern farming practices could be a lot easier said than done, however. Huge, politically connected and often extremely unscrupulous agribusiness concerns involved in fertiliser, pesticide and seed manufacturing (and let’s not forget the genetically modified sector) have a lot invested in maintaining the current, highly profitable system.

In finishing, let us end where we began — with meat. Author James E McWilliams raises the all-important ethical issue by saying that it’s not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters, it’s whether we produce them at all.

The dilemma he raises leads to some deep seated questions about how we as individuals personally regard our mass slaughter and wholesale exploitation of the living creatures we share this planet with. Even if our consciences can continue to live with this, the evidence is that, in the long run, the planet certainly can’t.

Taken from http://www.deccanherald.com/content/250707/age-novelty.html

The Food Movement

Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave. Companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.

One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement” or perhaps “movements” since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; animal feed pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing,( especially towards children) . Sometimes the various factions work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the revival of small-farm agriculture. Animal rights advocates conflict with sustainable meat producers . “No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar, and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close.” Viewed from a middle distance, the food movement coalesces around the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is “unsustainable”—that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.

For some in the movement, the more urgent problem is environmental: the food system consumes more fossil fuel energy than we can count on in the future (about a fifth of the total American use of such energy) and emits more greenhouse gas than we can afford to emit, particularly since agriculture is the one human system that should be able to substantially rely on photosynthesis: solar energy. It will be difficult if not impossible to address the issue of climate change without reforming the food system. Several of the major environmental groups have come to appreciate that a diversified, sustainable agriculture—which can sequester large amounts of carbon in the soil—holds the potential not just to mitigate but actually to help solve environmental problems, including climate change. Environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group are taking up the cause of food system reform, lending their expertise and clout to the movement.

Another claim of the food movement for public attention is the fact that the diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens health care. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct result of the way that agriculture and food industries have been organized.

What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on the function of a lively new public square. For those who are committed to eating as much locally produced food as possible—is the desire to get “beyond the barcode”—to create new economic and social structures outside of the mainstream consumer economy. Though not always articulated in these terms, the local food movement wants to decentralize the global economy, if not secede from it altogether, which is why in some communities local currencies have popped up.This is at bottom a communitarian impulse.The food movement has set out to foster new forms of civil society. But instead of proposing that space as a counterweight to an overbearing state, as is usually the case, the food movement poses it against the dominance of corporations and their tendency to insinuate themselves into any aspect of our lives from which they can profit.
Wendell Berry writes, the corporations "will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so."

Freely extracted and adapted here

Poor told to eat rat

A state government in eastern Indian is encouraging people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.

Authorities in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, are asking rich and poor alike to switch to eating rats in a bid to reduce the dependence on rice. They even plan to offer rats on restaurant menus.

We await the Hilton to serve rat .

eat the rich

This blog has reported the food crisis in the past and highlighted the concerns of many - but what is not needed is the hypocrisy of a daughter the King Hussein of Jordan and wife of the Ruler of Dubai to shed crocodile tears for the suffering of the poor and needy .

Nor do we require her to praise the false promises of the war criminal , Henry Kissinger , in her article that the Rupert Murdoch rag the Times feel necessary to publish as some sort of contribution to the debate on the world-wide rise in food prices .

Rice prices rises

I have previous linked to stories of the food crisis that is engulfing the world here and also at the African blog Socialist Banner , but as it is indeed a world wide phenonomen . India is restricting the export of rice .

But in Bangladesh the rising prices are now effecting those of the "middle classes" .

It is reported , Government-run outlets selling subsidised rice and other basic commodities are now being besieged by members of the middle class as food prices continue to rise.
In Dhaka people are queing up for hours a day in the midday sun to buy 5kg of rice per head under the government’s Open Market Sale scheme - established whenever a potential food crisis is perceived. The authorities have opened over 2,500 such outlets nationwide, with an additional 3,800 set to open in the coming days. Other food essentials, including pulses, flour, oil, onions and sugar are also rising after remaining relatively stable for the last two weeks, increasing by nearly 50 percent in the last six months, with the prices of chickens, eggs and fish also going up.

“Middle class people can neither stand in the long queues to buy cheap rice and pulses, nor have the money to buy those from the market. We are the sufferers of the present price hikes,” Mansur Ali, a senior clerk in a government office “I am the lone earner in my family. My two children are very young and my wife is pregnant with the third. She needs extra nutrition, but I can’t even buy food for the family,” he said." No one in my family has ever stood in an OMS queue. These are meant for the poor,” said Ali, whose 10-year-old son waited for four hours in such a queue to buy rice.

Earning just under US$100 a month, Ali now supplements his income by providing private tutoring in the evenings, earning another $7.5 a month to cope. However, that too may not be enough. According to the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies , purchasing power declined by around four percent due to higher inflation in 2007, propelled by 16 percent food inflation in December alone - and this in a country where about 40 percent of families at or just below the poverty line of $1 a day are already spending around 70 percent of their income on food

A waste of good food

The Independent on Sunday reported that Britain is throwing away half of all the food produced on farms.

About 20 million tons of food is thrown out each year: equivalent to half of the food import needs for the whole of Africa. Some 16 million tons of this is wasted in homes, shops, restaurants, hotels and food manufacturing. Much of the rest is thought to be destroyed between the farm field and the shop shelf.

Japan pledged more than 300 million yen in food aid for Burundi, in Africa, where malnutrition runs at 44 per cent. The food thrown away in the UK last year would meet the equivalent of Burundi's shortages more than 40 times over.
The United Nation's World Food Programme has admitted it might have to ration food aid in response to rocketing global food prices that have soared by more than 75 per cent since their lows of 2000, jumping by more than a fifth last year alone, prompting riots in some countries.

The chief executive of FareShare, the national food charity, said:

"Unfortunately, we live in a world where many people do not have access to food in general, and good-quality food specifically, while at the same time millions of tons of perfectly fine food are being disposed of. In the UK alone, the extent of food poverty is staggering, as millions of people with low or no income find it harder to access affordable, nutritious food."

Estimates that the world's population will rise by 30 per cent over the next 50 years to around 8.5 billion have raised the spectre of a global food shortage too big for farmers to meet, Lord Haskins , a former government adviser on rural affairs and chairman of Northern Foods , said:

"If consumers ate a bit less and wasted a bit less you'd help to solve the problem. If the world was vegetarian then you'd solve the problem completely."

One-third of wheat grown globally is fed to livestock reared to end up on the dinner table.

More importantly though was the comment from a food policy professor at City University , Tim Lang , who said:

"Waste is a fundamental part of the food economy and it will be hard to get rid of. I do not see how simply appealing to morals will do it."

It is the economics of capitalism that places the need for profit before the needs of people .

The Jungle re-lived

Just when you thought it safe to eat .

The US Department of Agriculture has ordered the recall of 143 million lb (64.9 million kg) of beef - the largest meat recall in the country's history. An estimated 37 million lbs (16.8 million kg) of the beef recalled on Sunday went to school lunch programmes and other federal nutrition programmes . Some was also supplied to major fast-food chains.

It comes from a company in California, which allowed meat from cattle unable to stand at the time of slaughter to enter the food chain. The recall was ordered after USDA officials said the plant did not consistently order "complete and proper" inspections of cattle which had lost the ability to walk prior to slaughter.
Such "downer" cattle are at greater risk of contamination by E. coli, salmonella or contracting mad cow disease, as they have weaker immune systems and greater contact with faeces than walking cattle. They should either be removed from the food supply, or receive a more thorough inspection following slaughter, officials say.

The meat-packing plant is also being investigated for animal cruelty after an undercover video came to light showing crippled and sick animals being mistreated.
Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer said he had been "dismayed by the inhumane handling of cattle" that resulted in the violation of food safety regulations at Westland/Hallmark.

Just like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Food , not so glorious Food

From the radical news service Democracy Now , Michael Pollan , professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley, argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food but “edible food-like substances.”

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it’s a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. It’s—for the food industry—see, to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for seventy-nine cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.

So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that seventy-nine cents—and actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyone’s ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now there’s cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It’s made out of the cereal material. It’s extruded.

So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to make—and because, you know, food really isn’t designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen...

Mud Pies For Food

With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies.

Charlene, 16 , with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
Cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal for her, according to this report .

At the market , two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.
Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies , they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun. The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.

"I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me." said Charlene .

About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.

Food Adulteration 2

Posted before about food adulteration in pet-food contaminated with melamine, a chemical typically used in plastics and pesticides. , and since then we have had toxic Chinese toothpaste , contaminated with diethylene glycol, a potentially dangerous chemical used in antifreeze. Now , finally Chinese authorities have begun to act .

Chinese officials have shut down 180 food manufacturers so far this year after finding such potentially toxic ingredients as formaldehyde in candy, pickles, biscuits and other common foods.

"These are not isolated cases," Han Yi, director of the government's quality control and inspection department, was quoted as saying.

The government said it had seized 23,000 cases of fake and low-quality food valued at $26 million between December and May.

Inspectors found traces of dyes, mineral oils, paraffin wax, formaldehyde and malachite green chloride, an anti-fungal agent used in fish farming that is a suspected carcinogen. The various substances had been used in the manufacturing of flour, candy, pickles, biscuits, melon seeds, bean curd and seafood .There have been several scares involving food or other goods including stale rice snacks, diseased pork, potentially poisonous fish and other harmful or fake products.

The scandals are seriously hurting China's food-processing industry .which had an estimated value of just under $250 billion in 2005.
"They hurt very much," said Hu Xiaosong, vice president of food science and nutrition at China Agricultural University.

Hurt sales . Hurt profits .

Food Adulteration

When i was in Canada in March the big breaking story ( but not to have been highlighted by the UK media ) was the mysterious deaths of cats and dogs from contaminated pet foods produced there and distributed throughout North America . It is reported that there has been approximately 4,150 dog and cat pet deaths . 5,500 varieties of pet food and 150 brands have been withdrawn from store and supermarket shelves .
Health inspectors have investigated the supply chain and now generally believe that the contamination originated in wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate imported from China . And in pet products sold in South Africa and Namibia, the third vegetable protein ingredient, corn gluten, also has been found to be contaminated.

Investigators suspect that melamine , an industrial chemical used in the manufacturing of plastic utensils and fertilizer , in combination with a rice protein additive imported from China and found to contain cyanuric acid, may cause crystals to form in the kidneys, shutting them down. Cyanuric acid is used as a stabilizer in outdoor swimming pools and hot tubs.

All vegetable protein imports from China used in human and animal food is to be be detained.
The products include wheat gluten, rice gluten, rice protein, rice protein concentrate, corn gluten, corn gluten meal, corn byproducts, soy protein, soy gluten proteins and mung bean protein.

It has now been revealed that the food chain has been extended to and includes humans .

People have eaten millions of chickens that were given feed tainted with recalled pet food, federal officials said Tuesday, though they said the threat to human health is minimal.
The announcement came after an investigation of chicken farms in Indiana found that 38 of the facilities had given contaminated feed to poultry raised for human consumption, and that 2.5 million to 3 million people ate them.The officials added that they expect to discover that chickens on possibly hundreds of farms in other states were also given tainted feed.

FDA officials said 6,000 hogs that may have ingested tainted pet food entered the human food supply. Pork producers in seven states -- California, Kansas, North Carolina, New York, South Carolina and Utah -- are being investigated for buying adulterated feed.

The National Chicken Council, which represents U.S. poultry producers, marketers and processors endeavour to minimise the risks .

"...chicken feed may have been contaminated as a result of a practice common among pet food manufacturers -- they sometimes sell their leftover material to manufacturers of chicken and pig feed...What they're saying is that somebody bought that material and it got mixed in corn and soybean that gets manufactured in poultry feed...The dilution factor is enormous. You have a relatively small amount of pet food by-products used...It's a safe and wholesome product to use"

I'm not too sure i believe that .

A 2002 UN report concluded the potential risk posed by melamine is low. However, the UN based that conclusion on the slim chance that consumers would even come into contact with the chemical. Until the recent and ongoing recalls, regulators did not consider melamine a likely contaminant of food meant for either people or animals. Nor were the vegetable proteins considered at risk for contamination. The US Food and Drug Administration is now testing a variety of vegetable proteins, used to make everything from infant formula to energy bars, for the chemical.


How did the crisis arise ? - simple - for profit

Chinese producers appear to have been spiking the vegetable proteins to make them appear to have more protein than they actually did. Adding a nitrogen-rich contaminant like melamine would skew the results of tests to make an ingredient register as more protein-rich than it really is -- and allow it to sell for more money.