The Safety of Our Food Supply in Cascadia
We found out this weekend that babies were dying in China because of tainted infant formula. The formula was not distributed anywhere outside China. Is there reason for us to worry about this, since we probably have stronger food-safety regulations in the US?
This probably should be a worry to us. We have seen a version of this same problem here in our part of the world last year. In that case, over 4,000 cats and dogs died and many more were sickened by pet food that had been contaminated with melamine. Melamine is a substance used in making a number of plastics products, as well as being used for fertilizer. It also, when added to food, will artificially increase the protein levels of the product, useful when marketing your food product as a “high-protein” product.
It would be folly to presume that the only way we will see melamine or other contaminants in our food supply if it is “only in our pet food” or “only in stuff that never leaves China.” At our grocery stores, we are bombarded with thousands of products that have a wide variety of ingredients, a large number of which we would never directly stock in our cupboards. Thus, the chance of something we buy and eat might contain an ingredient unknown to us becomes fairly likely.
In this day and age, making a profit in manufacturing, including food manufacturing, means acquiring raw materials at the lowest possible cost and cutting production costs wherever possible. That’s business. It is unlikely that an American manufacturer would deliberately add melamine, or any similar material, to our foodstuffs. However, it seems perfectly plausible that a foreign supplier of some raw material used in food production could ship over some tainted food ingredient.
Does that seem far-fetched. Well, it isn’t. That is exactly how it came to pass last year that US and Canadian pet food manufacturers distributed so many different kinds of pet food so widely throughout North America. I wish it to never happen, but it will be just a matter of time before some greedy food producer sends some tainted human food into the country.
Is there a solution to this problem? One might be the trend toward buying and eating organic foods actually grown in Cascadia. While that is a worthy goal, that isn’t really a practical solution for feeding all of us. But it does provide a concept and a framework for getting more of our food from trusted sources. Another is limiting the food we purchase that containing unknown ingredients. Finally, we need to reform our food safety programs to meet the realities of a food production system that is working on a more global model than ever. We need to addres these issues before we can no longer trust our food.
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