More on the pet food recall

Here is a story that reveals all too clearly that some plumb shady practices have been going on in the pet food industry. Obviously no one has been very careful about what went into what dogs and cats eat, where it came from, or even honest ingredient labeling.
Sadly, there is nothing stopping contamination in the dog food dish from showing up at the dinner table too. Another story yesterday indicated that the contaminated rice and wheat gluten (that actually turned out to be wheat flour) was made into fish food in Canada and fed to fish in the USA, which were certainly eaten by unsuspecting Americans.

We were discussing the issue in the barn this morning (politics and national issues are topics that turn up there every bit as often as how many bales of hay to feed.) We decided that if the US inspected foreign foods and their suppliers anywhere near as thoroughly as we do American farms and factories, the likliehood of such adulteration would diminish immensely. Here at Northview we have an inspector from Producers Cooperative, where we sell our milk, who routinely checks our premises. From seeing that medicine for dry cows is on a different shelf than that for lactating cows, to making sure there are no holes in the milk house screens, no dirt where it shouldn't be, and even that the place is tidy, he keeps a close eye on us. Our milk is tested EVERY SINGLE TIME the tanker picks it up, that is every other day, for antibiotics, cleanliness, butterfat, protein, somatic cells and water content. If it is too high in any negative factor it is condemned and we pay for the entire truckload of milk that it was dumped into. We are also under the direct oversight of state and federal inspectors who check for the same things and very thoroughly too.We could be denied a place to ship our milk and fined if we get caught doing naughty things. Certainly if we dumped melamine into our tank to boost our protein price, we would get caught...real fast

Then we are under the observation of the Soil and Water Conservation folks, the EPA, state Ag and Markets, and have so many other government entities watching over how we do what we do that I literally can't bring them all to mind. Building inspectors, Dept of Environmental Conservation, nosy neighbors.... vets inspecting the beef that we ship....we are being watched, and carefully. However, it is pretty darned obvious that while the US government peers at its own navel by layering inspections on its internal food supply like someone dressing a kid for January in Alaska, it has its back turned toward millions of tons of material that is slipping in through the back door. What we need is for imported products to fall under the same scrutiny, and, (since not everybody outside this nation is our best buddy... most favored nation status to the contrary) they should actually fall under MORE scrutiny.

The whole affair makes Pete Hardin, of the Milkweed, look real smart. He has said for years that uninspected and unregulated imports of fractions of milk, such as milk protein concentrate, potentially permit milk from exotic species, such as water buffalo, and unclean locations, such as Chernobyl, to be included in our food. Hmmmmm, ya think?