Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Even if you merely dip in the news stream, you know the basics about melamine from China showing up in pet foods across this country. Because nothing could be more serious than threatening United States of America pets!

We’re going to see more of this — a lot more — as we understand better all the hidden costs from globalization and Wal-Martization. In this case, thanks to no oversight and belief in the God of Low Prices, Chinese businessmen slipped the plastic into wheat gluten and other ingredients, because it mimicked protein but cost less. Dogs and cats and who knows what else got sick and died. Probably some U.S. businessmen knew of the deception, or some suspected and looked the other way.

It turns out, the Chinese melamine — which is also an ingredient in many kitchen counters — got sold into fish food sprinkled into salmon hatcheries in the West. The stories on that are here and here and here and here.

The most recommended reading goes to the scene of the crime — a factory in China that carried out the poisonous deception. The LA Times has the story, opening with the dateline Xuzhou, China:

Before Mao Lijun’s business exported tainted wheat products that may have killed American pets, his factory sickened people and plants around here for years.

Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao’s factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao’s company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke — until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

It wasn’t authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory — days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients.

Just thinking about this melamine, I have to wonder where else it slipped into the food universe. I bet you and I ate some already and we’ll probably eat more. And the next question: What other bogus ingredients are we eating now and tomorrow? … The Inevitable Department is one of our fastest-growing departments, here in World-Mart.