Food Safety For All
I recently received an email encouraging me to call my congressman John Dingell and tell him to support the “Pet and Human Food Safety Act” introduced by Rosa Delauro and Richard Durbin. The email had the Humane Society of the US logo on it and it probably was legitimate. But I really think that food safety is an issue that needs a major over haul–both for people and pet food.
The reasoning behind this is that if pet food is found adulterated, as in the case of melamine, it can be converted to livestock feed. That is why millions of chickens and a few hundred pigs are being quarantined today awaiting test results. But really, food contaminated with anything, especially melamine, does not need to be fed to any other species and needs to be destroyed, (or sent back to the country of origin).
The bigger picture here though is that food is being imported into our country and is not being actually tested to check whether it is contaminated with other things such as pesticides, poisons, and other non food additives on a regular, shipment by shipment basis. And that is not saying that there isn’t a government agency charged with doing that testing. Both the USDA and the FDA have food regulating authorities. But the food regulations are convoluted, over lapping, and under funded, making food safety a real terrorist threat. It was our pets that suffered this time. Next time it could be the human members of your family.