Customer Reviews

Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine

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Marion Nestle's book "Pet Food Politics" is about the pet food recall of 2007. For those of you who don't remember, there was a massive recall of pet food last summer. The recall began with cat food manufactured by Menu Foods (but sold under many other brand names including Iams, Nutro, and Hill's), but expanded into a large number of cat and dog foods under many different brand names. It became clear after the recall that the problem occurred because an unscrupulous Chinese supplier sold a mixture of wheat flour, cyanuric acid, and melamine as wheat gluten. As a pet owner, the recall inconvenienced me (I had to change my cats' foods). As a parent, I became greatly concerned about what I was feeding my daughter and began seriously looking at where the food I bought was produced. I bought this book because I wanted to better understand what happened.

I knew the basic story here, but did not know about the total number of pets who died (likely in the thousands), the reasons why melamine was substituted for the wheat gluten (cheap melamine looks like expensive protein when tested using standard industrial tests), nor what happened to the contaminated pet food (it was fed to livestock and made it into the human food chain).

This book is a fast read and is clear, well written, and very interesting. Unfortunately, it is too brief. I wish that Ms. Nestle had taken this opportunity to explain more about the pet food industry: its history, the major players, the processes used to make pet food. The story is fascinating, but it feels more like a New Yorker article than a book.

I would recommend this book to someone who was interested in the pet food recalls, though I think that most readers should start with other books about food production. Specifically, I would recommend Michael Pollan's excellent The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals or Marion Nestle's own What to Eat before reading this book, to get a feel for how food is produced and to understand some of the politics involved.

This book is a page-turner - and not just because it shows all the twists and turns that went on behind the scenes in the pet food recall. It is an eye-opener about the lack of government oversight or pet food company responsibility for what goes into pet food or how it is made. Just as the title makes clear, this is not a book about pet food manufacture and ingredients - that is the book the author was working on when the pet food recall happened. THAT book is forthcoming. This book is exactly what the title says: it's about the politics of pet food manufacture and sales and how our chihuahuas have been the sentinels as a wake-up call that our human food industry is no better. The author is neutral and balanced and generously gives benefit-of-the-doubt to the various players in this dangerous food drama, a fiasco that still haunts many of us with dogs and cats. Nestle's lack of judgmentalism is actually great because it allows you as the reader to discover how it all worked and bring your own moral indignation to the table, as it were. This book is like following a detective looking for an explanation of the economic,business, political and social elements that conspired to bring about a horrible Perfect Storm of tainted food. I was absolutely riveted by the meticulous research that went into unraveling the mystery and uncovering the obfuscation by many of the participants. As the author of "The Dog Bible" I can attest how hard some information is to come by, especially in nutrition, so I was so impressed by this book that I invited the author, Marion Nestle, onto my live NPR radio show DOG TALK on September 27th. You can sign up for the free podcast or listen live online and decide for yourselves. I say she's done a brilliant job and given us a really significant heads-up for ourselves as well as our pets. I will wager that you'll click on "buy now" once you've heard her talk.

Marion Nestle presents an insightful, disturbing analysis of the recent contamination of many popular brands of pet food by melamine, an industrial waste chemical. She prints a list of affected brands at the back of the book and I was horrified to discover that the "high quality" mail order food I was feeding two of my dogs was on the list (although I have not had any problems). Even more disturbingly, she discusses how the globalization of food distribution has put not just pet food but human food at risk. Just after I finished reading this book, reports of melamine-laced milk products sickening thousands of babies in China appeared in the major news outlets. Everyone, not just pet owners, should read this book!

This short book provides a competent overview of the China melamine pet food scare of two years ago. As a dog owner who lived through it and searched for updates on what was safe and what wasn't, I was very interested in Nestle's investigation and findings after the fact. While I was reading it, the news broke about the same kind of poisoning in baby formula in China. Had I not seen that, I might have believed that once the perpetrator of the pet food poisoning was executed!! the poisoning would stop, but no. As Nestle expertly explains, despite the lack of safely involved with worldwide food production, the United States is woefully short of regulatory and safety inspectors for these products as they come into the country and are combined with other ingredients and then distributed to companies who make food of all kinds and specifically pet food. Maybe, pet food companies will take more care in their formulations, however, all pet owners should take the time to investigate the manufacturer of the food they use and pay extra for the better brands of pet food. Nestle lists the brands that had to be recalled for both cat and dog food in the back of her book.

I found the information in this book very interesting. It is packed full of information that kept me turning the pages - I finished this book in a little over a day and am still processing the information. There is information in here that I had never heard and I followed the recall very closely.

I think that all animal owners owe it to themselves to read this book just to see how loose the pet food industry was/is. Pretty appalling stuff.

I went to school for international business and found the material regarding the China/USA import/export very interesting and think everyone can take something away from this book.

This books tells you whats wrong with our system. Dog food you buy these days is full of "by-product" and filler. What is by-product? You certainly cant purchase by-products in the grocery store! We have been feeding our dogs RAW for 8 years and this is why. Dogs come from the wolf. The wolf doesn't "cook" his food in the wild. He kills it and eats it RAW. Thanks to our breeder, she educated us on the RAW diet. She has been feeding RAW for over 25 years. The Vet's don't care for it because they aren't taught the RAW diet in college. After all, they have dog food companies coming into their office to promote their food and yes, the Vet gets a kick back. My niece is a Vet Tech. She wasnt taught RAW in school but has since started to study RAW and has totally changed her outlook on dry and wet dog food coming from these horrible companies. These companies are poisoning/killing the animals. Our dogs are healthy, no skin issues, no ear issues and no allergies. Their coats are silky and their eyes are bright and clear. They eat RAW chicken, RAW hamburger, RAW beef liver, RAW bones, RAW eggs (shell and all), alot of veggies and yes, yogurt and cottage cheese along with their vitamins. They eat nice and slow unlike how a dry food dog eats. No bloat for our boys because there isn't a bunch of dry food sitting in their stomach being blow up with their stomach liquids. On the wk-ends they get RAW, meaty beef bones. You always hear never give a dog a chicken bone, that's because when a bone is COOKED, all the vitamins and minerals are cooked away therefore, the bone splinters. A RAW bone is HARD, CRUNCHY and GREAT for cleaning their teeth. Their teeth are white and clean. I hope you buy this book and hear what its telling you. I hope you educated yourself on a RAW diet. Any books by Ian Billinghurst and Wendy Volhard will show you the way to feeding RAW.

Not only did this book change the way I look at the pet food supply system, it gave me an awareness of the politics of pet and human food and how not being aware can cost you and your family their lives. The FDA is behind the 8-ball and seems to only be able to given watered down warnings AFTER a great deal of damage and deaths have happened. Be aware and make your own choices to minimize risk. When something happens in the food system, it happens fast. You may not get a second chance to make better choices.

This book will give you the awareness and will help you make better choices now before tragedy hits you, your family, or your pets. It is easy reading and is so interesting and fast-paced that you will be on the edge of your seat. I finished it within a few days and normally it takes much longer for me to not get distracted with a book.

This book provides a knowledgeable and well-written examination of the scandal resulting from melamine contamination of U.S. pet food by Chinese processors. The author provides much behind-the-scenes insight, and the gaps are as informative as what is known, because they result from secrecy on the part of industry and government in both the U.S. and China. It's an excellent primer, and a good context for understanding how melamine could subsequently kill and sicken tens of thousands of Chinese infants.

Really informative read. Points out the complexities of the food distribution system - how it is really a global system.

When my cat was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, I started taking an even greater interest in the food she was eating. They say diet and lifestyle has a far greater influence on whether you get cancer or not than genetics or predisposition, but our pets don't choose their lifestyles OR their food, we choose for them. So, imagine my shock in 2007 when the premium and specialty foods I was feeding my two cats were part of a massive petfood recall!
It wasn't until I read this book that I understood why so many different foods under so many different brands were affected by the same recall (and shocked to find out Asia had a similar recall for the exact same reason not that long before the 2007 recall.) It shows a huge flaw in not just our pet food supply system but also our own food supply system. My cat recently passed away, just over five years after first being diagnosed with cancer. I guess that's pretty good when you consider that humans are branded cancer "survivors" if they are still around five years after being diagnosed, but meanwhile I spent a lot of time agonizing over what to feed my cats. I currently feed my remaining cat a mostly raw diet with a little bit of canned food and a tiny bit of grain-free dry food...and for myself, personally, I know I'm safe any time I shop at the farmer's market or the local produce store where they have big signs saying what local town the apples or sweetcorn were grown in, but every time I pick up food in a box or a can I wonder...where did all those ingredients come from, and are they really what they say they are? The bottom line is...we don't know what's in our pets pre-prepared foods...or our own...and it's scary.