I’ve been fol­low­ing the tainted Chi­nese wheat gluten scan­dal with great inter­est since the mas­sive pet food recall first hit the news. The quiet intro­duc­tion of man­u­fac­tured food ingre­di­ents imported from third-world coun­tries into the Amer­i­can food sup­ply is noth­ing short of alarm­ing. Here in the US, we’ve come a long way since the days of Upton Sin­clair. Our food plants are immac­u­lately clean. Inspec­tions are thor­ough and com­pa­nies are kept hon­est. Our food sup­ply is the safest in the world. Assum­ing our sup­pli­ers are held to the same standards.

Today, the New York Times pub­lished a heavy-hitting story about the exten­sive use of melamine as a filler in Chi­nese ani­mal food pro­duc­tion. It describes, for the first time, how wide­spread the prac­tice is.

The pur­pose of adding melamine is to arti­fi­cially inflate the level of pro­tein mea­sured by tests with­out actu­ally adding pro­tein. Two points of the arti­cle are very troubling:

First, inter­views with Chi­nese feed pro­duc­ers and melamine sup­pli­ers make it abun­dantly clear that nobody thinks they are doing any­thing wrong. This, in my opin­ion, is typ­i­cal of Chi­nese busi­ness. The dom­i­nant cul­ture of indus­try there, in my opin­ion, val­ues profit above all else. The feed pro­duc­ers do not believe that what they are doing could cause harm to ani­mals, but they clearly state that they are adding melamine to cheat the tests and deliver a sub-par prod­uct, and they brag that there is strong eco­nomic sense in doing so. That there is such an under­ly­ing cul­ture of cheat­ing should make Amer­i­can pur­chasers very wary of pur­chas­ing any­thing from China in which a devi­a­tion from the pre­scribed man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­ce­dure could result in loss of life or property.

Sec­ond, due to tight gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship of the press, this issue has not been acces­si­ble to the Chi­nese pub­lic. In Amer­ica 100 years ago, the ground­break­ing changes brought by the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspec­tion Act were a direct result of the pub­lic out­cry that fol­lowed the pub­lish­ing of The Jun­gle. With­out a free press, cheat­ing in Chi­nese food pro­duc­tion will con­tinue unabated. Pro­duc­ers will reap the finan­cial rewards while the casu­al­ties to ani­mals, and per­haps some­day peo­ple, pile up.