The recent recall of pet food sold under such respected brands as Purina and Iams (and for­mu­lated by Menu Foods) caught many pet own­ers by sur­prise, I’m sure.

I won­der how many of them would have guessed that their pet food was made with con­t­a­m­i­nated ingre­di­ents man­u­fac­tured by the Xuzhou Any­ing Bio­logic Tech­nol­ogy Devel­op­ment Co. of Wang­dien, China (qui­etly imported into the USA by Chem­nu­tra, Inc.).

I have sev­eral thoughts on this subject:

1. Why import wheat gluten from China? Since when was there a short­age of wheat in the USA? The process must be mech­a­nized, so sweat­shop labor pro­vides no com­pet­i­tive advantage.
2. How can you really be sure where any­thing you eat comes from? Fast food is not that dif­fer­ent from pet food. I’ll con­tinue to keep a safe dis­tance away from McDonald’s. Who knows whether one of their burger patty manufacturer’s sub­con­trac­tors is import­ing filler mate­ri­als from some ques­tion­able far­away land.
3. How cool would it be if food (for humans and ani­mals) was required to be labelled with point of ori­gin infor­ma­tion? That rule would apply to Burger King Whop­pers as well as super­mar­ket food.