According to new reports, government tests have been unable to verify the presence of rat poison in pet foods that have allegedly been linked to scads of pet deaths nationwide, and a whole lot of petfood recalls. However, they have found something interesting.
Melamine.
Hey, wait a minute, you say. I have dishes made of that stuff! How can the crappy plastic they make cheap dishes from kill my kitty?
Well, I’m sure they’re going to hemm and haw and investigate this and that, and send in Grissom and Warrick to do their CSI magic to try to ferret out the evil plot to K. O. the felines, and someday we’ll see a bunch of shrugging and a theory that it was in some random batch of wheat. But here’s my theory.
AHEM… this is my theory. It is mine.
Ever seen the equipment they use to make petfood? Okay, neither have I, except on an episode of “Unwrapped”, and I read a description once. Mostly, there’s a lot of metal augers and grinding and stuff. Well, I wonder how the hell you clean stuff like that. I’m sure there’s a specified procedure, probably using steam, or some appropriate sanitary tool and appropriate cleanser approved for food service, or at least for pet food service.
And I’m sure there’s some guy that has to use these tools, and they probably don’t work all that damned well. They work well enough, if you work hard enough, and they get the grinders and augers squeaky clean and don’t leave any kind of contaminants behind. But it’s a lot of damned work, and poor George, or Matilda, or whoever it is that has to clean this blasted machine has to spend hour after hour scrubbing. Then they make some pet food. Then George, or Matilda has to do it again. And they get paid what some yutz gets paid to park cars, read porn, and scratch himself.
It just ain’t fair.
So George, or Matilda, brings in one of those Magic Sponge thingies from home — you know, it’s one of those white sponges you can use to take magic marker off the stainless steel countertop, or rust off the car’s bumper. Hell, if you just scrub a little harder, it’ll take paint off a car or stain off a bannister. Hell, if it’ll take little Bobby’s doodles off the refrigerator door, it’ll take that catfood off that auger real easy! And George…or Matilda…scrubs that auger clean with that white sponge thing, and damn, if it doesn’t clean that caked-on gunge off in nothing flat! Wow, fantastic! Made George or Matilda’s life a hell of a lot easier! Bring in a whole BOX of those white sponge doojies, keep ’em in the ol’ locker, save hours a week!
Maybe even have some time to read some porn.
Except…
Those white sponges clean so well because they’re made of a micro-abrasive foam of melamine plastic. It doesn’t just wipe at the stains, it chews them away, the foam breaking away, exposing new, sharp edges as it wears off, to create what amounts to a soft, microscopic knife that shears the crud off the surface. The melamine that breaks off is left behind on the surface being cleaned. If you use one of those sponges a lot, you can see “crumbs” of soiled sponge falling off and away, as it wears. And the rinsing and cleaning protocols set by the company don’t take these little pieces into account. They don’t get properly flushed away. They stay in the equipment, and get into the pet food.
I’m sure the pet food company didn’t plan on having razor-sharp, microscopic pieces of plastic left behind on their grinding equipment. It wouldn’t take a lot. Get that stuff into an animal’s liver, and who knows how badly it might chew up the microscopic tubules?
I have no idea if this is actually what happened to these animals. It is pure conjecture. But I don’t use these melamine sponges on my brew equipment because they are abrasive, and because they leave a residue I can’t be sure is removed because I can’t see it properly. I know it leaves microscopic scratches on the surfaces it cleans — this is bad for brew equipment, because bacteria love tiny scratches. Perhaps this is what happened to the renal systems of the animals? Tiny scratches, little places for bacteria to grow — blam! — septicemia from ten thousand tiny places too small to see.
It’d ruin the heck out of a batch of beer. I’d hate to see what it’d do to a pet’s liver.
Update: Turns out that the melamine in our pet food is coming from cheap Chinese feedstocks, where melamine made from coal is being used as “fake protein” to stretch profits by stretching the volume of animal feed. It is extremely profitable in China, where just a few percent savings in protein cost can boost profits astronomically. It looks for all the world like the Chinese have discovered the benefit of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, as several of them would seem to apply to this situation perfectly.