US May Be Sending Melamine Tainted Animal Food to China Too. And Check Out the "Casings" on Spaghetti

An Ohio company has admitted that they regularly use melamine to (according to Washington Post report "U.S. Company Used Melamine in Feed" link to article is the second one below)

to hold feed granules in pellet form, in contrast to the recent pet food scandal, which involved imported ingredients that were spiked with melamine to provide a false measure of protein content, officials said.

And apparently this is perfectly acceptable.  It's not how you get your poison, but whether the  manufacturer has a legal business reason for putting it into the human food chain.

The government assures us that the amount getting to human is to small to be of concern.

 A little melamine here.  A little melamine there.  And when the kidneys give out the food companies aren't the ones going to be paying the horrendous medical bills.

Of course we can trust the FDA to keep us safe, right ? 

BTW, they should check out some brands of spaghetti too.  I think some brands may use melamine to bind the noodles.

  I recently took over the cooking of spaghetti noodles in our house.  I was complaining about the al dente style.  I figure that one should be able to completely masticate the product not send down what feels like semi plastic pieces to cause intestinal problems later.  As an active person, I need to be able to digest carbohydrates properly.   So I cook the noodles 45-60 minutes after insertion.  And last night I tried eating the spaghetti plain with the homemade ground turkey meatballs.  That was the first time since I started cooking the noodles that I hadn't applied sauce.  I was only partially successful with my attempt to get all the great taste from our turkey meat balls.  What one might not see (even if they even cook their spaghetti long enough and and eat it thoroughly cooled) if they use sauce is (in at least one brand) a weird worm-like secondary stringing. 

Resisting the urge to purge immediately, I got some strong reading glasses I have hanging around and looked closer.  It was a casing that was coming off the spaghetti and curling around itself like the skin of a tomato does if you try to cook it fresh with its skin on. 

 Hmm.  I wonder what that could be, but it wouldn't be there if it was something bad, right?  

So, I continue eating while reading the Washington Post online.  This was after 9 pm because I had been busy and didn't grab dinner until then.  On the left coast where I live, the Post offers it's initial reports for the next day at 9 pm because of the time difference.

Hmm,  look, there's something new on melamine.  I wonder what that's about.

As you probably know, it was about melamine being used as a casing for animal food that is in the human food chain.  No problem the FDA says because the dosage is diluted by the time it reaches humans.  And those fish and shrimp foods that do have too much melamine go overseas, but then farmed fish and shrimp come back from overseas to US Markets.  (Is that why farmed shrimp are so nauseating?)

So then I was eating spaghetti which seemed to be encased in something reading about foods being encased in melamine.  I pull on the casing and find it has characteristics like very thin plastic.

Like most spaghetti, the brand I ate last night lists durham wheat semolina and vitamins as it's only ingredients.  The front says "Product of Italy" and implies that it relies on Italian grown Durham wheat.  Could the plastic like coating that came off the spaghetti, which I never did finish eating last night, be a natural development when durham semolina is made into spaghetti?  Semolina is like Cream of Wheat. So I assume some extra processing must be done to get it to form into noodles (besides the press).  I don't think you can take Cream of Wheat and make a noodle of any kind out of it, though I could be wrong.  Durham wheat is supposed to be high in protein.  Can that form a natural coating that separates from the noodles.  Or was I right to call the al dente spaghetti cooked from this brand (I will not name the name due to the possibility of slander because of ignorance of naturally forming spaghetti casings) strings of plastic?  

I will be testing other brands of spaghetti for similar effects in the next few days. 

 BTW, this company says it offers testing to see if melamine and cyanuric acid is in a sample of a food product.  I assume that a fee, would be involved there somewhere, too.

tags: melamine  fda  food contamination  china  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit