Today In Food Adulteration News

Can one ever get tired of tainted food reporting? The Washington Post has a great article this morning that is, in its essence "A Star is Born: The Melamine Story." As it turns out, it's not just a tale of can-do scurrilous food additive entrepreneurs.

Dairy industry analysts who have inspected the melamine powder said it appeared to have been created by sophisticated chemical technicians. Qiao Fuming, a dairy consultant in Beijing, said it is impossible to take raw melamine and mix it with milk because it won't dissolve. The melamine had to be converted into a form that could be mixed with liquids, he said. How melamine became popular in the countryside has as much to do with greedy chemical companies as with poor farmers.

Also interesting is what I've read elsewhere - it takes very high doses of melamine over time to actually make someone sick. It's possible that many of the reported deaths may actually have been caused by low-grade melamine that was contaminated by other things, like cyanuric acid. Which would imply that melamine could be in almost everything dairy-related in China right now, and how sick you get is dependent on the quality of what your food is tainted with.

I hope this doesn't give melamine a bad rap. It may cause kidney failure, but when used as it was originally intended it does make a fine tabletop.