Wheat flour, not gluten, tainted

WASHINGTON – The tainted Chinese ingredients that got incorporated into U.S. pet foods and later made their way into chicken and pig feed were not wheat gluten and rice protein as advertised but were ordinary – albeit seriously contaminated – wheat flour, government investigators said Tuesday.

Moreover, officials said, some of that contaminated flour, mislabeled as gluten, was mixed into fish food in Canada and exported to the United States, where it was fed to fish raised for human consumption, including salmon at an Oregon hatchery.

That raises the prospect that some American seafood may be laced with melamine, the industrial toxin that has revealed in startling detail the many ways in which the food chains for pets, farm animals and humans are internationally intertwined.

A growing number of lawmakers are demanding a better system for tracking the sources of food and ingredients, their biochemical composition and their safety.

“Our food-safety system is broken,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who chairs the subcommittee that funds the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture. She has called for the creation of an independent food safety agency that would consolidate tasks now handled by a dozen or so agencies.

FDA officials said they do not yet know how many U.S. fish farms may have used the tainted feed or what kind of fish may be affected. Some of the fish may have been sold to grocery stores and restaurants, and others may have been raised to stock lakes and rivers for fishermen, they said.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife stopped using the feed at its Marion Forks Hatchery in Idanha last week after the FDA confirmed it was contaminated, said department spokesman Rick Hargrave. The same feed was shipped to six other Oregon hatcheries, which also have stopped using it.

Government scientists said they will conduct a risk analysis to determine whether eating fish that were fed tainted feed raises human health concerns.

Separately, David Acheson, FDA’s assistant commissioner for food protection, said tests had found that the tainted Chinese pet-food ingredients, which had entered the United States labeled as wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, were in fact ordinary wheat flour. Gluten is the high-protein constituent of flour that remains after starch has been removed. Investigators suspect that Chinese exporters boosted their profits by using cheap, unprocessed, low-protein flour and adding melamine, which gives false high-protein readings.