Things I didn't know when I worked for PetSmart....

My old job stocking the shelves in the cat food department got me interested in the ingredients in pet food. I read the labels, did a little bit of research, tried to share information with my customers.

I wish I'd had this post (courtesy of AlterNet) to share with my customers.

Post author Jill Richardson interviews Marion Nestle, author of the book Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine. This book examines the pet food crisis of 2007--in which numerous pets died from eating contaminated pet food ingredients--and what it tells us about the safety of the human and pet food supply today.

JR: What was the top reason that allowed the pet food problems to reach the magnitude they did? Was it preventable?
MN: The number one reason is that nobody was paying any attention to food ingredients imported from China. After that, the reasons multiply. Pet food companies had no idea where their ingredients came from. The manufacture of pet foods is complicated, so it is centralized in a few manufacturing facilities that make many different brands. The food supply for pets is so tightly linked to the food supplies for people and farm animals that the food supplies cannot be separated; what affects one, affects all. The FDA has lost so much funding over the last 10 years or so that it can't do its job. And China is an important trading partner as well as an exporter of cheap goods. This is a hugely complicated, interconnected story that I thought was well worth telling.

Indeed.