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Pet Food Regulations

Made with Real (Wheat) Meat

How can a consumer know if they are purchasing a real meat chunks can of pet food or a fabricated meat-y chunks can of pet food? We can’t. Lack of regulations allow consumers to remain in the dark about their pet food purchases.

How can a consumer know if they are purchasing a real meat can of pet food or a fabricated meat-y can of pet food? We can’t. Lack of proper regulations allow consumers to remain in the dark about their pet food purchases.

Look at this image of Beneful Chopped Blends with Beef, Carrots, Peas and Barley Dog Food

BenefulChoppedBlendsBeef

This dog food has the appearance to be made of almost completely beef. This dog food sells for $1.77 per 10 ounce tub at Walmart – which is $0.17 an ounce. As comparison, a human food quality can of beef costs $0.58 an ounce. How can a beef pet food sell for so much less?

The television commercial advertising this pet food might give consumers a small clue to how a $0.17 an ounce (retail) dog food can have the appearance of being almost all meat…

 

 

The clue is “meaty chunks”. The dog says “I mean its Beneful, I can actually see the meaty chunks and carrots right there.” The dog didn’t say ‘I can actually see the meat chunks‘ – the dog said, “I can actually see the meat-y chunks…”.

So what are meat-y chunks? We don’t know, meat-y has no official definition within pet food regulations.

Meat-y chunks could be accomplished through a process of emulsifying bits and pieces of less expensive meat products into a fine slurry, adding in a thickener that allows the meat slurry to be formed into any size or shape required resulting in a tremendous cost savings in the final product.

Let’s start this explanation with the example of hot dogs.

75414-How-Hot-Dogs-Are-Made-PHOTOS-og2z

From the website PandaWhale is an interesting post about the process of how hot dogs are made. This image is the meat slurry that eventually becomes a hot dog. (My apologies if this ruins your hot dog consumption.) Briefly, meat is finely ground and thickeners are added to help the product hold its shape.

In human food, there is a process of making fake meat using no meat product at all. This is known as seitan. About.com provides the following definition of seitan: “Although it is made from wheat, seitan has little in common with flour or bread. Also called “wheat meat”, “wheat protein”, “wheat gluten” or simply “gluten”, seitan becomes surprisingly similar to the look and texture of meat when cooked, making it a popular meat substitute.”

seitan

Seitan products that contain no meat ingredient can be made to mimic the look of meat. From TheVeganandKorean website this product looks exactly like meat sausage.

Seiten2

 

 

From Wikipedia, this is an image of canned fake duck. Please notice the texture of this product how it mimics the look of poultry/duck skin and shredded meat (remember, this product contains no meat at all)…

 

 

 

 

 

McRib

And a familiar human food meat product, from Huffington Post this is an image of a McDonald’s McRib prior to cooking. The ground pork meat is shaped into rib-looking form.

Long story short, fake meat or meat-y meat (made with meat slurry and thickeners) can be sliced and diced into just about any form or shape to replicate the look of actual meat chunks. Food technology can make a meat-y product look almost identical to real meat at a far less cost.

Back to pet food. How can a consumer know if a pet food contains actual meat or is meat-y?

Unfortunately for pet food consumers, there are no regulations specific to meat-y ingredients. There is no legal definition for meat slurry formed into meat-y chunk ingredients. These ingredients would be lumped into the meat definition it consists of (such as beef or chicken or pork). But pet food consumers have no real way of knowing if a pet food is made from real pieces of meat, meat slurry and a starch used to form a piece of meat, or a combination of the two.

However we do have the pet food ingredient list. If the meat-y chunks are made/formed by the pet food manufacturer, the company is required to list all ingredients used to make the meat-y chunks. So, consumers can look at the pet food ingredient list for clues to meat or meat-y. Using the pet food example above – Beneful – here are the ingredients of this Chopped Blends with Beef, Carrots, Peas and Barley Dog Food

“Water sufficient for processing, beef, wheat gluten, carrots, liver, meat by-products, peas, barley, corn starch-modified, artificial and natural flavors,…”

Within the first ten ingredients of this pet food are two animal protein sources (beef and meat by-products) and two ingredients that could be used to thicken and form meat-y chunks (wheat gluten and corn starch-modified). Are the two starches used to mold the meat-y chunks? We don’t know.

Here is an image of a new cat food from Purina Fancy Feast called ‘Broths’ – this particular variety is Tuna, Anchovy, and Whitefish in a Decadent Silky Broth’.

FancyFeastBrothTuna

As you can see, this cat food appears to be mostly chunks of fish in a broth. However, the ingredients of this cat food lists numerous thickeners. From the Fancy Feast website the ingredients are:

“fish broth, tuna, anchovies, fish extract, whitefish, modified tapioca starch, potato starch, wheat starch, sugar, salt, soy protein, vegetable oil, guar gum, carrageenan, vitamin e supplement, egg whites, spice and coloring.”

In this broth pet food are tapioca starch, potato starch, wheat starch, soy protein, guar gum, carrageenan and egg whites. How can a broth pet food contain 7 different thickeners?

I asked this question of Fancy Feast. They stated the 3 starches and 2 gums are used to texture the broth and the cat food is made from actual pieces of fish. I asked specifically if the fish pieces are molded pieces of fish, and was told they are actual pieces of fish (though molded fish could be termed as actual pieces of fish too).

Just in case my understanding of a broth was incorrect, I searched (and searched) online for a broth product or recipe that included starches or gums. I couldn’t find one. So again, how can a broth pet food contain 7 different thickeners? Is this cat food made from molded fish ingredients? We don’t know; no regulation exists to provide consumers this information.

The worst news for consumers, is we have no regulation to require manufacturers to tell us if the meat used in a pet food is actual meat/fish or if it is meat-y/fish-y. We have nothing but the ingredient list and perhaps advertising clues to make an assumption about the pet food. Consumers can ask the manufacturer specific questions, but regulations do not require manufacturers to completely inform us of what we are trusting our pet’s life with.

And also remember, that the pet food regulations we do have allow the absolute worst quality of meat and fish to be processed into pet food without disclosure to the consumer. So meat-y and fish-y can not only include multiple starches to form the chunks, but the animal protein used could be sourced from diseased animals rejected for use in human food.

The point of this post is not to make a judgement if meat-y or fish-y pet food is suitable nutrition or not. The point is that regulations do not require manufacturers to properly inform consumers what they are purchasing. How can consumers trust a brand – trust the entire industry – if we are not properly informed of what we are buying? Until we (consumers) have proper regulations that demand complete and proper information be provided to us, it is fair for each of us to make our own assumption if starches and gums are used to produce a meat-y pet food or a fish-y pet food. I’m confident the industry won’t like our assumptions. Assumptions do no one any good – but…thanks to lack of proper regulations, it’s all we have for now. This is something I will ask AAFCO and FDA about at the next meeting (August).

Regardless to lack of regulations, keep asking your pet food manufacturer questions. For canned/moist pet food you can question the manufacturer directly if molded meat ingredients are used, however perhaps the better question is what cuts of meat or fish ingredients are included in the pet food. The more questions we ask, the more we learn.

 

 

 

Wishing you and your pet(s) the best,

Susan Thixton
Pet Food Safety Advocate
Author Buyer Beware, Co-Author Dinner PAWsible
TruthaboutPetFood.com
Association for Truth in Pet Food

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14 Comments

14 Comments

  1. Barbara Fellnermayr

    April 23, 2015 at 5:11 pm

    Just remember when you pay .17 an ounce you get what you pay for. What ingredients do people think are being used when that’s what they pay for the finished product? Price is only an issue when EVERYTHING else is the same!

    • Peter

      April 24, 2015 at 6:28 am

      Barbara, the question is why, why, WHY do consumers not understand this? Why?

      Why do we trust pet food manufacturers that we have an adversarial relationship with? Why do (often) well-meaning consumers trot out of the “big box” store lugging a 40-50lb. bag of dry food that they pay so little for (never dreaming of calculating it per pound) and think that they are getting a quality product?

      • Barbara Fellnermayr

        April 24, 2015 at 11:53 am

        I think that they trust big manufacturers because they go to be big and successful. Big and successful companies wouldn’t knowingly hurt our animals. People, they got big and successful by slashing corners and using less than quality ingredients.

  2. Robin

    April 23, 2015 at 6:07 pm

    I watched an episode of Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs” on A&E a couple days ago and it was about a company in my state of CA that goes out and picks up the dead and rotting carcasses of farm animals. On the show, they picked up several dead dairy cows, including one so rotten that it had tripled in size and they told Mike that these can literally explode from the build up of rotten gases. Everything was covered an inch thick in squirming maggots. They picked up a dead horse, some pigs, llama, alpaca, and sheep. Brought the truck back to “processing” They stripped off the hides to be sold for leather, then they threw all the different rotten carcasses into this huge grinder, and you could actually see huge chunks of feces being torn from intestines, ground all of them together into a bloody, maggoty glop, cooked the glop to pull out the fat, (rendering) and all through this Mike is gagging at the stench and feeling nauseous, grabbing the wall to keep from passing out and it didn’t look like his trademark humor, it looked real. At the end, they explained how they recycle EVERY PART, which I was thinking was so great….. probably it was going to be fertilizers, ….and then Mike asked where does the finished rendered brown glop end up and the guy says…..(among other things like poultry feed) the MEAT portion of nearly ALL BRANDS OF EXTRUDED (KIBBLE) PET FOOD. This should be a mandatory episode for anyone who still argues in defense of kibble. Gross, gross and utterly gross.

    • Jane Eagle

      April 23, 2015 at 8:47 pm

      Thanks for that info…I think…My mantra: If it’s not safe for YOU to eat, it is not safe for your pets to eat! (“But wolves and wild predators eat rotten meat all the time…” yes, and they die at 5-6 years of age…)

    • LP

      April 24, 2015 at 10:28 am

      Here’s the link to the episode on YouTube. Around the 30 min mark is where the reference is to where the rendered meat goes. Warning: this is disturbing.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwJE_e_hBxU

      • Maggie

        April 25, 2015 at 12:03 am

        I listened from before to 5 minutes after the 30 minute mark and I heard no mention of pet food / kibble, just poultry food.

  3. Linda Horn

    April 23, 2015 at 6:49 pm

    Maybe we ought to change the saying “you get what you pay for” to “you don’t get what you don’t pay for”. When it comes to product quality, you may or may not get higher quality, when you pay more for the product, but you definitely will NOT get quality when you do NOT pay for it. Thank you Susan, for fighting to change pet food regulations, so the pet food industry will have to actually disclose everything that is in their so-called “food”!

    • Jane Eagle

      April 23, 2015 at 8:51 pm

      No, we usually do NOT get what we pay for! I used to buy Wellness until the results of the Consumer-funded tests. Apparently, I was paying over $2 per pound for dangerous garbage in a pretty bag. Then I realized: I can buy fresh human-grade meat at the grocery store for $2 per pound. SO that’s what they eat now (plus veggies and supplements). We are never going back to kibble.

  4. jb

    April 23, 2015 at 8:00 pm

    Buy meat & process for your companion. Then you KNOW what is in their food.

  5. Rick

    April 23, 2015 at 8:37 pm

    I have a video that can be seen about the rendering plane in Vernon CA.
    http://www.ocdoggiedinners.com//HTML/links.htm What is really in pet food.

  6. Pam G.

    April 24, 2015 at 12:50 am

    It makes me sick to walk by the many isles of pet feed. I would NEVER again buy the garbage they call pet food. We make our 3 babies good healthy nutritious food in the time it takes to cook our own meals. Seeing and hearing the description of the rendering plants operation was worse then I ever imagined.
    The owners, and managers of these deceptive businesses need to have the meaty chunks feed to their children and eat it themselves.

  7. Terri Janson

    April 24, 2015 at 12:09 pm

    GROSS!!!! I get so tired to trying to explain why these bags of crap can be sold on store shelves. Most people will not believe me…..but I still go on about it. I will never stop. I don’t understand how these BIG PET food companies can get away with what they do. BUT…I feel more and more people are getting their eyes pried open because of US! 🙂

  8. Ellie

    April 27, 2015 at 1:52 pm

    It is astounding the things that Americans will buy and eat and yet no one bothers to read the ingredient list. If they do read it they do not understand most of what is on it. Most people just trust that someone is watching out for them.
    The ingredients in human foods are outrageous so how can we even imagine that pet food would be “wholesome and delicious?”
    Most of the diseases that people die of in the US are diet related. You will not find those diseases in countries where the people do not eat processed foods and where there foods have not been genetically engineered or injected with hormones, steroids and antibiotics.
    Now our pets are dying of the same diseases as well as suffering from the same auto-immune diseases that cause degeneration of bones, joints and internal organs.

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