What's in the Pet Food?

Since Coco's pet food was recalled; I decided to score her a bag of quality treats. I grabbed a bag of Newman's Own peanut butter treats. So, what do I find inside ... a baggie with indelible ink writing; probably dropped by a quality control expert who was biding his time on the assembly line while waiting for that break that would make him a pet-food-company-owning movie star.

With melamine (a plastic making chemical) found in wheat gluten and stay bits of this and that in the dog treats, one really starts to wonder what is going on in all of the big food companies. Everyone seems to have diverted their eyes from the quality of the product to the marketing.

The human food industry is probably just as bad as the pet food industry. With accountants squeezing the margins on all products, I suspect that the whole produced food industry is marching in step on the way to a major quality disaster in the human food supply. The agri-giants messed up the Spinach and lettuce last year.

I think the real lesson of the pet food scare is that the supposedly competitive brands of pet foods on the shelves really are little more than different marketing efforts from a very small inbred group of companies.

I wish we had smaller companies run by entrepreneurs who really cared about what they were doing. Instead, we have all of these wanks who are trying to apply Sun Tzu's philosophy on war to business. The end result is a few companies that dominate and that put us at a graver risk than we would have if we had small independent firms.