Don's Dairy Supply, Inc.

WRITTEN BY TERRY HANNUM, DELAWARE COUNTY TIMES

Here is a suggestion for a New Years Resolution:  do not eat any more industrial adhesives. This sounds not only logical but really easy to do since your grocery list seldom includes this manner of thing on it and the local markets certainly wouldn’t stock food with ingredients that might have originally been sold as glue.   Think again!

   The culprit here is Milk Protein Concentrates or MPC’s and even in this historically rich and proud dairy farming community, the mention of MPC’s brings on disdainful commentaries. They do not sound too bad, the protein of milk in a concentrated form but this is a name that honestly does not quite fit.  In fact it is so far removed from dairy that it is included in some lactose free and dairy free foods.  MPC’s are a powder that is left after all ultra-processing has been done to milk to remove all valuable components from it.  It neither is not powdered milk nor is it dry milk but something altogether different. 

     Chemists might find the composition an interesting study of the protein lineup, the chemical compounds of MPC’s but for many consumers this is not as important to understand as the uses of MPC’s.  Aside from one plant in Portales, New Mexico, this non-milk yet somehow still milk product is produced in Russia (large plant in Chernobyl), China and India to name a few. The product is then shipped to almost every other region of the globe but not as a food product or ingredient for food products.  Nations (other than United States) use MPC’s as effective, inexpensive industrial glue.

      Why does U.S. import MPC’s (in 2004 alone 34 million metric tons were shipped in and the number is much greater now) and use this industrial glue product in foods?  Of course the very short answer is ‘money’.  MPC’s, being the last end product of all milk processing is cheap, especially when it comes in from places other than U.S. where there are no regulations, no research (other than its adhesive properties), no standards and no safety oversight.  It is less expensive than using the readily available milk that is produced right in our own country. Because MPC comes into U.S. ports as a non-food product it qualifies for low tariffs and no USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) inspections.

    So here we are with millions, now stretching into billions of tons of MPC imported into our country as inedible and it is transformed into an acceptable food product.  For most people, especially those who eat, moral questions arise regarding who would allow this to happen, to knowingly feed our country’s population with a former glue substance, what sort of person would do this? 

      There is a consideration that maybe industrial glue is not too bad to eat and that everyone should increase the quantities they already consume, start a new nutrition fad. This is exactly where the rampant use of MPC did start.  The beginning craze of MPC’s came about two decades ago when the high protein, low carbohydrate diets were peaking in popularity. The spin-off of prepared foods for sale that met the eating plans dietary criteria evolved with MPC being just what they were looking for and it is cheap too!  That marked the beginning of the food processors rush to get more of this stuff, no matter if it may not even be the end product of cow milk processing but can be milk from camel, yak, water buffalo, goat, horses and sheep due to the lack of a regulatory agency.

   Several years ago, in the face of tragedies throughout the world that were resulting in the deaths of children, a milk code labeling system was started so that consumers could identify where the milk that they were buying came from.  In Delaware County ‘36’ is the magic number to know.   This began when the chemical melamine was found in the milk that had killed a child in United States and hundreds elsewhere in the world, particularly China.  Melamine found its way into children’s diet by way of infant and toddler formulas and despite research that now indicates that melamine may not have been the true culprit, it was something in the MPC.  The milk coding was the results of peoples demand to know where the milk they are buying originated from. 

Unfortunately, melamine is still being found in some MPC.

    This is the time to start checking food labels to prove that milk protein concentrates are not in the food that you eat.  Narrow the search by if you consume any processed cheeses or processed cheese products.  Subway sandwich eaters can fall in line here, supporters of what seems to be the all-American Kraft (owned by the Phillip Morris Corporation of cigarette fame) processed cheese slices along with most other corporations that make processed cheese slices, Doritos brand and other cheese flavored chips along with many other snack type foods, candy, instant coffee creamers, many nutrition drinks and baby formulas have the milk protein concentrates in them.

   Reaching out to inform consumers to a potentially hazardous and certainly offensive ingredient is a challenge.  The logical first step would be to politely ask large food manufactures to stop putting this ingredient in the food we eat.  Ok, setting logic aside and perhaps even politeness, the best way to control this situation is to obtain political backing and begin regulating the import of this ingredient.   Take action and write or email any elected officials from the President of United States to mayors.