Designer food.

American food safety regulators have been allowed into China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States. Workers in Zangqiu, a heavily polluted northern city openly admit that melamine, a cheap substance which looks like protein in tests is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein. Melamine is at the centre of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked last month to the deaths of at least 16 pets in the United States.
The manager of an animal feed factory admitted: “If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt pets .” He further added casually: “Pets are not like pigs or chickens.” He explained that they can afford to eat less protein because “they don’t need to grow fast ".
In recent years China’s food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their colour and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim. Oil extracted from human corpses in the manufacture of instant noodles, dye in salted duck eggs to make the yolks unusually red, a sign of high quality. Counterfeit and substandard goods, from fake liquor and medicines to face creams, toothpaste and so on.
Things are getting better though. Yesterday Zeng Xiaoya, formerly the man responsible for ensuring the safety of China’s foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals was executed. This was done either by shooting or by lethal injection. Probably the latter which is used in high-profile cases. So a word of caution, when buying pet food, please use known brands.