Kraft "Cheese?": Adulterated Food?

FDA: Don't Ask! Don't Tell!

America’s dairy farmers already besieged with a chaotic national milk price structure, increasing concentration within the dairy industry, growing energy costs, corporate pressure to employ a questionable bovine growth hormone (rBGH). and the ever-present threat of foot and mouth disease are now being menaced by still another threat to their economic livelihood.

Milk Protein Concentrate (MPC) is today being widely used in the making of so-called cheese products, principally by Kraft, the nation’s largest cheese manufacturer, and Land O’Lakes. The general definition of MPC is a blend of dry dairy ingredients from 42% to 90% casein (pure dairy protein). The World Trade Organization (WTO) has two Harmonized Trade Schedule (HTS) numbers to designate MPC --- 04049 and 3501.

HTS04049 is made by ultra filtering skim milk, retaining anything the size of a protein or larger (bacteria, somatic cell, etc.) and then drying that to form a powder. With HTS 3501 proteins obtained in other ways can be added (i.e., casein). Neither of these two products are considered milk by the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) definitions.

"MPCs are cheaper than domestic forms of dairy proteins (farm milk, nonfat dry milk, etc.). Not manufactured in the U.S. MPC’s are added to cheese vats --- on the cheap yielding more end products with `savings' retained by the manufacturer," according to John Bunting, a Delaware County, New York dairy farmer. Traditionally, half of all U.S. milk is destined to go into cheese production.

Imported MPCs come from traditional dairy countries such as New Zealand, which provides the U.S. with 45% of its imports. Other countries importing MPC’s into the U.S. include Argentina, Poland, India, China and the Ukraine, home of the city of Chernobyl. Between 1996 and 2000 imports of MPCs into the U.S. increased by 400%.

Recently the USDA announced that it was scrapping plans to tighten restrictions on dairy imports posing a risk of foot-and-mouth disease. Any further restrictions on dairy imports will not take effect until a public comment process and publication of a final rule, USDA said May 4. European Union officials announced written confirmation of the decision.

The import restrictions would have primarily affected some European soft cheeses and products containing casein. Casein would have had to be treated at ultra-high temperatures needed to kill the FMD virus. Cheeses would have been required to be similarly treated or to have aged sufficiently to kill the virus.

Under U.S. law, using an ingredient not approved by the FDA is one form of food adulteration. FDA defines food additives as “all substances . . .the intended use of which results or may reasonably be expected to result . . .in their becoming a component or food otherwise affecting the characteristic of food.”

MPC is a food additive without exemption. FDA has no standard for MPC. The FDA does not list MPC among food additives "Generally Regarded As Safe" (GRAS). Thus, using MPC in any human food constitutes adulteration, EXCEPT when individual manufacturers have followed exact costly and complex rules for properly self-determining unapproved food additives to be GRAS.

If a food manufacturer like Kraft, which has 56.8% of the nation's cheese market and 62.2% of the “American” cheese market, and Land O’Lakes completes a self-GRAS determination then use of MPC in a non-standard food would be legal. FDA’s GRAS self-determination rules require each food manufacturer using an unapproved food additive to conduct its own self-determination.

“As of late January, 2001,” Bunting notes, “no food manufacturer has voluntarily submitted any GRAS self-determination to the FDA. Nor has FDA reviewed any GRAS self-determinations by firms listing MPC in human foods. Don’t ask! Don’t tell!”

As Peter Hardin, editor and publisher of the authoritative monthly The Milkweed, who along with Bunting has done much of the investigation of MPC use in the U.S., shows “virtually EVERY Kraft processed `cheese’ product in the supermarket contains MPCs. Add up the Kraft products listing MPC as an ingredient: Cheez Whiz, Velveeta, the array of processed Singles products, Kraft emerges as a huge user of the 100-120 million pounds of MPCs that entered the U.S. in 1999. Kraft now spells processed cheese products `M-P-C’.”

Hardin also has demonstrated that certain claims about Kraft’s processed “cheese” products “appear to be less than truthful.” For example, Kraft uses the word “Cheez,” not cheese in Cheez Whiz, but still claims that Cheez Whiz is a “cheese dip.” And, he adds, “good luck finding cheese in Velveeta, a Pasteurized, Prepared Cheese Product.’

“Kraft has intentionally `dumbed down’ the quality and integrity of the “processed `cheese’ products by using MPC,” he adds. “But Kraft (and others) want more. The National Cheese Institute (NCI) has petitioned the FDA to allow ANY dairy ingredient (foreign or domestic) to be used in cheese manufacture. Kraft --- NCI’s largest member --- wants to make it legal for all cheese manufacturers to `dumb down’ all cheeses, processed, natural . . whatever. Why? Cheaper ingredients boost corporate profits.”