Two quotes stuck with me from this meeting, and they summed up the whole thing. “Every person here wants to see animals live their best with the best nutrition.” And: “Ag is funded by the industry it regulates.” Both true. Same meeting. Sets up the tension below.
Take FSMA labels. On one side, the label changes are 16 years overdue — the law has been on the books since 2007, the original deadline was 2009, and we’re still waiting on labels that actually reflect what’s in the bag. On the other side, industry is out here complaining about the cost of printing new labels. From companies big enough that they redesign and reprint labels constantly anyway. Pick a lane.
Then there’s CIOC — brought in specifically to educate the public about raw diets, and somehow never thought to call the trade association that actually represents the raw food industry to ask what our stance is. It isn’t outreach when you bypass the industry you’re reaching out about.
On the brighter side: after five years of effort on my end, HPP finally has an official definition. Genuinely proud of that one. Yes, it really took five years — for one definition.
Two more foods were added to the common food index — parsnip and Saskatoon berries. Some feedback centered around whether these are “common.” I’m guessing the dissenters prefer burgers and pizza and eschew fruits and veggies.
And speaking of things that take forever: FSMA label changes are pushing 20 years in the making at this point, and they still haven’t been expanded to cover horse feed — even though horses need the same sugar and starch disclosure people and pet food are getting. Two decades in, and somehow there’s still a “not yet” list.
Which brings me to the biggest two-sided moment of the meeting. AAFCO wants to be seen as a world leader. But when challenged to move on senior pet food profiles, industry said that more than 15 peer-reviewed articles still weren’t enough evidence to justify a change. Meanwhile, a lot of those same companies already operate under FEDIAF’s senior profiles — Europe finalized those back in 2017. You don’t get to claim global leadership while dragging your feet on a standard your own members already meet somewhere else.
In a very well laid out presentation, we learned that plaintiff attorneys and the FDA are both watching closely these days — but for different reasons. Having the right form of a claim on your label doesn’t mean it’s substantiated, and those are really two separate exposures: one’s a regulatory problem, the other’s a plaintiff attorney problem. Either way, social media counts as part of your label now — liking or reposting a customer’s “this cured my dog’s cancer” post makes that claim yours, and there’s no “two-click rule” protecting you just because you linked out to someone else’s claim instead of making it yourself.
None of this is really about any one person in that room. I keep coming back to that first quote, because I believe it — the people doing this work largely do want to see animals live better, longer, healthier lives. But that quote and “ag is funded by the industry it regulates” are in conflict with each other. Good intentions and slow-moving self-interest can be true of the same group of people at the same time, because individuals don’t set the pace of an industry — the incentives around them do. Nobody in that room is voting against senior pet food profiles because they don’t care about senior pets. They’re operating inside a system that pays for itself by staying the same, and changing that system is a much bigger, much slower fight than any one well-meaning person can win alone. That’s the real two sides of an AAFCO meeting — not good people versus bad people, but good people working inside a structure that isn’t built to move quickly, even when the people in the room are ready to.
