Well, I was thinking of making the switch to soy anyway.

Best I can tell, here's the deal, and its a bad deal. Dairy farmers were adding melamine to their milk in order to fetch a decent price. It might be because their milk was of low quality to begin with or because they were adding water to it. In either case, melamine helps give the appearance of higher protein, hence higher quality milk. This makes it really bad news, as the problem now lies at the source and all dairy products are implicated.

When the story first broke the blame was placed on individual milk producers and to a couple bad eggs within those companies. This might indeed have been part of the problem but as we learned of more and more brands with the same exact issue, the only reasonable explanation was to look at the source.  Which is why I am going soy.

If melamine itself was of no harm, the scandal would have been about mal-nourished babies from drinking low protein formula. In fact, there was just this kind of scandal here a few years back.  But it turns out that while melamine is fairly harmless by itself, it is a bit toxic when combined with other milk stuff. The current human experiment will tell us exactly how toxic. Or maybe not, since the press won't be able to report on it fully.

Having visited a small farm just last week, I can imagine the disconnect farmers could have between what they were adding to their milk and what the ultimate result would be. The disclaimer being I know nothing about how the dairy farms work here.

Yang has been breastfeeding Elisa, so we have no worries there. Aidan and Lydia are not huge consumers of milk, but nevertheless drink a good cup or two a day. The brand we buy had not yet been implicated but we are switching them to soy as well. The white elephant in this story is this practice may have been been going on for years and no one knows the long term impact. One would have thought the pet food scandal of last year -- also melamine based -- would have scared the industry straight.

Back in the West, for the past several months and in the past week in particular another type of crisis developed. One that has effectively doubled our national debt from 5 trillion to 10 trillion dollars. As I read and listen to stories about how the zero prime crisis came into being, the chances of a depression era total meltdown, and who is accountable for this mess, the connection to the melamine crisis is clear.

Its a trait most of us, if not all of us, share. One that binds us as uniquely human.

Greed.