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EVERY North American pet owner no doubt shudders at the memory of The Great Pet Food Recall of 2007. For two months beginning in March, many leading dog and cat food companies pulled their products from stores after discovering they were laced with the toxic compound melamine.

By the time the incident had played out, an untold number of pets had died, the Chinese government had executed a businessman for fraud, and people everywhere got an unsavoury glimpse of the dark side of the pet-food industry.

This is the story tells in . Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and author of several well-received books about the food industry, traces the contaminated food back through the pet-food supply chain, from familiar brand names to the handful of anonymous middlemen who actually make the stuff to the even more obscure sources of raw materials. The trail leads back to Chinese suppliers, who were spiking their wheat gluten with melamine, a nitrogen-rich molecule that made the gluten appear to have a higher protein content.

Nestle also devotes a chapter to the response of the US Food and Drug Administration, the agency responsible for monitoring pet foods. The proved woefully understaffed to handle a crisis of this magnitude 鈥� the division responsible for pet foods had just two full-time employees to field more than 18,000 phone calls from worried pet owners. And she charges that in the heat of the crisis, FDA officials seemed more worried about protecting pet-food companies than getting timely information to the public.

鈥淛ust two employees had to field calls from 18,000 pet owners鈥�

Nestle also finds that some of the contaminated pet food ended up being fed to hogs and chickens, so that melamine entered the human food chain. Should we be worried? She implies so, but never calculates whether anyone might ingest dangerous quantities of melamine through contaminated meat. The FDA鈥檚 figures suggest they would not.

Still, Nestle鈥檚 account makes a thorough case study of the pet food crisis and its implications. If that were all she set out to do, this would be a fine little book. But Nestle has bigger game in her sights, as suggested by the book鈥檚 subtitle, The chihuahua in the coal mine. 鈥淐ontaminated pet foods,鈥� she writes, 鈥渨ere early warnings of the safety hazards of globalization.鈥�

Here, unfortunately, Nestle lets us down. What does the pet-food recall really tell us about comparable problems in the human food chain? Instead of laying out the parallels between the two food systems, Nestle gives us a chapter of advocacy: eat local, label country of origin, establish stronger rules for import safety. All worthy aims, no doubt, but without the careful analysis to back it up, Nestle鈥檚 chihuahua is more bark than bite.