cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26864906
Britain must allow US chlorine-washed chicken into UK markets if it wants relief from sweeping tariffs, Donald Trump has indicated.
It comes after the UK failed to avoid tariffs imposed on the global economy, with the US president slapping a 10 per cent levies on all British exports to the United States.
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In a statement published alongside the tariff announcement, the White House said: “The UK maintains non-science-based standards that severely restrict US exports of safe, high-quality beef and poultry products.”
It suggested that Britain’s ban on chlorinated chicken was among a range of “non-tariff barriers” that limit the US’s ability to trade.
The UK has long ruled out allowing imports of chlorine-washed chicken from the US due to health concerns, with Downing Street on Thursday reiterating its manifesto commitment to high food standards.
Asked whether the UK could allow imports of chlorine washed chicken in order to appease the US, the prime minister’s officials spokesperson said: “Our position on that is unchanged. You’ve got the manifesto commitment on food standards, which obviously remains.”
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The last major polling done on the issue, conducted in 2020, revealed that 80 per cent of Britons are opposed to allowing imports to the UK, and the same proportion is also against allowing chicken products that have been farmed using hormones.
There is also growing pressure from the farming industry to rule out concessions on the issue, amid fears it could undercut British farmers and drive down food standards.
Nigel Farage admitted he would allow American chlorine-washed chicken to be sold in the UK as part of a free trade deal with the US.
A 2014 report by US non-profit Consumer Reports found that 97 per cent of 300 American chicken breasts tested contained harmful bacteria, including Salmonella, campylobacter and E.Coli.
Around half of the chicken breasts tested also contained at least one type of bacteria that was resistant to three or more antibiotics.
Meanwhile, if you ate a large amount of chlorinated chicken – the equivalent to 5 per cent of your body weight in one day –you could be exposed to harmful levels of the chemical compound known as chlorate,
Yeah, I’d suggest holding out on this one. The way US farms raise chickens is deplorable and leads to the spread of disease.
Americans tend to be unhealthy af for a reason. Regulatory capture is a major issue in our ever more corrupt government.
I think we should not overinterpret this. Lets walk through it backwards.
5% of your body weight in chicken in one day? Assuming you are a small thin person of 55 kg. That means you would need to eat around 2.9 kg of chicken in a day. If you were a 80kg tall person, you’d be looking at eating 4 kg of chicken in a day. Neither is realistic imo.
Now antibiotic resistance bacteria definetly is an issue.
As for harmful bacteria including Salmonella… Unless there is data to compare with from other countries that does not mean much in itself. Raw chicken is notorious for giving food poisioning and being much more dangerous in that regard than raw beef, pork, or even fresh fish. I got a very bad food poisoning from undercooked chicken not to long ago and that was in the EU.
Doesn’t mean that US farming practices aren’t much worse than most EU standards (if enforced), but these metrics mentioned by themselves are not the best indicators for that.
I am a small and thin person of 40kg.
Now would I realistically eat 2kg chicken in one day? That would be two whole chickens, which is not impossible but unlikely as I don’t really like chicken.
Would I still prefer my food not to contain a potential risky chemical? Absolutely.
I agree. I think there is better arguments to be made for that though. More interesting than short term health effects would be health effects from long term exposure. Rather than just stating the presence of Bacteria, spread of diseases like “Bird flu” that could also infect humans or the building of multi-resistant Bacteria in industrial farming is more relevant than the presence of Salmonella, which is quite prevalent in chicken, even under good farming practices.
Nigel Farage admitted he would allow American chlorine-washed chicken to be sold in the UK as part of a free trade deal with the US.
God, what a sniveling excuse for a politician.
generally kinda fucked up to think about raw meat being bulk shipped across oceans anyways
Oh boy if you think that’s fucked up: They take American chickens, send them to China to process, then ship them back to the USA to sell to us.
Of course, the crazy works both ways: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-is-china-treating-north-carolina-like-the-developing-world-122892/
Whatever is going on in that article, the Carolinas are developing countries states. Most of America is, really.
The UK maintains non-science-based standards
Maybe look at who is in charge of your health department before your start complaining about “non-science-based standards”
The “head” of any department is often not a scientist. Scientists conduct technical work, they don’t manage departments or orgs.
Yuck! American “food”. In general, not just chicken.
I was in Atlanta recently, and our allergy kid wanted to eat a cake at a family party, so I told them to check the ingredients. They couldn’t understand the list and brought it to me. There was no wonder, the list was full of artificial everything. And here I thought the UK’s UPF was bad - I was shocked that cake was even considered food.
Well, with American bread being so loaded with corn syrup that it is considered “cake” in Europe, one should not be surprised.
And as the American attitude to those “artificial everythings” is to include them as long as they are not proven unsafe, in contrast to the European that you can only include them if they have proven generally safe, there are a lot of things you won’t find in European ingredient lists. For some of those items, it takes the US decades to withdraw them from the “suitable for food” list, sometimes even after some thrid world countries considered them illegal.
This is honestly just a weird talking point I see online. I’m sure some bread is marked as “cake” or whatever but that’s not what most Americans eat.
I just checked my bread (which doesn’t come from a bakery) and the entire loaf has 6 grams of sugar in it. And you can’t make bread without sugar.
The bread being considered cake thing isn’t what you think it is. It was a matter of taxation, not nutrition.
US made food items, never safe to even bring into a kitchen. Look at the general US obesity, to get scared
