> Perdue on Monday defended [...] the technique to disinfect poultry [...], arguing that U.S. farmers now use a chemical called peracetic acid rather than chlorine: "Peracetic acid ... is a great pathogen reduction treatment. You know what it is? It's vinegar, essentially. To say that's unsafe or not to be used, we don't think there's a basis for that in sound science."
I always thought the EU doesn't want this procedure because it effectively allows farmers to take a short cut and cover up bad practices used earlier in the chain. Under this premise, this quote just argues against a straw man for an otherwise meaningless counterargument.
Yes, the claim is untrue on its face: peracids and acids are chemically different and have different properties. PR flaks shouldn't be lying to the public, and I don't want to minimize that.
On the other hand, peracetic acid is something I would accept as a chemical treatment without qualms, while chlorine compounds would squick me out. It actually will break down into vinegar when it oxidizes something, and on the surface of raw meat, this process will be completed by the time a consumer gets it.
I use hydrogen peroxide to disinfect contact lenses. It neutralizes into water and oxygen in the presence of a catalyst. It would do that over a long enough period when exposed to air. I linked a paper in the thread elsewhere that shows the same decay for the chicken washes.
Using peroxide as a lens disinfectant has advantages over other multi-purpose solutions which cause increased corneal staining and are at much higher risk of allergic reactions.
This is about something else. If you are allowed to clean meat that aggressively it usually means what passes as good enough to be sold has a lower standard. Or the other way around: because we in the EU can't use these methods the whole supply chain and quality control has to be much much stricter to deal with this. We can't just dip the thing in chlorine and assume it is clean now.
1. Chlorine isn't used anymore, it's dishonest to claim that it is just as it's dishonest to claim peracetic acid is dangerous or ends up in the end product.
2. Well aware of the problems and concerns with the supply chain in the US, but not treating and dealing with salmonella outbreaks would have measurably worse health outcomes. These problems don't get fixed overnight. I'm fine with those problems being attacked but don't spread FUD about what you don't understand.
1. No, chlorine is still widely used on processed poultry in the U.S. The latest data from the National Chicken Council suggests that it's used in around 10% of chicken processing facilities. This is not a small amount of chicken.
2. There is no evidence that the absence of antimicrobial treatment of chicken carcasses yields "measurably worse health outcomes", as you say. Data collected by USDA and the UK's Food Standards Agency use different criteria for their respective streams, and thus can't offer definitive conclusions, but there don't appear to be large differences in contamination between the American and British systems.
@atoav's comment accurately conveys the official position of EU and UK trade and food safety agencies. I see nothing here to indicate that you have any better understanding of the topic than @atoav.
So the thing you need to know is there's 2 categories of soft contacts that are currently on the market. Hydrogels and Silicone Hydrogels (SiHy). The latter are newer and have become much more common as they are in theory healthier for the eye (they allow more oxygen to pass through). There's some drawbacks though in that the material isn't inherently wettable because silicone is hydrophobic by nature. This means it's a bit more complex to formulate a material and there's some quirks to it, notably it's usually stiffer. This might affect how solutions interact with the surface.
Corneal staining is basically scratching of the outer part of your eye. It is usually asymptomatic but can result in a burning sensation. It was found that the surface of SiHy is affected by what material is used to clean them. This link includes some research and plenty of linked studies: https://contactlensupdate.com/2013/08/14/what-do-we-know-abo... I had a better link that compared various products on the market but I'm unable to find it as this time.
Interesting. That link seems to say they aren't even really confident what staining is, it could just be the fluorescin dye binding to the eye. My friend wears Night & Day (SiHy) and rarely takes them out at night, replaces them maybe every 1-2 months. Mostly no issues or burning, although he did get a corneal ulcer one time, and he has seen increased neovascularization.
I think they are not the same thing, not exactly, and the difference is interesting.
Hydrogen peroxide is a rather - comparatively - unstable substance, it decomposes to water and oxygen; hydrogen peroxide is a rather strong oxidizer, which defines a lot of its properties.
I'd assume double -O- bond in peracetic acid behaves the same - decomposes with release of O and acetic acid (or the anion of the acid). This oxidizing effect likely provides the effect which is desired - the same which chlorine would produce, that is, oxidizing a lot of things in chickens making them safer.
I've heard that hydrogen peroxide is used in Europe instead of chlorine in US for water treatment - for example, in swimming pools. I'm not sure why peracetic acid is chosen.
They are not chemically the same thing. Presumably they don't use vinegar because vinegar is less effective. However, the implication is that the chemical they use will break down to vinegar by the time it gets to the consumer.
I don't want meat washed in vinegar, bleh. Maybe co-incidentally, that's how some supermarkets used to prolong the shelf life of meat once it started becomming smelly and sticky. Just washed it like that in vinegar, and re-packaged it. Like 20 years ago. Thanks but no thanks.
Not sure if sarcasm or not, but please don't try that. You can use vinegar or other acidic marinades to prolong its edibility, but only before it has started to rot.
Yeah, but that does not necessarily make it edible again. Rotting is basically just all the little critters (bacteria, funghi) around us digesting it, which gradually turns the object in question into their output. That output can be toxic for us humans, and doesn't necessarily break down into digestable substances during cooking. I'm not very knowledgable on the topic and processes, so ymmv, but I wouldn't try it, food poisoning isn't very pleasant.
> Theories more favorable to corporate activities are portrayed in words as "sound science." Past examples where "sound science" was used include the research into the toxicity of Alar, which was heavily criticized by antiregulatory advocates, and Herbert Needleman's research into low dose lead poisoning. ...
> According to epidemiologist David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety, and Health in the Clinton Administration, the tobacco industry invented the "sound science" movement in the 1980s as part of their campaign against the regulation of second-hand smoke
The food process relies on the fact that peracetic acid decomposes rather quickly. However, handling the active solution requires great care. It's highly corrosive and toxic.
I would mostly be concerned about the sub-products of peracids reacting with foods. I don't know if there is any studies on this subject.
Poor (cheap) practices earlier in the process (aka life of the chicken) could cause lower quality meat, fewer nutrients, more likelihood for nasty stuff. Washing the germs away doesn't necessarily wash away the effect of that.
I think they'd argue "cleanliness" is not the only aspect of what "good" is. The chickens' diets and living conditions affect the quality of the chicken. To say nothing of the animal cruelty angle...
"The end doesn't always justify the means" the saying goes, therefore for the end to be "unequivocally good", the means has to be taken into consideration. This so called "eww" factor I think is a gross understatement of animal cruelty, other injustices and poor practices
Because the purpose of the steps is to hide faults and failures in the process leading up to the final product, and this means that any failure in this process is _likely_ to lead to a bad/unsafe/unhealthy product.
I remember when I visited a supermarket in the states and noticed something very weird: Not only chicken breast was super super cheap but the color was whiteish and didn't look right to me.
Since a young age I visited egg farms and I can tell you the conditions are far from ideal, they even turn on the lights at 3am to enhance egg production. We're talking about egg farms that are regulated by EU laws. About 12 years ago the EU regulated how many chickens were allowed in a single case (about 8 I believe).
Even with EU regulation it is well known that the amount of antibiotics is simple too much and dangerous, we've law holes like: It is regulated in France but you can cross the border and get it in Spain as they don't control who buys it.
>I remember when I visited a supermarket in the states and noticed something very weird: Not only chicken breast was super super cheap but the color was whiteish and didn't look right to me.
The fat on American chickens is visibly whiter than those I've seen for sale from small local farms as well as the ones in Australia, which both tend to have a much deeper yellow to them.
I think that's a diet thing, though.
Woody breast tends to give a striated appearance to the meat.
The Netherlands has a treaty (against the outcome of the referendum) with the Ukraine which allows for effectively undermining our animal welfare policies.
Who knows what's next. Cheaper Tesla vehicles, more US technology, less regulation around the EU, and so on. This whole "chemical-washed" paranoia is just propaganda from EU farmers, and EU protectionism. I for one welcome cheaper products, so at least people who barely afford food would at least have an option. Certainly if standards of living are so high around the EU no one would buy such products anyway, right?
But we don't want cheaper Tesla vehicles. We don't want mass surveillance tools that masquerade as US technology. We don't want poor people to eat chemical-soaked chicken. It may surprise you but not everyone gapes in awe at America as a model to follow around the globe.
EU - ~500 Million people. "In the EU, over 91,000 salmonellosis cases are reported each year." [1]
US. ~330 Million People. "CDC estimates Salmonella bacteria cause about 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations, and 420 deaths in the United States every year. Food is the source for most of these illnesses." [2]
> Unfortunately Morris is making the statistical rookie error of comparing two statistics measuring completely different things. For the US, he reports estimates of total illnesses whilst for the UK he uses recorded lab reports. The actual number of illnesses in any country are unknown as many will not be diagnosed or reported. We do know for sure that the number will be far higher than lab reports of known, reported cases.
> And in fact, the lab report data are available for both countries and could have made a valid comparison. The US reported 46,623 salmonella lab cases in 2016, a rate of 14.5 per 100,000 people and a similar rate for Campylobacter. The latest UK figures (reported on the Reality Check article) are 10,089 for Salmonella (around 17 per 100,000 people) and 63,946 for Campylobacter (over 100 per 100,000 people). It might justifiably be queried whether lab reports are collected on the same basis in the US and UK but on the basis of what we have, rates are actually higher in the UK than the US.
This is a great misuse of data and not relevant as presented.
Perhaps the US has a significantly higher per capita consumption of Salmonella infection vectors. Perhaps people in the US are less clean in ways that increase infections. Perhaps EU cases are under reported.
Maybe USA eats more salads - but agreed, pushing out this data without a breakdown going X % was due to chicken and outlying the data without that context to induce a perception that all is due to such chicken is a bit off-key.
If we look at hospitalizations or deaths the difference is still significant.
> Outbreaks due to Salmonella are on the rise, with S. Enteritidis causing one in six food-borne disease outbreaks in 2016. Salmonella bacteria were the most common cause of food-borne outbreaks (22.3%), an increase of 11.5% compared to 2015. They caused the highest burden in terms of numbers of hospitalisations (1,766; 45.6% of all hospitalised cases) and of deaths (10; 50% of all deaths among outbreak cases).
I've heard that people in the US are discouraged from eating raw eggs. That makes it sound like the EU would be at greater risk, but if we the US doesn't do proper measurements we can pretend that it makes it impossible to even attempt to compare.
Eggs are a funny one, as the regulation is very different between US and EU.
In the US all commercial eggs must be washed, which destroys the cuticle and is why eggs are stored in a fridge to keep fresh. In the EU commercial eggs cannot be washed, and are typically stored outside the fridge (and vaccinated against salmonella, iirc).
There is a lot of contention about the effect on bacterial culturing, but research I've seen suggests it's a bit of a wash (e.g. 10.1371/journal.pone.0090987)
This is a genuinely hard problem between jurisdictions, because reporting tends to be done in terms of statistics only, with differing (and often unreported) data methods, etc.
The context of this thread is chicken, but thanks for noting that. But the point stands -- estimated infections cannot be compared with reported cases.
If you can find actual reported cases in the US from all sources, that would be great to compare -- otherwise we shouldn't make the comparison at all.
I'm not sure that that's the reason, actually. The reason is that not everyone who suffers from disease X necessarily goes to get treatment for disease X which would be the only way in which that case of disease X could be reported.
So, for example, if it's the case that only 1/100 people who get salmonella have symptoms severe enough to cause them to go for treatment, then the _estimates_ of salmonella will be 2 orders of magnitude _higher_ than the _reported_ cases.
I am not an expert and haven’t looked at those links. I’ve learned to be skeptical of US vs EU stats ever since I learned about the difference in definitions and data methods that lead to difference in infant mortality statistics.
For one thing, those two quotes are talking about different stats: “cases reported” vs “estimates”. How many cases are reported in the US? What is the EU’s estimate of the actual total?
Chlorine treatment can make bacteria undetectable by inducing a dormant state [1] so some earlier studies on effectiveness of chemical treatments may not be valid.
Also the US and EU have different approaches to meat production. In the EU, the principle is to prevent meat contamination in the first place throughout the food production chain whereas in the US emphasis is placed on decontamination at the end of the chain.
Finally, some recent bacterial food poisoning outbreaks in Europe were due to vegetables so comparing numbers of infections without taking the source into consideration can be misleading.
This may also induce a kind of dormant state in bacteria as many chemical stresses do. So whether a new chemical treatment is more effective needs to be tested in light of this knowledge.
While peracetic acid has known disinfectant properties, it's only been used for washing hands as far as I know, not for ingestion. It's also a very strong irritant even at low concentration, plus it usually contains a mixture of acetic acid, hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid in various proportions. I am not sure how this would be controlled and there's been no study on ingestion of this combination of substances in humans.
I understand the concerns about using such processes over having a clean processing facility but I don't trust the cheap labor (prisoners, migrant farmers, etc) the US uses to not cause an outbreak. For those doubting this logic please look at the shit lettuce outbreaks we have every 2-3 months.
There's a decent amount of chicken farming and processing in my area (southern Mississippi). I know a few people who work for Southern Hens. The job isn't great, but the benefits are ok and the pay is fairly good for the area (probably doesn't compare well to other parts of the country, though). Better compensated than the majority of unskilled or even semi skilled labor in the area that I've seen. Certainly not cheap migrant or prisoner labor.
The (socialist) European way then would be to regulate the industry, to ensure certain standards. Basically trying to attack at the root of the problem instead of the outcome. We are not necessarily very good at it, but we try and it does work reasonably well on average.
Sorry, forgot the /s on "socialist". Just being a bit snarky about anything government related easily painted as socialism in some subsets of the US population.
My understanding is the chemical wash isn't the inherent issue here. It's the fact that they need to be chemically washed in the first place. Due to factory farming, chickens live in piles of their own poop, and with that comes tons of other unhealthy side effects. To combat that, in the US we simply give them a chemical bath.
The issue at hand is that the EU doesn't want low quality chicken entering the market because it could cause health issues if not cleaned properly, and at the volume we produce, it's likelier than not to be done improperly at some point, at scale. It's just not worth the risk.
But, I could be missing the mark entirely. This is all from memory when I read up on EU food standards a few years ago. My memory of all of these things could be completely off here.
Seems to me like the real motivation is defending their own agricultural industry. American chicken is cheaper and likely just as good. The health claims are weak, everyone can understand protectionism, but it is often masked behind other claimed goals.
>>Seems to me like the real motivation is defending their own agricultural industry. American chicken is cheaper and likely just as good.
Well...if you stop and think about it for a second - of course it is. If our, European farmers have to abide by certain animal welfare standards and the American ones don't, then of course American meat will be cheaper. Equally, I wouldn't want to eat chicken meat from China or Vietnam - their animal standards are nowhere near ours, so why should they be sold here? If Americans improve their standards then they are welcome to our markets.
The US imported food has been the stuff of jokes in my country for almost 20 years now, even before we entered the EU, and we are an Eastern-European country with all sorts of other problems. Can’t really understand how can many US commenters say that US food is as good and healthy as European food with a straight face.
Many US residents are speaking from their own experience as consumers, and probably only experience the lowest quality chicken after it has been turned into highly processed foods like chicken nuggets or dogs, masking the quality issues.
The chicken that many US commenters see as intact wings and breasts are probably higher quality than the exports (unless they go specifically to a discount store specializing in low quality foods).
Isn't it obvious the stuff that gets imported isn't the same stuff that all Americans eat? The US isn't exactly exporting tons of fresh food all the way to Eastern Europe.
Of course its gonna be mostly packaged, mass produced crap....
Having lived in Europe (UK, France) and North America (Canada) I can assure you that American chicken is not just as good. It's not just chicken. All sorts of meats are worse in quality.
Well not really, especially when it comes to Beef. Pork has has a rather diverse selection from both side, but generally I think they are about the same.
I should clarify. It's not impossible to get higher quality meat but it's harder. I can go into almost any supermarket in the UK or France and get very high quality meat easily. I find that in Canada and the US it's much harder to find good quality meat in a supermarket. I have to go to more specialized places. Similarly the lower end in Canada and the US tends to be much lower than the lower end in the UK and France.
Don't even get me started on trying to get unsmoked ham but that's a cultural thing.
Like many things in the US, there is a huge range. I think it's probably true that at the lower end of the cost spectrum in most meats, the US produces more cheaper and lower quality stuff. Particularly the average grocery store inexpensive chicken isn't good, but it's cheap and super plentiful.
That's a long way from "all sort of meats are worse in quality", though.
Having lived in the UK and the US, I actually can't tell the difference in any meaningful way. High quality poultry costs more and is better in both places. Both places have sketchy chicken shacks that probably don't use high quality meat, although I CAN assure you that Harold's in Chicago exceeds any chicken shack I've tried in the UK.
One objection is that it allows the initial chicken production to be dirtier as you can then just disinfect later even. In the EU, the entire processing needs to be clean.
They are about as sentient as the salad when this washing we are talking about occurs. (I really hope I understood it correctly that this happens after they have been killed)
BUT....what if it isn't clean? One worker can infect a whole host of chickens and there is no mitigation that will stop it before it is consumed except for the hope that it is cooked properly. Besides, the "chemical washing" is not chlorine anymore it is just vinegar (What many people put on chicken to eat anyway). So ideally you would have clean farms, clean processing and clean storage and then the consumer would properly cook it...but if one of these does not happen ideally, another cheap way to prevent killing people is to use vinegar to reduce possible sickness even further. The only reason why I can think that this would be apposed is to protect poultry producers in Europe.
How is it a strawman? Chemical washing is a sensible thing to do.
You know I live in the mid-west and I have seen some iffy chicken farms and some really clean ones. I have also been to Europe (mainland, Britain, and Ireland) and have seen the same. The thing is you simply can not inspect everything all the time and guarantee the entire supply chain will be free from issues...but you can put mitigations in place that can help.
More trustworthy than most other sources. I'll acknowledge the bias, but at least they have people who know something about the subject they are talking about and have done actually research. That is .gov normally tells the truth - not always the whole truth, but at least the truth. The "yoga mamas" scream chemical and pass on friend of a friend rumors as pure truth.
Yoga mamas... why do you even bother mentioning them?
However, it looks to me that an US organization talking about US produced food under the Trump administration is about as trustable as the FTC when talking about net neutrality or the FAA when talking about Boeing airplane safety.
"yoga mamas" comes from the grandparent post. Far too many people get their "facts" from their friends and repeat whatever they made up/heard without any critical thought.
This isn't just Trump, I see at least as many liberals do that. A large part of the Trump-hate I see is from made up facts that have no basis in reality. (which isn't to saw Trump is good or honest, just that his opponents are doing the same thing they accuse him of - they believe they have the real facts)
So the question becomes, what is the impact to consumers?
Does one process result in a less healthy product or not?
In other words what is the advantage of being sterile all they eat through versus ensuring sterility at the end of the process? Is one more prone to letting pathogens slip through?
EU member states put chlorine in their water supply, too, but chlorine itself was never the problem. Chlorine washing can be used to hide problems further up the supply chain, so if vinegar washing enables the same, it should also be disallowed.
Not all states do, atleast in my region, there is no requirement to clean water with chlorine once it comes from the water table other than if a farmer screws up their schedules.
There's a substantial difference between "a certain amount of contamination is basically unavoidable" and "we could raise chickens more humanely like the Europeans do but choose not to for more profits".
I personally don't get this. European supermarkets are full of cheap chicken meat. Can the US food industry actually beat that low quality meat with even cheaper and lower quality junk food and still be profitable? Please somebody call the ALF squat team. This is sick.
Related is the chicken tax [1] on light trucks which is one big reason why SUVs (which are classified as light trucks) are so popular in the US because US companies can make more profit selling them due to the import tariffs stifling the European competition.
Do they still have to label irradiated food in the EU? IIRC many people avoid it because radiation is scary sounding. I have to imagine that chemically treated meat would be an even tougher sell, regardless of how benign it might actually be.
I don't cook meat without chemically washing it either. I was raised on washing meats with vinegar and sour orange and don't compromise on it at all. Chemically washed is quite the spin considering US rates on food poisoning are probably quite low.
Depends on the restaurant, the last one I ate at produce their own stuff at a couple of local free range farms that they corporate with. Once in a while you can even go visit the farms at special cooking out events. Not really uncommon here either.
I mean, if you order a pizza from the cheapest place then sure, but they already sell some really dodgy meats. We’ve had quite a few scandals where the beef turned out to be horse. Illegal, but you kind of know the stuff they sell is close to poison.
But it would be labelled as chicken coming from the US, this makes it easy enough to avoid!?
Already today, I always read on the label to find out from what country the meat I'm about to buy comes, I always prefer local over imported as I think it is something little I can do to reduce unnecessary emissions and would hence anyway not buy meat that comes from another continent, just to get it few cents cheaper
It is however often not possible when eating meat at restaurant for example :(
Things that aren’t labelled properly are illegal in a lot of European countries an the EU doesn’t have power to overrule that. GMO products has pushed this hard over the years because almost no one wants to buy them.
Hell in Denmark where I live, half of our super market chains outright refuse to carry things like eggs from cage-hens. So they likely wouldn’t ever offer chemical washed chicken American for sale, and they’ll likely even use it in commercial to tell consumers how much better than their competitors they are.
Which is still better than their chicken--look at the frequency of the presence of campylobacter in raw chicken in the UK. It's absurd to think that they're doing anything better.
We’re vaccinating our chickens. That seems better - we get to eat raw eggs. We also seem to be doing animal welfare better [1]. It seems that the US has essentially no animal welfare regulation for poultry [2].
> In the USA, there are currently no federal regulations to control or safeguard the welfare of animals used in agriculture. An Animal Welfare Act is in place but it applies only to animals kept for non-farming purposes. State laws govern animal welfare in some parts of the country but currently no such legislation applies to poultry in any of the three major poultry-producing states considered here (Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas).
I allows horrendous poultry farming practices, which in the US are "fine" because the meat gets washed afterwards anyway, so who cares chickens are standing in their shit until their own feet dissolve - the end product is fine, right?
I'm not a vegetarian, but god I hope the American chicken never enters this market.
In Europe we believe it's indirectly harmful: Being able to wash germs off meat and eggs allows tolerating more diseases in the farms. If you can't just sanitize diseases off products, you have to keep the farms clean of diseases.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537033/ - "According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, there are about 1.3 million cases of Campylobacter infection each year in the United States alone." ("Update: December 29, 2019")
63 million population in the UK. 330 million in the US. Ratio = 1/5.2 .
57K cases in the UK, 1.3 million in the US. Ratio = 1/23 .
Could be, but I think it's mainly an argument against US eggs to be imported, not the meat, which is the discussion here. I've never heard of someone getting salmonella from chicken meat because it's not normally eaten raw.
Although personally I think the US should have mandatory salmonella immunization (currently about half of egg laying chickens are immunized).
Yet if you look at the cases they weren't transmitted from meat/egg end-products, it was almost always produce sources contaminated with manure from infected populations.
>I'm not sure we can trust US resident's opinions on taste as long as Hershey's chocolate still exists.
As an American, I agree with you 100%. Our opinions on taste are utterly worthless.
It's not just Hershey's chocolate either (which is already bad enough), it's so many other foods that are commonplace here. Food quality in this country is abysmal. You can get great food here, but it's harder to find and you'll pay dearly for it, but the stuff that regular Americans eat is generally awful.
Hershey’s chocolate is fine, so is American cheese. (You’d be insane to make S’mores or a grilled cheese with anything else, and if you don’t like those things you’re unamerican and should just move to Europe.)
EDIT: To be fair I think the butryric acid thing can be overlooked as an acquired taste. Same way that IRN BRU tastes like bubblegum to Americans, even though UK'ers claim it isn't. I still think Hershey's regular milk chocolate works better with peanut butter than any other chocolate I've had. The bigger issues I have with Hershey are the cloying amounts of sugar they keep adding as they knock down the cocoa butter and cacao solids in each of their products to save money. I used to run boxes of UK KitKats down from Canada's duty free stores so that other Americans could see what they were missing out on.
Hershey's chocolate is pretty bad, and American cheese is barely cheese. But both have functional properties that make them desirable for some applications: it's difficult to make a truly good cheeseburger without American cheese because of its melting properties, for instance. That's also why people use it in grilled cheeses, although it's less essential there (swiss melts just fine on a sandwich, for instance), and you should at the very least probably add some shredded cheddar or something to your American in a grilled cheese.
You can add American's functional properties to almost any cheese with sodium citrate powder (we make and slice up baking sheets worth of "Americanized" aged cheddars, gruyere, and even blue).
I would not confuse these useful properties with goodness. Grapeseed oil is also extremely useful. But California olive oil is a better oil. American cheese is like the grapeseed of cheese.
If you've only had good grilled cheeses with American cheese in them, I feel bad for you - truly. A good grilled cheese is one of life's greatest pleasures. There are many different kinds of cheeses that can go into a good grilled cheese.
I'm actually British, and live in Kent. And I agree, Hersheys chocolate tastes like sick. And FWIW I keep chickens and geese for eggs.
On the face of it "chlorinated chicken" sounds unappealing, but I've been to America multiple times over the years, eaten all sorts of food (including chicken) and never noticed any difference or ill effects.
Like most people here, I get to choose what food I eat. I could eat organic, ethically sourced meat every day if I chose to. However, if chlorinated chicken let's people on a lower income eat better than before, I'm all for it.
I'm saying I can't taste it and noticed no ill effects (which admittedly is an anecdote). However, of my friends that have gone to the US, I've never heard any of them say they would be avoiding chicken in case it was chlorinated. It only seems to be an issue for imports.
I buy all my meat from Butcher Box. All their meat is humanely raised. All their animals are pasture raised and free to roam. Pigs have bedding in open barns, chickens roost in barns and are free to roam. https://www.butcherbox.com/sourcing/ They work with American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) on their chicken standards as well.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and between this and "People who believe in God are the assholes", you've been flaming up a bit of a storm here. You've also done it repeatedly in the past. It's not what this site is for.
I find it harder to pay attention to the actual complaint because they word it in such a biased manner to purposefully play on the fears of people who associate 'chemical' with danger. Imagine if someone was complaining about the European produced poultry because of all the chemicals they put in their food.
I wonder if the EU will ever say: "Hey, change your methods, we can make trade deal." Perhaps the lack of a charismatic, true leader makes it to risky and it is too easy to avoid public scrutiny. When stuff goes sour, people blame trump. Who will us EU citizens blame?
(Read to the end, it is not what you think it is!)
I have stopped eating meat in 1990, due to the discusting way the animals are treated and I couldn't care less. At well over 40s I still look young, no gray hair, medical results are fabolus.
BUT!!! I would seriously ask all the vegans/vegetarians to STFU, they are annoying to the point where everyone attacks me when I tell him that I don't eat meat and try to argue. It is embarasing that, as a vegetarian (lacto/ovo whatever, who cares), I rather don't tell this to anyone, due to radical groups too stupid to understand, that their aggressive actions are beeing counterproductive. There was an old saying that fighting for peace is like f* for virginity. It just doesn't work. And I am so sorry that I think that there is no need to make every meat eater on barricades due to agrasive stand you unneededly take.
Just let people eat whatever they want. They will figure out on their own.
Why should people be able to eat whatever they want? If people's food choices directly support cruelty towards another creature then someone has to speak up to defend that creature. Most vegans are not militant activists, but they also shouldn't have to keep silent. People will figure out much sooner how much cruelty is involved in producing their Popeyes Chicken sandwich if vegans speak up.
I always thought the EU doesn't want this procedure because it effectively allows farmers to take a short cut and cover up bad practices used earlier in the chain. Under this premise, this quote just argues against a straw man for an otherwise meaningless counterargument.