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.
>it's difficult to make a truly good cheeseburger without American cheese because of its melting properties, for instance
Huh? On non-fast-food cheeseburgers, cheddar is typically the standard cheese, and swiss is also popular. One of the best burgers I ever ate had caramelized goat cheese (in Europe). I don't even know the last time I had American cheese (on a burger or anything else), and I'm pretty sure the cheeses I've had on burgers were not "Americanized" as you mention, they were just normal cheese.
What makes Hershey’s chocolate bad? A Hershey’s bar with almonds is pretty much as good as it gets chocolate wise. Certainly better to my palate than the fancy high cacao chocolate that is trendy these days.
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.
They do that with a lot of things, and then it’s really easy not to buy it.