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.
People like a lot of "burgers" that are barely burgers by the classic definition. Every once in awhile, I like a pub burger with all sorts of random stuff on it too. But those burgers are to "cheeseburgers" what Chicago pizza is to "pizza".
There is a reason that the nationally-famous burgers at Au Cheval in Chicago, Hog & Hominy in Memphis, Holeman & Fitch in Atlanta, Shake Shack in NYC, Husk in Charleston, and probably a bunch of other destination burgers all use American, despite many of these places being sit-down establishments.
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.
You like what you like. You can go read any number of blind taste tests, or any of a million Reddit threads where it is tediously re-explained that the sour milk note in the stabilizers Hershey's grosses Europeans out, or the NYT's notes about how bitter their cocoa is, but really it's just commodity chocolate whose overwhelming characteristic is sweetness with almost no texture or anything of interest to recommend it.
If you're looking for something to serve an almost functional role in a product, like a S'more or whatever, it's... fine? Do you bake with Hershey's? Like in a brownie, where you can dial the sweetness in instead of swinging it all the way to 11?
I don't think there's anything wrong with liking Hershey's chocolate, and I myself like American cheese! I'm just saying they're objectively not as good as other products, and the people who point that out aren't wrong to do so. Honestly, I think most people who say Hershey's is good would prefer Cadbury's.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmonellosis_in_the_United_St...