They do that with a lot of things, and then it’s really easy not to buy it.
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.
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 :(
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.
The noises from the UK are that it won't [0]. But in reality let's see.
We won't really know what happens until the ink has dried on the trade deal with the US and it has been published.
> The UK will not lower food standards to secure a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, the government says.
[1] https://api.worldanimalprotection.org/
[2] https://www.britishpoultry.org.uk/identity-cms/wp-content/up...
> 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'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.
I'm not sure what this means. Are you trying to say that poor people shouldn't be allowed to eat?
There are plenty of ways for poor people to eat healthy diets without harming animals. It's a perverse incentive of the system that grows vast quantities of poor-quality corn and soybeans, cycles them through animals (wasting 90% of the calories in the process), and then feeds people the animals. A system that focused more on feeding people grains and pulses would produce more food for less money.
The US in particular is wedded to the notion that meat is essential and primary food, and it set up its entire agriculture industry to making that cheap. It does so at a cost of hidden subsidies, poor-quality and disease-ridden meat, and a lot of animal suffering. You don't have to be a PETA nutjob to object to factory farming.
A fairer and less abusive system would, indeed, mean that higher-quality meat is available primarily to rich people. But it's a strawman to say that it means that poor people shouldn't eat. They can eat very well as vegetarians, vegans, or even just people who eat meat occasionally rather than three times a day, every single day.
Nothing is particular about the US here, humans are omnivores whose optimal diet for health contains both meat and plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
In 2017(latest data I could find), the US was topping the world's charts on meat consumption per capita.
There is something at least noteworthy about that. The average american eats 40% more meat than the average EU citizen.
Not everything can be so easily brushed away under the guise of human nature.
Vegetarians can be, and usually are, just as healthy as meat eaters. And no optimal diet contains meat in the quantity Americans eat on average. Japan has barely 1/3rd the per-capita meat consumption with better life expectancy and health.
It's an easy trope to suggest it's cruel to state meat should be less accessible to the poor. But virtually nobody would claim caviar, truffles, or saffron should be ubiquitous foods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmonellosis_in_the_United_St...
I don't think campylobacter kills, but it's certainly not very nice to get.
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 .
=> about 4x more likely in the US.
Although personally I think the US should have mandatory salmonella immunization (currently about half of egg laying chickens are immunized).
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/salmonella-raw-ch...
"Salmonella from raw chicken has made 92 people sick across 29 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday."
Maybe the trade agreement should be modified to require only immunized chickens to be exported to the UK.
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 breaks that rule and contains butryic acid. Here's a link explaining why and how that affects the taste: https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/butyric-acid/1017662...
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.
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.
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.
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.
And what is that reason? We have Shake Shack here in DC, and the reason there is pretty obvious: Shake Shack is fast food. It's a tier higher than Five Guys, and two or three tiers higher than McDonald's, but it's still fast-food, and their burgers do not cost $12-15 like in nice restaurants, so of course they're going to use cheap cheese. As for those other places, I've never heard of them.
Maybe I'm just weird, because I generally consider fast food to be inedible, so I really don't pay much attention to chains like that. Shake Shack is probably the cheapest type of restaurant I would ever eat at, and that's pretty rare. I make enough money to eat good food.
American cheese is the standard, at the high end and the low end, for burgers that aren't eaten with a knife and fork. The reason is that it has superior functional properties to other cheeses: it remains emulsified when melted, and easily melts completely.
At this point, I'd probably just send to you J. Kenji Lopez-Alt if you want to read more about the virtues of American cheese. It's useful stuff. Ironically, though, I'm here in the thread to talk it down as "cheese". It's a good product. It's not good cheese.
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.
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.