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brummm

I really hope the EU will not allow this kind of US meat into the EU market...

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If they do, I hope they make sure that it has to be labelled on the food.

They do that with a lot of things, and then it’s really easy not to buy it.

Food chains/restaurants won't have this labels in the menus. And they will serve you the cheaper product.

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.

That's the whole point of the trade deals though. It wouldn't be labelled properly, since it would be considered unfair competition.

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.

Interesting that so much of the activity of "free market" advocates is centered around reducing access to information.

Unless you're eating in a restaurant.

If the EU doesn't the UK will

> If the EU doesn't the UK will

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.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47418505

Good thing they're leaving the EU then...

Indeed, and remember to add to that the additional £350 million a week to the NHS. It'll be better than living in Shangri-La

You realize how small the UK market actually is? (not just compared to europe)

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].

[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).

Why? Do you believe it is harmful? If so, why?

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.

> Do you believe it is harmful? If so, why?

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.

The same way living in your own feces but taking a shower before leaving the house does not make you a clean person.

It's just protectionism. It's not like the chicken tastes of bleach. Have you ever eaten food in the US?

The US has 450 deaths from Salmonella every year, the UK has had 1 in the last ten years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmonellosis_in_the_United_St...

I'd be interested to see what the relative rates of campylobacter are. I could only find UK figures, which were 56,729 cases in 2017.

I don't think campylobacter kills, but it's certainly not very nice to get.

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 .

=> about 4x more likely in the US.

That's because of mandatory salmonella immunization in the UK, it's not because of sanitary practices.

That's an even stronger argument against allowing US chicken to be imported.

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).

> I've never heard of someone getting salmonella from chicken meat because it's not normally eaten raw.

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."

I stand corrected.

Maybe the trade agreement should be modified to require only immunized chickens to be exported to the UK.

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.

>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.)

I once heard a Belgian say: "There are two kinds of foods: Those that go with chocolate and those that go with cheese"

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.

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.

>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.

Shake Shack --- at least the original --- is an internationally recognized excellent burger. But leave it aside, if you want, as a chain. The other burgers are celebrity, destination burgers; "make arrangements well in advance to get them" burgers (though you can get Au Cheval's burger easily at Small Cheval now).

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.

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.

You should try some German or Swiss chocolate. Ritter Sport (German) is very good and not costly (and not high-cacao either).

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.

Supposedly our pasteurization standards are absurdly high as well, so very likely we don't know what real cheese tastes like either

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.

Let me return the question, are you are basically saying "if I can't taste it, it can't be bad"? ;)

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.

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