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Comment by tschellenbach | Hacker News Reader

What's the health impact of the chemical-washed chickens?

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.

The data on salmonella is not super solid, but points to higher levels in the U.S. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562

>>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....

Hence why we're against treating said "mostly packaged, mass produced crap" the same as local European food.

Except part of the reason you have mostly packaged, mass produced crap is because of your own regulations which specifically try to block the US market to protect your home markets.

That's besides the point though, you said US food isn't as healthy as EU food. You didn't say "imported, mass produced stuff isn't as healthy as fresh EU produce and meat". I was simply saying that you are getting a very skewed perception of US food if you are only comparing against imported US food.

US food in the US is generally high quality.

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.

>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.

Considering that salmonella is far, far worse in the US than in the EU, your claim that American chicken is "likely just as good" is obviously false.

Salmonella in the US is [more often] due to greens [than] chicken.

Do you have any data on rates of salmonella from chicken, specifically, in both regions?

Edit:

"Chicken, beef and pork account for just 33% of salmonella poisonings in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture"

https://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/blogs/foods-more-lik...

Nope. See current top post, the US gets an order of magnitude more salmonella infections beacuse of bad food safety.

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.

Yes, from what I've seen this is the primary objection (aside from realpolitik considerations i.e. wanting to keep agricultural prices high).

Salad has routinely been chlorine-washed in Europe for years, and nobody complains about that.

I hope most people would agree chickens are a bit more sentient than salad.

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)

The point isn't when the washing occurs, it's in what conditions they have to be kept in before that to either require or not require washing.

Isn't the real concern how safe the final product is though?

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.

So why aren't the Americans showing us how clean their farms are, instead of going on about this vinegar strawman?

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.

Acetic acid and peracetic acid are completely different things.

Peracetic acid has the following health warnings:

GHS Signal word Danger

GHS hazard statements H226, H242, H302, H312, H314, H332, H400

GHS precautionary statements P210, P220, P233, P234, P240, P241, P242, P243, P260, P261, P264, P270, P271, P273, P280, P301+312, P301+330+331, P302+352, P303+361+353, P304+312, P304+340, P305+351+338, P310, P312, P321

Because the media who shows people things gains far more from manufacturing crisis and various trade wars then telling the other side of the story.

An excellent question. If anyone can link to some authoritative information on this, I'd be interested in reading it, too.

All I got from a Google search is yoga mom blogs. I'd like to see what a .gov health agency has to say about it.

but .gov means US health agency... doubt they can be trusted on this issue.

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)

The term 'liberals' always amuses me, being outside the US.

Looks to me you use it as 'those hippie commie bastards' while around where I am it means 'the (optionally center) right'.

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?

Seems like the EU approved peracetic acid for use on some food products but just not chicken.

https://chemicalwatch.com/biocideshub/47111/eu-commission-ap...

To quote the article:

> 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.

If you're fine with using vinegar elsewhere in food, you should be fine with this.

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.

I'm fine with vinegar in my salad dressing, but I'm not OK with the chef using it to clean his hands in the place of soap+water.

Sanitized poop is still poop. I'd rather the poop not be there at all, as much as possible.

You'd better not look any closer in to sanitization standards in the food industry then... plenty of sanitized (rat) poop.

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".

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