Europe deplores America's 'chlorinated chicken.' How safe is our poultry? | Hacker News Reader

Europe deplores America's 'chlorinated chicken.' How safe is our poultry?

npr.org

17 pointssrameshc3 comments

This is an odd passage:

  "The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years [...] so that's not the issue."
  Less than 5% of poultry processing facilities still use chlorine in rinses and sprays, [...] Those that still do use a highly diluted solution at concentrations deemed safe.

The author should survey a few Europeans to check if they'd be happy to eat chlorinated chicken 5% of the time and 'at concentrations deemed safe'. Also the author should let me place a wager on the outcome.

Do I understand that correctly: in the US the approach is to mitigate the impact of eating poultry that was sick during it's lifetime, while the EU tries to prioritize preventing the animals becoming sick?

The other issue, AIUI, is that it is not entirely to what extent chlorine washing and other external treatments actually reduce bacterial contamination, vs merely _messing with tests for_ bacterial contamination (eg https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/mbio.00540-18 )

Arguably the US industry is suffering from Goodhart’s Law; if rather than taking a rules-based approach to production you focus on a post-production metric, you may not get quite what you were expecting.

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