Believe me, the majority of “The rest of the world” does not protect its citizens from harmful food contamination.
s/is/was
The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.
And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.
If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).
but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries
That is mostly a myth. EU and US take different approaches to setting food safety regulations, which means they have different lists of banned substances. The EU bans a lot of substances that have no evidence of actual adverse effects just out of an abundance of caution or sometimes even because of uninformed public perception, which is why their regulations seem more comprehensive, but the vast majority of that has no real positive effect on consumers.
https://blog.ansi.org/ansi/differences-between-eu-and-us-foo...
In terms of actual food safety, the US is basically the same as the EU (it technically ranks even higher than most EU countries on the "Quality and Safety" criterion of the Global Food Security Index, but the top countries are all very close)
https://insights.economistenterprise.com/sustainability/proj...
(Before anyone accuses me of something, I live in the EU and generally prefer EU in terms of lawmaking and regulations. It's just that food safety specifically is a point of comparison which is much less true than people usually think)
10% milk fat (more exactly 1.6 lb per pre-mixed gallon, but that's simply a bizarre way of phrasing it), no more than half air by volume. 6-10% other dairy solids (lactose, whey).
Compare with the UK: at least 5% fat (no cows need be involved)
France requires 5% milkfat, Germany at least requires the 10% milk fat, but no further requirements.
Canada pretends to be at 10%, but if you add any flavoring at all that can go down to 8%.
Many things that are well known memes are completely false. Not everything in the EU is better regulated. Everyone always complains about chlorinated chicken, not realizing that <5% of US chicken is washed that way as chicken now uses vinegar washes, and those that did were at concentrations deemed safe by the FDA.
Source for that? All I can find says EU have stricter labeling standards except for forum comments such as yours here.
Edit: > Many things that are well known memes are completely false
To me it looks like "USA shows more additives due to harsher labeling standards" is just a meme, everything I've seen says Europe has stricter requirements on what you need to say about additives. So USA having much more additives listed comes from American products having more additives in them, not everything is better in USA.
The European approach to food additives is visible. The EFSA assigns a 3- or 4-digit code to every food additive, and that number must be included on food labels if it’s used in a product. The EFSA believes this system makes it easier for consumers to look up and memorize specific additives.
In the US, those same additives are required to be printed out in full.https://www.daymarksafety.com/news/some-fundamental-differen...
EU labels are not required to list as much information about nutrients in a product as compared to US food labels. Plus, they often omit such items as saturated fat, fiber, and sugar.Those aren't additives, it just means you don't need to breakdown the nutrients label it doesn't change the additives.
So the things you have brought up doesn't seem to be the reason USA has so many more additives listed on their products. If you give a single example of an identical product listing more things in USA than in the EU and how these regulations influenced that I could trust you, but as is what you say seems to just be a meme.
> what you say seems to just be a meme
The biggest meme now is hating the US while glorifying EU despite in-your-face evidence that justifies a contrary attitude.
We do list all of that, but thats usually a separate table, or if not a separate bloc of text. Its always there. Posting random webs scraped by llms ain't providing facts and personal experience to discussion.
I think some folks are full of shit so that nutritional content of the food itself, like mentioned, in a parallel comment doesn't matter much for them, but for rest of us with normal biology it does matter unfortunately.
Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 requires the vast majority of pre-packed foods to bear a nutrition declaration. It must provide the energy value and the amounts of fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt of the food.So, the issue with chlorinated chicken washing is not that the chlorine is unsafe, as such. There are two concerns. The first is cross-contamination. The second is that there is some evidence that it is essentially a cheat; it defeats common tests for salmonella but does not actually reliably destroy the salmonella. So, if you allow chlorine washing, then you can pass the tests while not fixing supply chain problems.
Reference on most American chicken now being washed with _vinegar_? As far as I know that’s fairly uncontroversial ineffective.
“The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years.
…
Less than 5% of poultry processing facilities still use chlorine in rinses and sprays, according to the National Chicken Council, an industry group that surveyed its members. (Those that still do use a highly diluted solution at concentrations deemed safe.)
Nowadays, the industry mostly uses organic acids to reduce cross contamination, primarily peracetic, or peroxyacetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide.“
> primarily peracetic, or peroxyacetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide
The NPR should possibly hire a science editor. Peracetic acid is not a _mixture_ of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide, any more than water is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. It can be, though in practice is not, made by _combining_ them.
Anyway, same concern as chlorine from the EC’s point of view; it’s an attempt to clean up the problem after it is created, of dubious efficacy, whereas EC policy is to attempt to avoid creating it in the first place.
Nothing said that EU farmers used these pesticides, its related to imports. And even most imports they tested were in the legal limit even though they are from areas where these things are legal.