
Government ready to open British markets to chlorinated chicken for US tradedeal - kasperni
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/chlorinated-chicken-british-markets-us-trade-deal-trump-a9548431.html
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dkdk8283
I had to look up what chlorinated chicken is - although I’m still confused by
this article. Seems like a political issue and not really about food safety?

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olliej
Basically, low quality control, poor sanitation, and wanting to push back the
sell by date has led to US companies using many very questionable
preservatives over the years.

Prior legislation to protect consumers has reliably been fought back by the
relevant industry groups, even when the preservatives were knowingly toxic -
for example us companies we using formaldehyde as a preservative for decades
and beat back any attempt to disallow it.

Needless to say this track record has meant the rest of the world doesn't
really trust the quality controls or management of the US ag industry.

So now we can look at to today's chlorinated chicken. US industry claims that
they perform a chlorine wash of the chickens they produce to remove microbes
to make it safer. The obvious response from other countries is "we don't need
to do this, and your industry has a bad track record, so we think your
chlorine wash is an attempt to cover up poor sanitation in your facilities".

Honestly there are other US ag processes that I think are much worse than this
- chlorinated chicken seems to be a case of something that taken in isolation
wouldn't be strictly be terrible, but the surrounding context makes it
suspicious.

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evgen
Thankfully there is not going to be any US trade deal until after the election
and most likely not until several months after the Biden administration gets
down to work. The UK will get hosed by the deal no matter how it goes, but the
US House is not going to pass any sort of deal that might, even for a single
second, make Trump look good (and screwing Boris is just the cherry on top) so
I am not quite sure why the UK even bothers to try. The release of information
like this does nothing but hurt the Tories, shows everyone how desperate they
are now that the winds of no-deal are starting to blow across the channel, and
even a casual observer knows what a fools errand it it. If anything this shows
the Tory negotiators to be incompetent for even trying...

