cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40891725
White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards
Donald Trump is demanding American chlorinated chicken be sold in British supermarkets.
The White House is pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards in order to revive a transatlantic tech partnership that drastically collapsed on Tuesday.
Jamieson Greer, the US trade envoy, wants Britain to accept hormone-treated chicken and beef, a term he was not able to achieve when the wider US-UK trade deal was first signed in May.
“He is seeking to use the tech partnership as leverage on trade deal concessions he still wants but that didn’t get the first round,” a source close to the negotiations told The Telegraph.
The US pulled the tech prosperity agreement over complaints Britain’s Online Safety Act would police American AI companies. Washington is using this complaint in order to secure fresh compromises in its trade deal with London, The Telegraph understands.
Insiders say the tech agreement collapsed in part because of the absence of an ambassador to Washington, a post which has remained vacant since Lord Mandelson was fired in September over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
America has been trying to get us to legalise their shitty chicken for years, fuck right off. We produce our own locally to a much higher standard.
I’ll buy your Good & Plenty though, my gawd that tastes goooood
I’m not advocating for American chlorinated chicken, but I’m not sure our chicken is to a much higher standard. Over the last few years I’ve noticed a decline in the quality of our chicken from white striping to woody breast. I guess this is caused by them using breeds that grow quickly.
And now the UK left the EU, they have way less bargaining power.
Wait. No. That can’t be right.
We were supposed to be able to get much better deals when we could negotiate our own. /s
Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone fell for that line. How can a single country have more negotiating power than 28 countries including that single country?
Yeah, your pricing power is far greater when you’re smaller, duh.
Perfect example: any individual negotiating with a giant multinational.
Are you my Grandpa? The only one I know who eats Good & Plenty
Only a small portion of US chicken gets the chlorine rinse, a practice that the EU recognized as perfectly safe by the way. They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices. They don’t import American chicken because the cost difference would destroy the local farms.
It’s often used to conceal the fact that the chicken is riddled with e. coli.
It’s to kill the e. coli? Not “conceal” it?
Chlorine washing doesn’t kill off all pathogens, it only suppresses them so that they no longer show up in standard tests. In other words, chlorine washing conceals the presence of pathogens.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/science-on-safety-of-chlorinated-chicken-misunderstood "But the academics point to research published last year which found washing food in bleach does not kill many of the pathogens that cause food poisoning. Instead, it sends them into a “viable but non-culturable state”, which means they are not picked up in standard tests, which take a sample of the food and try to culture any germs on it.
The presence of the pathogens is thus masked by the bleach, but they are still dangerous to human health.
Erik Millstone, professor of science policy at Sussex University and co-author of the briefing, told the Guardian lives would be at stake if food based on these lower standards were sold in the UK. “I am satisfied [by the evidence] that US food poisoning cases are significantly higher than in the UK. A minority of people suffer fatal complications,” he said. “There will certainly be fatalities, and they typically affect vulnerable people, such as infants, small children and the elderly.”"
No, it all does. It’s not Safe. You can stick it up your bum.
“La la la I make up my own facts” is an embarrassing stance to upvote, let alone put forth as an honest argument.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7015476/
There’s ongoing study about safe exposure levels, but the usefulness of animal studies is limited (mice are a poor metabolic analogue). The World Health Organization stands by 0.7mg/liter in water for chlorate and the key thing being looked at is how much remains on food as residue.
No one is saying the chlorine is unsafe. Do you think they don’t treat municipal water in the UK? They do. This is about chlorinating chicken as part of processing, and the reasons it isn’t needed in the UK and is in the US are in your own BBC article.
And as far as I’m concerned, none of that matters. The UK has a set of standards you must meet to sell chicken there. If you want to sell your chicken, meet their standards. My country requires labeling in French for a variety of products. Same thing. If you want to sell those things here, get labels with French.
Literally the person I am replying to is saying it’s unsafe.
They say “it”. One could assume it refers to the chlorine, or one could assume it’s the banned product that is treated with chlorine. Which one someone decides they’re referring to probably has to do with how disingenuous that person is being, given the rest of the topic is about chlorinated chicken and not the process itself.
Surely the local farms can produce chickens cheaper than importing them across the Atlantic. I know we have cheap goods here, but not that cheap.
Had cheap goods. With the way our food costs have exploded in the last five years we almost certainly wouldn’t have leverage over local production.
Ignoring that, the behavior that protectionist trade laws are avoiding is: Country A using tax subsidies to artifically deflate the cost of a good, flooding the market of Country B where it isn’t subsidized and eventually putting the producers there out of business so they become reliant on trade with Country A. Protectionism like this isn’t wrong, but people generally don’t like being told that they’re being barred from less expensive options so it gets dressed up in nationalism.