The United States is asking the Europeans to reconsider their ban on exporting chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef to our continent. What are we talking about exactly?
Whereas the Society and Consumption Observatory (Obsoco) affirmed in 2017 that 82% of French people felt more attentive to their diet than 3 years earlier (in particular by favoring quality for their health and well-being), IUS Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue is asking the Europeans to reverse their export ban on chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef.
The United States has a habit of cleaning the chickens that come out of their farms with chlorine, which the European Union has banned, preferring that the poultry intended for our plates be washed in pure water. This request from the US Secretary of Agriculture follows threats from Donald Trump to impose punitive taxes on European cars if Brussels and Washington fail to reach an agreement on the question of agriculture.
Why do American farmers wash their chickens with chlorine?
As exposed by the DailyMail in 2017, American chickens are crammed into sheds, deprived of natural light, force-fed and therefore so big that they can no longer move. “Poultries are too heavy to stand up because they were raised for meat and nothing else, so they spend their lives immobilized,” Craig Watts, a former chicken farmer from North Carolina, told the daily. They spend 95% of their time sitting on the ground, in a mixture of pine shavings and feces from their herd and previous herds. Their flesh rots and when they are this tight, they walk over each other to eat or scratch, this causes injuries.”
In 2013, the american magazine Consumer Report, the equivalent of our 60 million consumers, revealed that almost all chickens raised in the United States (including those certified “organic”) were contaminated with bacteria, that 90% of carcasses contained “contaminating feces” and “about half contained at least one bacterium resistant to three or four of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics”. It is therefore to eliminate this dirt that the chickens are then cleaned with chlorine and other disinfectants.
Growth hormones to boost growth
And the beef with hormones in all this? The growth hormones used in agriculture can accelerate the growth of animals or the milk production of cows. The import of hormone-fed beef has been banned in Europe since 1988, which the United States has tried to have re-examined several times since.
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