magnet
6424
My understanding is that the EU and US both have mandatory procedures for manufacture and transport of food. They are roughly similar, with certain high-profile exceptions (e.g. washing eggs).
They also have “action levels” for certain substances, like pesticides.
A food producer can be fined and/or shut down if they are inspected and are found to be violating the mandatory procedures, OR if their product exceeds the action levels for pesticides. In other words, there is a certain level of pesticides which is unacceptable even if you are following all the recommended procedures.
In the US, there are also action levels for biological contaminants such as rodent hairs. This does not mean that the FDA thinks two rodent hairs in your chocolate is acceptable, whereas the EU does not. Quite the opposite. It means that if the FDA finds two rodent hairs in your chocolate, then the chocolate producer is in automatic violation and no further investigation is necessary. Whereas in the EU, rodent hair will never trigger an automatic violation.
Never worked in a restaurant, but I used to work in a large scale bakery which kicked out tens of thousands of loaves per day. I’ll say this, it was very, very rare to see an insect in the building but it was something that would happen. I never saw recognizable insect parts in any ingredients which we got preprocessed, such as flour etc, but I’d guess there were some.
Nothing I saw stopped me from eating bread.
Also, what @Tin_Wisdom said several posts up about things growing outside is true. I grew up in the country with fields within 30 yards of the door, adjacent to our front yard, separated from our back yard by a narrow windbreak of trees.
Fields are not hermetically sealed in geodesic domes. Deer run through them. Raccoons raid them. Little rodents dig dens on the ground and climb up the corn stalks or collect grains of wheat. Insects crawl on them. Birds fly over them.
And they poop. Everything poops. When I was a child, I’d run through the corn rows. Never pooped out there. May have peed… almost certainly peed although I don’t recall any specific incident.
Maybe in Europe all their wheat fields are built under inflatable domes only enterable via airlock with a decontamination procedure like something from The Andromeda Strain but I have doubts.
Anyhow, city people need to chill out.
US regulation is shit. Your government is a corrupt oligarchy. You dont think this has filtered down to your supermarkets yet? US food quality, adulteration, provenance, labelling and ingredients (ie HFCS) are notoriously poor, the last thing we want is your chlorinated chicken and things like relabelled poorly tested and sourced Chinese produce that now floods US markets.
Yep, the US has vastly different and vastly looser regulations on agricultural and food products, to the extent those regulations keep being an issue for any US-EU trade agreement. This has been an issue for years and it’s one of the main reasons the EU is unwilling to have an open border to its market without regulatory alignment (among many, but this one is very sensitive public-opinion wise).
For example, see page 29-30 of this paper: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmintrade/481/481.pdf#page=30
Edit: however, I believe some of the EU regulations regarding some products are too strict and a little bit paranoid or protectionist (versus health related). But the regulatory difference is there.
You mean the Great Value brand? 69 cents for 8 hot dogs? How can you beat that?
RichVR
6429
When I worked at the ESB we would buy lunch at a deli in the lobby. One afternoon I got a grilled cheese sandwich that came with two pickle slices. Nestled between them was pieces of a large cockroach. A leg, a head with antennae. I threw them away and still ate the grilled cheese. Hey, I was hungry. The next time I was in the deli I saw the bucket of pickles on the floor next to the grill, uncovered. From then on it was, hold the pickles.
Pretty much.
The EU regulation isn’t that there must be zero contaminants, btw. The legislation for this sort of thing simply does not state that there is an “allowable level” for contaminant in general (except for health-affecting contaminants) and that contaminant levels shall be kept as low as can reasonably be achieved according to recommended good working practices. The problem with maximum allowable limits (rather than regulating what procedures must be followed), is that there is little incentive to do anything to improve procedures or cleanliness as long as you’re actually below the limit.
magnet
6431
US and EU food regulations are different, and overall I trust food in the EU more than in the US.
But I was specifically referring to the idea that the US allows you to eat rodent hairs and the EU does not. Actually, the US has limits and the EU does not. Probably because they are basically harmless.
In fact, when I was in Paris, I tried mimolette, which was delicious. But it is banned in the US because of insect contamination. It is literally made using insects. They are harmless. But it is kind of ridiculous for the EU to accuse the US of failing to police its food against disgusting creatures.
I’m not too sure how true this is, but from what I’ve read EU food regulation was based on NASA developed standards that both the USA and the EU were set to adopt, but for some reason the USA decided to dilute them a bit.
RichVR
6433
Check out
Jumping maggots can actually poke you in the eye.
magnet
6434
Incidentally I was wrong about mimolette. It’s not made with insects. Technically they are more like cheese spiders.
jpinard
6435
The real thing you need to be concerned about is the UK allowing the horrendous policy of pesticide, herbicide, insecticide in agri-products and the ridiculously massive amounts of hormones and antibiotics in animal products. And people wonder why the hell rates of autism have skyrocketed (outside of better diagnosis and awareness), and of course antibiotic resistance. Greedy and/or lazy American businesses will usher in the extinction of mankind to make an extra buck.
Even our so-called “all natural” and many “organic” options are full of this crap.
Champagne thats not champagne, cheddar thats not cheddar, tricksy labels that make things sound like they are not (i saw a fruit drink labelled as juice using wordplay that was 0.5% fruit or something), margarine/spread thats so artificial fat people walk around Walmart leaking oily shit out of their arses, a pork industry thats a toxic nightmare, rotten chicken washed in bleach, a salad industry with a bodycount in the thousands etc. This is just stuff I know about from recent memes and stories.
The labelling/provenance thing that we in the UK are also losing due to Brexit is particularly awful. Fake champagne heh. Its like bloody China.
Wait. Are you implying that such things are not used in European agriculture? That would be news.
jpinard
6438
Not at all. But they have much more stringent regulations and there’s a ton of things we use on crops/animals here that are not allowed in the EU. Because the EU regulators are not in bed as much as the USDA is here with agri, which has comprised their regulatory oversight. Basically the USDA is just an arm of big agri-business.
Yeah who thinks “I trust Trump and the GOP to make sure my food quality and safety is the best it can be even at cost of profit to their agri-donors.”
I mean, it could be worse. We could be getting frozen meals that are labelled as beef, but instead full of horse meat. Man, if that happened in a US store, that would be horrible.
By the way, it’s something that happened a few short years ago in England.
Ugh, it was a mistake to read this thread while having breakfast. Enjoy your pulped maggot sandwiches.
To be fair, it’s still a more pleasant dinner conversation than talking about the political situation on either side of the Atlantic.
Your point is?
The horse meat scandal is actually a good example of the system working - despite attempts to undermine the food regulatory authorities by conservative governments. Food Safety Authorities discovered the crime, which is what should happen - and the finger of blame for why the scope of this problem was able to grow as large as it was can be clearly traced back to legislative efforts to undermine regulations and lack of funding (leading to important reforms both in the affected countries and EU-wide).
Given the labyrinthine responsibilities for Food Safety in the US, the lack of regulations concerning food provenance (voluntary, rather than mandatory), the over-reliance on self-regulation of the industry, and the fact that one of the first acts Trump did (of course) was to slash the budget for the FDA to nullify the implementation of the food safety improvements instituted by the Obama administration, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of the large scale food fraud being conducted in the USA is not getting caught.
That’s kind of the point of food fraud. If people get sick from eating contaminated food, that’s bad for business. Getting exposed is obviously bad for business. So the point is to contaminate food in ways that is impossible to detect without testing. The point is to sell people the cheapest possible food at the highest possible price point, without anyone the wiser - and because the margins in the food industry are so thin while the value of the industry is so enormous - there is a lot of incentive to commit this kind of crime. It happens a lot more than any of us would like to think.
