8 points on American Chicken!

YAY!

Point 1 – the health angle.  “WE fookING DRINK CLORINATED WATER? AMIRITE?!”.

Well yes, we do.  Chlorine is present in tap water at a concentration of 5ppm.  Chlorinated chicken is washed in chlorine at a concentration of 50ppm. You might sink a 5% pint of beer in 5 seconds but would you do the same to a pint of cask strength scotch?  And what does chlorine do?  Well, it’s meant to kill infections, but it also masks them (see University of Southampton study 2018 – found chlorine is not totally effective at killing pathogens and can make them undetectable).

Point 2– the animal husbandry.  Chickens in the UK can be live transported for a max of 12 hours.  This is a shitty lot for a bird but also means they are more cramped and more likely to die in transit and/or develop/cause infections.  In the US, they can transport for 28 hours.  So that is, y’know worse. 

Point 3 – Food poisoning! UK FSA (with EU-mandated hygiene standards) results in 15 reported cases of food poisoning per 1000 people.  In the US, it’s 114 per 1000, so almost 10 times as much.

Point 4 – what do the public think?  Well 90% of respondants to a WHICH? Survey were concerned.  It might be project fear again, but fear motivates.  Even if (and it’s bloody unlikely) Chlorine Chicken is perfectly fine and the experts are wrong again (!!!!), well fewer people will buy/eat chicken, so that impacts on those who farm/process/retail it.  And it’s all fair and good to say “ooh, but we can label some as non chlorine washed”, but that doesn’t stack up in restaurants, canteens, takeaways – once it’s in the food chain, it’s in the food chain… And not forgetting we recently enough had fooking horse labelled as beef. 

Point 5 – the protein!  We all need to move to a more plant based diet.  A study published this very day suggested somehting like 25g of red meat and 35g of chicken/fish per day per human.  A regular sausage contains 66g of meat.  But even remaining on animals for protein, fish and then chicken count as the most efficent ways to make animal protein – so if people move from chicken, they eat more of the more damaging (in order) lamb, pork and cows.

Point 6 – the single market.  Once we have US chicken in our market, then we cannot easily export UK chicken to the EU.  The checks/costs/admin will be significant.  So the UK producers will have one option – replicate the US practises.  So we then can only produce for the domestic market or for the US market. The US has massive scale – and can produce and ship stuff here to sell cheaper than the broiler from down the road.  So we cannot compete.  The US producers will take over the UK market, and it will mostly disappear.  To the extent it remains, it will be on the US model. 

Point 7- as the US deregulates its enviromental laws more and more, guess what happens here?  So more growth hormones, anti-biotics and other nasty chemicals (and more cancers, birth defects, and boys with boobies!).

Point 8 - The US model has 4 main processing companies.  They don’t buy chicken at market rate from farmers, they set up tied farms (like a tied-house).  That farmer buys the feed, the certification, the chicken houses, the vet services etc. from the relevant tied processing company.  The farmer is squeezed.  And the prices are set by them.  And would you believe it, but the feed costs increase at a greater price than the carcess rate?!  And also, every now and again the processing company mandates a new “sorry guys – you’ve got 4 chicken houses, but for logistical reasons we need to you operate minimum of 5 houses, so borrow some money from us at 10% to buy a new house/hatchlings and feed/etc from us!”.