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Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

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Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#101

Post by unreal37 »

Xylakant wrote: post #70
jkldotio wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the traditional Croatian wine Prosek being banned from sale because it sounds too similar to prosecco which was developed long after (and they are different types of wine).[1] Or the feta cheese I buy from Germany that can't call itself feta and that anyone in day to day conversation will refer to as feta. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/23/us-croatia-food-eu...

Most of the feta cheese you buy as "feta" that tries to be and still isn't real feta is actually cow milk cheese. The taste and texture is different, so the product shouldn't be called feta. The fact that people colloquially refer to things by the wrong name shouldn't allow producers to mislead me by labeling things with the wrong name.

It's a big gray area for me.

What if someone followed the traditional methods and ingredients of real feta, made the best feta cheese you ever tasted in your life, BUT it was not made in Greece. Should that be allowed to call itself feta?

I am against monopolies generally, and this geographical indicator stuff around products that have existed for centuries (Champagne, Bordeaux, Bourbon, Parmesan, Chablis, etc) rubs me the wrong way. It's granting a small region a monopoly on a descriptive word that everyone uses to describe the product, with no indication of quality anyways.

What if Diamonds had to come from Russia or else they were not allowed to be called diamonds? Or if sugar had to come from America or else it had to be called something else?

Confusion would reign. Its unfair competition, really.

Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#103

Post by jacoblyles »

arrrg wrote: post #58
jkldotio wrote: post #6

The flipside of this are things like the banana regulation, more commonly known as Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94.[1] I believe it's now rescinded under ridicule but there are people who try to deny it even existed. It's well worth reading in full on eur-lex for riveting prose like "the measurement, in millimetres, of the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle,…

For context, you always have to keep in mind why those laws exist. What is the goal that is towering above all else for the EU? The one it has actually been relatively successfully implemented? Creating a common market, of course! For a common market to exist it is obviously not enough to open up the borders to people, labor, goods and capital. It is also necessary to have common rules and regulations for the goods a…

I wonder how on earth people got through life before we had the government protecting us from misshapen banananas.

Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#104

Post by radio4fan »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #77

1. Being from UK where we have just had months of "how the hell did horsemeat get into every burger and lasagne meal?", the idea Europeans have this food business sorted is laughable. 2. All western countries have high standards in food processing. The differences are arbitrage not horrors that will kill us all, as this article rather lazily implies. 3. processing food is mostly the problem. Processing meat is almost…

I don't see where TFA aruges that the food business in the EU is sorted, rather that many practices which are rightly illegal in the EU are legal in the US.

Murder is illegal everywhere, but that's not to say it never happens.

Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#105

Post by Riesling »

X4 wrote: post #92

We need more advanced Gardens and 100% recycling of everything we use, the system must have a working circular flow. No Genetic engineering, or processing of our food. It took billions of years for the nature to create the foods that are perfect for us, we cannot create something better (in a few hundred years). I wish that someday the entire Human race on Earth will be as enlightened as the people in Star Trek.

> It took billions of years for the nature to create the foods that are perfect for us, we cannot create something better (in a few hundred years).

Technically it's not that nature created those foods for us to be perfect. It's more like that the available food has shaped human evolution. Those individuals who could make best use of those foods, also had the best chance of passing their genes onto following generations.

This evolution continues today, probably even at a faster pace, especially since we are processing foods to the limit.

Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#106

Post by claudius »

gadders wrote: post #87

For this one: 4. Chlorine washes for poultry carcasses the EU is currently looking at implementing something similar using substances such as ozone in solution or steam.

With the difference that steam is not exactly as toxic as chlorine, and even ozone is likely to be less of a problem.

Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#108

Post by alexholehouse »

pygy_ wrote: post #84
bjhoops1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prions absolutely terrify me. Primarily because they are so difficult to kill, er.. destroy. They are basically the zombies of infectious particles. http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080701/full/news.2008.926.ht...

Alzheimer and other dementia are also probably the result of an a priori prion-like phenomenon.

I'm interested to see someone else take this stance. A large part of my PhD is based on ideas relating to this, but it's not a (currently) widely held train of thought. Are you involved in this area at all?

Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#109

Post by Spooky23 »

mikeash wrote: post #86
tokenadult wrote: post #10

The most sensible European regulations of those listed in the article kindly submitted here are "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001." and "What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for 'non-medical purposes,' i.e., growth promotion." I'd like to see the United States fo…

The fact that you have to qualify your comment with your links to farmers puzzles me. I mean, I understand why you did it, but it's puzzling to me that attitudes are such that you need to. The Brave New Antibiotic-Resistant Apocalypse will hurt farmers just as much as the rest of us, after all. The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current sit…

You'd be right, if farmers were free actors.

For poultry farms, farmers are essentially sharecroppers. They are paid a fixed fee to grow chickens owned by Tyson/Perdue/etc.

For beef farms, ranchers birth and keep cattle for a specific period of time, at which point they are sold to feedlot operators. The feedlots have thousands of cattle are where many of the nasty issues with disease/etc come from.

Farmers are not very politically powerful anymore. The next layer up in the agribusiness chain can control pricing and have all of the power.

Re: Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

#110

Post by scotch_drinker »

This is the problem any time an industry gets big enough to control legislature in Congress. It's happened in finance and it's happening in agriculture. Practices that are most likely detrimental to the long term health of the population continue apace because it makes someone a lot of money. Changing that at the governmental level is almost impossible, not to be all cynical and jaded. The American consumer has long decided they were only going to choose on price and it's a lot cheaper to have agriculture in the state it is than to fix it.

What you can do is shop locally, start a garden, support local farmers, start hunting and fishing, etc. Is it harder and more expensive? Yup but that seems to be the state of affairs we find ourselves in. On the upside, growing food in a garden is extremely fulfilling.

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