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Food Practices Banned in Europe But Allowed in the US

motherjones.com

131–140 of 203 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but that something needs to wash the chickens due to bacteria.

I am not saying that the problem (dirty chickens) doesn’t exist, I am saying that there are likely superior solutions to that problem which don’t risk leaving an extremely toxic and reactive substance on my food.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I recall an article a year or so back that implied that Alzheimer’s could be transmitted between mice if certain proteins were moved from a ‘sick’ mouse to a healthy one. I cannot recall the authors or even the journal, but I am sure you read it, if it was of relevance in any way.

Here's the paper: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/3/1024.full.pdf?sid=c461...

Open-access version: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575082/

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

#134

HN kicks up an almighty fuss about any attempts to regulate our industry (see online payments, sales taxes, etc.) but we are happy to pass judgement on others. In Europe we can barely stop people from selling horsemeat as beef. I'm not sure how effectively we are implementing any of these rules, and I'm sure a farmer who wishes to do so can flout them at will. One positive thing to come from the rise of supermarkets…

I don't ingest web applications and startups as the raw source of energy required to sustain my basic bodily functions. Food must be held to a higher standard.

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

#135
post #99
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things like the banana regulation, more commonly known as Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94.[1] I believe it's now rescinded under ridicule but there are people who try to deny it even existed.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,…

Regarding the Greek cafe, there are plenty of crazy regulations like that in the US, usually centered around alcohol. For example, in Virginia (where I live), ordinary stores can sell beer and wine, but nothing harder. Liquor can only be sold in state-run stores. I suppose the intent is to discourage consumption of hard liquor... and it seems to work on me. The state-run stores are inconvenient enough that I go for s…

Alcohol laws in America are crazy. In Kentucky, there's a joke about how you know you've crossed a county line when the potholes end and the liquor stores begin.

I live in Minnesota, where our liquor laws date back to the era when being a liberal meant you were for women voting and against ANYONE drinking. It was a big deal when we finally got to keep bars open til 2am, a few years back. We can't buy alcohol in stores on sundays, and grocery stores can't sell anything stronger than 3.2 "near beer". You have to go to a real liquor store for even wine and beer, much less hard liquor.

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

#136

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.

Newspapers here drool over the high standards of food safety in the USA, and literally faint when they find a drug on sale here that the FDA has banned. These things are par for the course - the Germans and UK have very different meat handling laws - but somehow mass food poisoning are rare and all that seems to happen is we get fatter.

Most of what is wrong with our food chain is meat orientated extraction processes pushing low quality cheap reclaims into foods that are overly processed. We know this. It's not a secret nor is it illegal. Nor is it banned in any country.

It's just dumb. The Mr Money Mustache of food would laugh at us.

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

#137
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

Surely the same argument applies - mass agri-business can see the coming apocalypse too.

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

#138
post #135
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the Greek cafe, there are plenty of crazy regulations like that in the US, usually centered around alcohol. For example, in Virginia (where I live), ordinary stores can sell beer and wine, but nothing harder. Liquor can only be sold in state-run stores. I suppose the intent is to discourage consumption of hard liquor... and it seems to work on me. The state-run stores are inconvenient enough that I go for s…

Alcohol laws in America are crazy. In Kentucky, there's a joke about how you know you've crossed a county line when the potholes end and the liquor stores begin. I live in Minnesota, where our liquor laws date back to the era when being a liberal meant you were for women voting and against ANYONE drinking. It was a big deal when we finally got to keep bars open til 2am, a few years back. We can't buy alcohol in store…

I never really understood how certain political factions can go on and on about supposed government control over our lives, all while completely ignoring pervasive crazy alcohol laws. Why can't I order beer over the internet? Why do I have to go to a state-owned store to buy vodka? Why don't these people who complain about "big government" ever bring it up?

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

#139
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view the horsemeat-as-beef scandal demonstrates that the system works and that mislabeled meat gets detected. In this case the meat was perfectly edible, it was just mislabeled.

Do we know how long the horsemeat went undetected, though?

If memory serves me correctly, around 6-12 months.
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