Saturday 9 March 2019

Finger lickin' good


One of the other things the US Ambassador to Britain said when he was trying to persuade us to abandon our standards of agriculture and food production in favour of the US practices and sales was that America had the lowest incidence of salmonella poisoning in the world.

They checked. He was wrong. The USA has a salmonella poisoning problem which is 20 times as bad as Europe's. About 750 people a year actually die of it in the US and thousands more fall very ill.

You can't even blame barbecues for it, as almost every British household has barbecues in the Summer these days and even Australia comes nowhere near the levels of the US.

The real reason for America's problems with contaminated chicken lies in the very practices they want us to accept, if not adopt. In Europe, cross-contamination is dealt with in the factories which process the meat whereas America thinks it need not be so fussy so long as they wash the chicken with chlorine before packing. Bad husbandry and bad handling lead to levels of salmonella which even chlorine cannot eradicate.

The terrible thing is that Theresa May is so desperate for trade deals that I am sure she would be prepared to shaft British farmers to keep Donald happy and compliant - on his own terms.

She has added to the mess of Brexit to such an extent that she is in real danger of destroying the Conservative Party at the same time Corbyn is destroying Labour. She doesn't even consult her own cabinet, let alone any others who are experts in their own fields. She really is ruining Great Britain and there is still more ruining to be done.

The officials in Europe are beside themselves with impatience and worry for the future, saying that the only meaningful negotiations that have taken place since the Chequers proposal have been between Theresa May and her own government. That means Theresa May as an individual.

The first big mistake she made was to pay-off the DUP for their support, because she was getting none from her own cabinet, let alone party. Now all that can be done is put up fences along the whole border of Northern Ireland and scrap the Peace Talks.

We have to leave the EU now. Another referendum which slightly tipped back into a Remain result would mean right-wing riots on the streets of towns and cities across the UK. The damage has already been done.

Theresa May's sole purpose as Prime Minister is now damage limitation, and that means trying to regain a modicum of respect from the rest of the world. Thanks to her, we are in a worse position to negotiate than we were two years ago. We are extremely vulnerable to the advances of people like Trump, and there seems to be little we can do about it.

Do (some of) you still believe that the few remaining successful industries we have left are not going to move to a more sensible country? Well they already are.

22 comments:

  1. You know I have no solution, except my own. I shop at a whole food market or the farmers' market and buy my eggs from farmers. Hell's bells, much of my produce comes from farmers who say "Here, take these turnips! Can't imagine why I planted them." Let the world go belly up. We can't stop it, unless our opinion, which is well known, eventually puts us belly down. As if that could be better!

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    1. I am doing more of that type of shopping myself as well. I know we seem powerless, but I am a little disappointed that when we do get a voice we waste it on stupid nationalism.

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  2. Bear in mind that chlorine rinses are widely used in the British food industry, including prepacked salads and cooked meats, and chicken is imported from abroad which contravenes our own regulations but can be legally allowed in because it was reared abroad. Don't forget to wash your salads well and hope that if you go to a fast food joint they didn't forget to do so too.

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    1. I know about the chlorine in salads, and I know worse than that in cooked meats - potassium nitrate. I use it myself when making corned beef. Meat from abroad is something completely different, and I never go to fast food joints unless I am stranded on a motorway.

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    2. In any event, the issue isn't with the chlorine, it is to do with standards of care in farming and slaughterhouses. Anyone who goes swimming once a week in a municipal pool will ingest thousands of times more chlorine than someone who eats unwashed salads 5 times a week. I don't want to eat unhappy chickens who have never seen natural daylight in their 35 day lives.

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    3. And I don't want to eat beef made more plentiful through hormones.

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    4. I could easily revert to vegetarianism.

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    5. I'm willing to pay more for good local food raised the right way. I think it's important for lots of reasons, not the least of which is health. We should all support our local agriculture as much as possible.

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    6. Agreed, but most of us cannot avoid supermarkets.

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  3. The whole thing is just one big mess isn't it?
    Last year I looked at a programme about immigrants being used in giant greenhouses to grow salad ingredients for the European market. The whole thing was appalling and I vowed never to buy salad produce from Spain again. Now it is the US. Market stalls and farm shops seem to be the only option to be safe.

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    1. Yes it is Weave. I will force myself to buy seasonal vegetables which are not Spanish, though I often do buy Spanish because I like the people and I like the Eastern Europeans who work for them. Seasonal workers are really needed here in Britain, and we don't seem to have the workforce to cope with stuff like fruit picking.

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  4. When we first moved here we were so pleased that there was a thriving local agricultural economy and we could buy locally grown food - meat and vegetables. Over the past 20 years however this has slowly been eroded and we are facing the same problems as elsewhere. There has been a marked decrease in locally grown produce in our local shops and the prices for such foodstuffs have also increased. We continue, however, to support our local market whenever we can and hope that our farmers can continue to thrive.

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    1. The big European discount supermarkets are stocking more and more local food now. It's good.

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  5. I pay more for locally grown and organic foods (although organic is not really true in some cases) but if I had to feed a big family every day, my standards would be lower because of the cost. We are all aware what these corporation farms are producing but we turn a blind eye and hope we don’t get sick.

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    1. Those small shops could not supply a town of 80,000 like ours though, but see the above comment.

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  6. It does seem like the entire planet is off the rails. We keep asking ourselves, WHAT HAPPENED? I guess all the badness was always there, it just wasn't yet on display. Corporate food in the US is just abysmal. Nothing really tastes like anything. I miss the tomatoes in Italy.

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  7. And people still ask me why I bother to 'grow my own'. Our meat is chosen carefully, our bread I know is good, and our wine is Bio; everything else I leave in the hands of the gods.

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    1. Do people ask you that? I would have thought it was obvious for someone in your position.

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  8. Has anyone ever heard - or even eaten - Jackfruit?

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  9. US population 326.77 million UK population 66.02 million. so salmonella cant be compared. us is having a bog rise in small local organic farming. even in large city's people have 2 or more chickens for eggs. http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/11/10/organic-crop-acreage/

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    1. 20 times more incidence of salmonella poisoning than Europe. That's the whole of Europe.

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