White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards

White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards

Donald Trump is demanding American chlorinated chicken be sold in British supermarkets.

The White House is pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards in order to revive a transatlantic tech partnership that drastically collapsed on Tuesday.

Jamieson Greer, the US trade envoy, wants Britain to accept hormone-treated chicken and beef, a term he was not able to achieve when the wider US-UK trade deal was first signed in May.

“He is seeking to use the tech partnership as leverage on trade deal concessions he still wants but that didn’t get the first round,” a source close to the negotiations told The Telegraph.

The US pulled the tech prosperity agreement over complaints Britain’s Online Safety Act would police American AI companies. Washington is using this complaint in order to secure fresh compromises in its trade deal with London, The Telegraph understands.

Insiders say the tech agreement collapsed in part because of the absence of an ambassador to Washington, a post which has remained vacant since Lord Mandelson was fired in September over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    8 hours ago

    what’s funny is we’re stopping it’s use. very few processors here use chlorine as part of the chilling process. Even then, it’s extremely dilute. We now mostly use a diluted peracetic acid (It’s vinegar- acetic acid- and hydrogen peroxide.)

    edit to clarify: When butchering animals, you want to get the temperature down as quickly as possible after you kill the animal. This keeps the bacteria lower, and reduces the chance of spoilage while increasing it’s life. To do that, chicken are chilled in a cold water bath, to which they add the acid (or chlorine.) to reduce it as much as possible, which expends it’s shelf life tremendously.

    The EU has questions about Chlorine’s safety; but more importantly… they view the use of additives as a way to mask hygiene problems. It’s a concern that the poultry is not up to par, and the wash is there to hide the fact or make up for it.

    • then_three_more@lemmy.world
      11·
      5 hours ago

      It’s a concern that the poultry is not up to par, and the wash is there to hide the fact or make up for it.

      This is the root of the objection I think most of the British public have and why it’s become media shorthand for saying that we’d have to accept what the US laughably calls food standards.

      There was a lot of concern about when we got that little deal because there was stuff about us buying more of US beef, never mind that it turned out that it was stuff that was already legal over here because it was the premium stuff.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 hours ago

        said another way… they think our food cleanliness is somewhere between “dirty as fuck” and “You eat that?!”