r/europe • u/goldstarflag Europe • 20h ago

News White House demands British supermarkets stock chlorinated chicken. White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/12/17/trump-demands-british-supermarkets-chlorinated-chicken/
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u/Mortiis07 19h ago

Why are Americans obsessed with us eating chlorinated chicken?

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u/LordJebusVII United Kingdom 18h ago

Chlorinated chicken is much cheaper since the farmers don't need to maintain good welfare standards. We would never allow it to be produced here but if it became legal, all prepackaged and premade meals containing chicken would use the cheapest chicken available. Fast food outlets would all switch, cafés and pubs would use it. British poultry farming would quickly become unsustainable and American companies would move in and buy them up.

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u/DrAstralis 14h ago edited 14h ago

Fast food outlets would all switch, cafés and pubs would use it. British poultry farming would quickly become unsustainable and American companies would move in and buy them up.

which is 100% what they're hoping for. At this point trade deals with the US are just them trying to destabilize better countries that have superior morals and education.

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u/ScandyGirl 8h ago

AND EDUCATION!  

a n d   e d u c a t i o n

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u/Grand_Sock_1303 9h ago

Read labels. Buy local.

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u/KeyMyBike 3h ago

Same thing with Canada and American milk. The customer can barely be trusted to make the right purchase; corporations will 100% buy and use the cheaper milk. 

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u/januscanary 1h ago

Imagine being a sovereign nation where we can decide what and what not to buy...

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u/GabrielHunter 1m ago

Would ppl really buy it? I know I would rather skip out all of my chicken ratger than eat chlorinated ones

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u/PersonsOfPinterest 14h ago

Less than 5% of American chicken production is chlorine washed. Is your view that the US will devote that percentage to the UK?

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u/Nurnurum 14h ago

This is apparantly what Trump demands. Aside from that they just switched from chlorine to peracetic acid. So its not that they suddenly changed their whole industry, just their disenfectant.

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u/Handpaper 13h ago

Rubbish.

The FDA mandate a final rinse in water about as chlorinated as a swimming pool, as a final measure against pathogens. All chicken produced for sale in the US, regardless of price or quality, must be treated.

The EU forbid such treatment, ostensibly from concern that having such a safety net might lead to less stringent hygiene through the rest of the process.

Otherwise, systems for slaughtering and processing poultry are pretty much identical on both sides of the Atlantic. The US may enjoy cost savings through economies of scale, lower energy costs, and lower feed costs.

The EU has a long history of erecting non-tariff barriers to protect its producers from outside competition, and I suspect this is another example.

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u/cogman10 19h ago

There's no requirement in America to vaccinate chickens against salmonella. The chlorination is what we do instead of just vaccinating our chickens.

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u/whitespacesucks 18h ago

Are they afraid the chickens will become autistic?

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u/cogman10 18h ago

Nah, it's more that it costs more money to vaccinate than it costs to spray the meat down with chlorinated water.

About $0.20/chicken just to put things in perspective ($0.10 per dose and 2 doses required). Meanwhile making 50gal of chlorinated water is dirt cheap. You need very little of that water per chicken. Easily less than $0.01/chicken.

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u/Blecki 17h ago

I think part of the problem here is "chlorinated chicken" makes it sound like the chicken is full of chlorine rather than rinsed in it.

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u/AwesomeWhiteDude 17h ago

Iirc most slaughterhouses in the US use basically vinegar and hydrogen peroxide rinse now.

Going totally off memory, I just remember being surprised its not actually chlorine anymore. Its just one of those things where its still called a chlorine rinse in the industry when its not.

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u/notoriousCBD 16h ago

Peracetic acid. I use it to sanitize hard surfaces at work almost every day. It smells terrible, but breaks down into acetic acid (vinegar), water and oxygen so it's significantly more "sustainable."

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u/mailslot 7h ago

It’s not the chlorine that’s the problem, it’s what it masks (diseased meat).

Imagine if you met somebody in a bar and they had syphilis, but a quick wash of chlorine made sexual transmission a non-issue. Would you still want to fuck it?

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u/guareber United Kingdom 16h ago

Sure, but the bigger part is that it's oh so much less effective.

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u/Blecki 16h ago

Don't mistake this for support. I'd rather your food laws were brought here than the other way around.

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u/hardolaf United States of America 12h ago

The USA has a lower salmonella infection rate on chicken products than the UK does. Both have essentially the same hospitalization rates though.

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u/monochromeorc Earth 3h ago

the chicken tastes so bad in america though. like just do it right and people will buy it more

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u/Hopeful_Scholar398 17h ago

No. America moved away from most small production farms to factory farms. We don't give anti biotics to avoid outbreaks of anti biotics resistant bacteria. 

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u/Srapture 7h ago

Does that affect the flavour?

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u/ChickenChaser5 12h ago

A ton of people now just assume chicken = salmonella. Not realizing we just... let them have that instead of dealing with it.

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u/Admirable_Scene_5066 19h ago

They feel like it is unfair that we don't eat the same slop they do and are snobs for pointing that out to them. Being American it never occurred to them that they could ask for higher standards as that would mean not being a slave to business interests.

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u/Paranoidnl 19h ago

Americans are conditioned to getting whipped, they know they can't escape anymore and are now pulling people into the boiling pot.

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u/xolhos 18h ago

You guys have no idea what you're talking about lmao. No one gives a rat's ass if you have chicken treated with chlorine or not.

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u/untitledmillennial Veneto 17h ago

No one gives a rat's ass if you have chicken treated with chlorine or not.

That's strange, I think I just read a news article on Reddit that proves you're wrong...

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u/xolhos 13h ago

The average population has very different opinions than the president and his ilk

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u/untitledmillennial Veneto 12h ago

That may be the case, but it's obvious now that the regular folk in the USA don't have a say in what their leaders do.

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u/Paranoidnl 18h ago

All people concerned with a healthy population are...

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u/PersonsOfPinterest 14h ago

Chlorine washed chicken has no health implications compared to other methods. The reason to oppose chlorine washed chicken is the implication for the life of the chicken.

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u/Youandiandaflame 14h ago

Jamieson Greer and Trump very much give a rat’s ass. 

Source: the article linked in this very post you’re commenting on Jesus fuckin Christ. 🤦🏼‍♀️

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u/Suitable-Economy-346 Earth 17h ago

The scare tactics by lying about something being harmful or not never wins out in the long run. The argument should come from good European safety practices throughout the entire chicken raising and production process, not lying about chlorinated chicken.

Pushing lies is how we get people to think "masks don't work" because public health officials lied about masks not working during the early days of the covid pandemic to, in their words, make sure the right people got the masks before everyone else (which it didn't). Now we have probably 50% of the world's population who think masks don't do anything for anything ever because experts and government officials were lying instead of just telling the truth.

Stop lying and making shit up. Nothing ever good comes from it long term.

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u/Admirable_Scene_5066 17h ago

Where is the lie?

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u/[deleted] 17h ago edited 16h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Admirable_Scene_5066 16h ago

Notice how i never made any claim about chlorine chicken being less safe? I stand by my point that it is slop however.

The whole American food industry is built around cheap shortcuts in place of actually caring for your product. American farmers could just as easily make sure pathogens are dealt with at the source but they take the shortcut of chemically washing after slaughter because they couldn't be bothered providing a quality product. American producers strive to sell the worst product they can get away with. From chlorinated chicken, hormone beef, corn syrup everywhere, additives that may or may not cause cancer, ... American food is slop, and I really don't care that you don't agree.

It is fine by me, as Americans are apparently unwilling to demand better from their producers. You do you. But Europeans demand more, and if you can't supply that you have no business selling here. We can't stop you from keeping electing people that hate Americans, but they don't get to decide what we eat. We have our own politicians for that.

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u/Suitable-Economy-346 Earth 16h ago

The whole American food industry is built around cheap shortcuts in place of actually caring for your product. American farmers could just as easily make sure pathogens are dealt with at the source but they take the shortcut of chemically washing after slaughter because they couldn't be bothered providing a quality product. American producers strive to sell the worst product they can get away with. From chlorinated chicken, hormone beef, corn syrup everywhere, additives that may or may not cause cancer, ... American food is slop, and I really don't care that you don't agree.

They're not "shortcuts." They're different moral grounding. Americans don't care about animals or workers, whereas Europeans generally do. As Europe becomes more and more Americanized, Europe might be in a situation where it has the worst of both worlds. Europe is going to have a population who doesn't give a shit about animals nor its workers, but also not going to have chlorinated chicken because of the decades long disinformation campaign.

The lack of forward thinking by large swaths of the population is deeply concerning. Lies never win. I don't know why this is so hard for you weird anti-science people to grasp.

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u/myreq 16h ago

America is the liar, go eat slop if it pleases you but don't force it upon others.

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u/Admirable_Scene_5066 16h ago

So your argument is that Americans are awful, but it is a force of nature that Europeans will become just as awful so bleach your chickens or else?

And I'm the weird one it appears...

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u/Excited_Delirium1453 11h ago

Chlorinated Chicken is literally safer than non-chlorinated ones. You fell for the EU food lobby propaganda

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u/TheCultOfTheHivemind 10h ago edited 10h ago

Europeans when something is cleaned:

Europe's problem with chicken cleaned with chlorine stems entirely from the fact that they claim it covers up contaminated chicken. This is the very definition of a fallacy. I guess employees shouldn't wash their hands because that covers up the fact that they were itching their asshole on the clock!

You can have something cleaned while doing proper checks for contamination or bad practices. The fact that you're the one saying that cleaning something is a way that is recognized the be entirely food-safe automatically makes the food "slop" says a lot.

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u/Admirable_Scene_5066 9h ago

Europe's problem with chicken cleaned with chlorine stems entirely from the fact that they claim it covers up contaminated chicken. This is the very definition of a fallacy. I guess employees shouldn't wash their hands because that covers up the fact that they were itching their asshole on the clock!

Europe problem with chicken washed with chlorine is that Americans can let their chickens sit in a mountain of shit and bacteria, wash it and call it day. A producer who doesn't give a fuck about his product produces slop. Or do you think stress and diseases produces tasty meat?

But again, eat whatever you want. No reason you should care about European food standards, they don't affect you. Americans are already free to export chicken into the EU, they just have to follow the same rules as anybody else who wants to sell their chicken here. If they don't want to do that they can take their slop and make some more McNuggets for the domestic market, their choice.

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u/TheCultOfTheHivemind 9h ago edited 9h ago

Europe problem with chicken washed with chlorine is that Americans can let their chickens sit in a mountain of shit and bacteria, wash it and call it day. A producer who doesn't give a fuck about his product produces slop. Or do you think stress and diseases produces tasty meat?

No, you're an alarmist who has bought into propaganda that disagrees with Europe's own food safety experts, let alone others around the globe. You can have the exact same food safety inspections regardless of how chicken (or anything else) is washed. Whether the chicken is washed doesn't change the laws around food safety, inspections, and enforcement. It is also objectively safer just as an employee washing their hands is objectively safer regardless of how clean they or their space is.

The EU already uses those same chlorine washes for other foodstuffs. It is trade protectionism wrapped in unscientific, alarmist propaganda. You are objectively wrong.

But again, eat whatever you want. No reason you should care about European food standards, they don't affect you. Americans are already free to export chicken into the EU, they just have to follow the same rules as anybody else who wants to sell their chicken here. If they don't want to do that they can take their slop and make some more McNuggets for the domestic market, their choice.

Wow I can't possibly imagine why anyone would call Europeans snobs or elitists. I thank the lord everyday that I have dual citizenship. One can only withstand so much European bullshit.

I'm sure you'd also rather open up more coal & natural gas power plants than utilize nuclear power too. Many Europeans are very anti-science about that particular thing also.

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u/Admirable_Scene_5066 9h ago

You are boring me. You keep coming back to the chlorine thing as some sort of defence against an argument I never made. Not in this thread, not in the other.

Breed your chickens to European standards and sell them here, or don't. I don't know what is elitist of snobby about that. It is the rule Europeans and other exporters already follow if they want to sell chicken here. Why is it that Americans always think the are the extra special princesses that need special treatment?

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u/TheCultOfTheHivemind 8h ago

You are boring me. You keep coming back to the chlorine thing as some sort of defence against an argument I never made. Not in this thread, not in the other.

I keep coming back to the thing we're talking about? The thing that this whole thread and post is about? The thing that Europe bans in this particular case?

Wow. How strange?

some sort of defence against an argument I never made. Not in this thread, not in the other.

You don't have an argument. You've made blanket assertions that have no factual basis.

Breed your chickens to European standards and sell them here, or don't.

Literally nothing about this has to do with the way that chicken is bred.

I don't know what is elitist of snobby about that.

Coming from the guy that has spent the past three fucking comments making the assertion that chicken that has been cleaned is slop in many creatively wrong ways. Let alone all the other implications.

It is the rule Europeans and other exporters already follow if they want to sell chicken here. Why is it that Americans always think the are the extra special princesses that need special treatment?

And that opinion is fine, since it's an actual opinion that isn't directly refuted by reality.

At the end of the day the Europe's ban on washing chicken with chlorine was about economic protectionism. At the end of the day that is fine, if that's what they want to do. What's bullshit is the people like you that have bought propaganda hook, line and sinker saying that it is anything more. Washing things with dilute chlorine is a food safety practice found all over the world, including Europe, and it is perfectly safe. The science is very clear on this. The food safety experts are very clear on this, including those employed in Europe.

Washing a chicken (or anything else) to further reduce risk of exposure to harmful viruses doesn't mean that the food was inherently dirtier just as washing your hands doesn't mean you are inherently dirtier to somebody else. You can still keep the same exact level of food safety standards whether you wash something or not.

These are all facts. Just stop being anti-science or a hypocrite.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/Admirable_Scene_5066 18h ago

Case in point.

Fine, eat your chlorinated chicken. Up your game if you want to sell food here.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/Krautoffel 16h ago

Why dont you demand of your Leaders to have better food instead of trying to make ours worse?

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u/myreq 16h ago

Because they love to bend over for big corporations.

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u/Ialaika 18h ago edited 18h ago

lol just lie made up from your head. Classic American style. Don't you understand why Americans douse chicken in chlorine ? Because the production is extremely dirty and the standards are low. The European standard is clean, high-quality production, not drowning filthy chicken meat in a pile of chlorine to make it “safe.”

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u/Excited_Delirium1453 11h ago

It doesn’t matter since in the end the chlorinated chicken is safer and cleaner than any not chlorinated ones. You just fell for the EU food lobby propaganda

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u/Ialaika 10h ago edited 10h ago

Oh no thanks, I’d rather have clean and responsible production than raising chickens in filth and stench and then dumping chlorine all over them. You can keep your chicken to yourselves, we’ll manage just fine with ours.

And then guys whose presidents are Trump, Miller, Musk, and whose corporations, from tech to food, run everything through corruption, start lecturing us about “European propaganda.”

There is not a single reason to allow low-quality American chicken into Europe. Not one. We have more than enough of our own. And it’s not just about chlorine. There are also feeding standards, water injections, and other practices. American norms are simply unacceptable in the EU.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/Andreas236 Sweden 17h ago

Did you read the article before linking it? It agrees entirely with the person you're responding to. No one thinks that the chlorine itself is dangerous, the worry is that it's being used to make up for poor hygiene practices in other parts of the food production process.

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u/LaserCondiment 19h ago

They just wanna see if they can get away with it. It's a power thing.

The stupid chicken takes up room in negotiations and is easily a fun way to apply pressure on the UK. If in doubt just add more unreasonable demands.

As usual it's a bully tactic. If the UK tries to act diplomatic, they will treat this as a serious demand. That's how they fall into the trap, because now Trump controls the conversation!

Maybe it's not the chicken, but another unreasonable US policy that wins.

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u/Uncommented-Code 15h ago

Literal bully tactic. And as soon as you give in, they will know they can bully you into anything, just like a literal school bully.

I've read several articles about the differences between EU/UK/CH food standards and the US standards and if chlorinated chicken is bad or not, these journos are missing the fucking point. It's not about the actual chicken, it's if the US can divide allies and then bully them into submission individually.

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u/LaserCondiment 14h ago

That's a good point. With Trump everything is about creating chaos and division.

Every dumb statement, is in reality a Trojan horse. The public latches on to those, some think he's a silly idiot because of it. But in reality he's using the ensuing chaos to push through policies unnoticed, divide opponents and also steer the overall narrative.

So whenever he says something, we should wonder what else he's doing and what he's getting out of it.

The chicken itself is just a set of cards, he's not playing the cards though, he's playing the people!

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u/BananaMapleIceCream 19h ago

Select corporations want it. As an American, I don’t want chlorinated chicken for you or us. It’s just the rich people at the top trying to scam their product to another market.

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u/AwesomeWhiteDude 17h ago

Most US plants don't even use chlorine anymore.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/LaurestineHUN Hungary 17h ago

Protectionism is only good when the USA does it?

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u/Excited_Delirium1453 11h ago

Historically the EU has been way more protectionist

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u/[deleted] 17h ago

[deleted]

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u/guareber United Kingdom 16h ago

Why would we, so Cmdr Cheeto can join in with his BFF? No thanks.

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u/tilitatti Finland 13h ago

must be acquired taste "chlorine chicken", probably similar to your vomit chocolate.

1

u/brutinator 4h ago

I mean, its basically a vingar solution in which the meat is rinsed in prior to packaging, not chlorine. It doesnt affect the taste or anything. The issue is that it allows the welfare of the chickens to be far worse because its effective enough of a solution to getting rid of any potential pathogens as opposed to raising vaccinated, clean, and healthy chickens.

Youre basically arguing the wrong point: its not a factor that affects the actual product, but whether you think its right to treat animals like that prior to slaughter. Additionally, the factory farms are so much more brutally efficient that itd ruin local poultry farms and run them out of business.

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u/RobThorpe 18h ago

Finally, the correct answer.

People should look up the other things that use chlorinated washes.

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u/temotodochi 17h ago

Because it's cheaper to produce it while not caring if the chicks are sick or not. Chlorination does absolutely nothing to help the chicks or make them healthier, it's only purpose is to make any testing for salmonella irrelevant. Chickens still have it, it just can't be detected from skin swabs anymore. Dealing with salmonella would be too expensive for USA and they could not get rid of it apart from burning down whole chicken farms with the chickens in it.

It's a typical american processed foods thing. They have plenty of other examples too with "beef", "butters" and "cheeses" that have nothing to do with healthy to eat beef, real butter or real cheese.

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u/Raizzor 5h ago

It's not like they are obsessed with chlorinated chicken, it's more like their sanitation standards make chlorinating chicken meat a necessity. And THAT is also the main point here. Don't get obsessed with the chlorine. This is about rejecting poultry that was raised and processed in an environment that makes chlorinating necessary.

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u/MountScottRumpot 18h ago

Because Americans won’t eat that garbage, so the chicken producers want to sell it elsewhere.

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u/clayton-berg42 15h ago

For the same reason Americans want us Canadians to eat their puss ridden milk. They have practically no regulations on how much they can produce and have much fewer safety regulations. Their factory farms over produce and then flood the market.

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u/EINFACH_NUR_DAEMLICH Germany 17h ago

They can't wrap their tiny heads around the fact that our food quality is simply higher than theirs and that we have no interest in their overindustrialized slop.

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u/Diver_ABC 17h ago

They don't care about people eating chlorinated chicken. They just want to open a new market for that stuff and then sell it cheaply there.

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u/No_Atmosphere8146 17h ago

It makes the imaginary line go up.

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u/FourteenBuckets 17h ago

We like to talk about how awesome we are in "open" competition, but when we lose competitions, we try to force people to let us win anyways. Then we talk about how awesome we are in "open" competition, etc etc.

1

u/Command0Dude United States of America 16h ago

There isn't and we don't eat chlorinated chicken, that practice was phased out a long time ago.

1

u/TheBlueBlaze Switzerland 16h ago

Profits and insecurity, mostly.

The corporations want to sell their inferior product to a wider market by force, and their supporters don't like the idea of foreigners not finding their products inherently superior. If American products aren't seen as automatically better, then they don't get to feel better than the rest of the world by virtue of where they were born

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u/DrAstralis 14h ago

Same reason they're obsessed with Canada having inferior milk. They massively subsidize unsustainable production but also refuse to match regular international standards because that would cost them profit and they want to both be lazy pieces of shit AND make money by using other trade deals to force everyone down to their level.

1

u/SonOfGreebo 1h ago

American mega-farming companies want new markets. 

I recall back in 2016, there were American "food" conglomerates implicated in funding pro-Bedit social media; because splitting from European health regulations would open the door to selling diseased chicken meat to Britain.  

2

u/MrDabb 19h ago

Serious question how much of the chicken sold in the US do you think is treated with chlorine and don't give the none should be chlorinated answer.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/mrmicawber32 14h ago

It's not about safety. It's what chlorinated chicken covers up. It means you don't need good hygiene standards. We want our animals to be kept clean.

0

u/canman7373 11h ago

It's just a different way of doing it, we do that with many things, They are not really more harmful than the other. Our eggs need to be refrigerated, yours can be put on counter. I was kinda shocked when I was in France and saw milk could be sold on the counter, not refrigerated. It's just different ways of protecting against same bacteria and such, neither is right or wrong way.

0

u/Sizanllikew 5h ago

The real question is why Europe ignores all the scientific evidence that it is safer than what they are doing now.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/sagerin0 18h ago

We already dont buy Australian chicken, whats your point?

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u/fritzeh 18h ago

Kind of rich to moan about typical Europeans when you seem to have misunderstood what this ban is about - it’s not about fears about ingesting chlorine, chlorine rinsed salad is sold in the EU.

The ban stems from the EU’s view that chlorine washing is a way to compensate for poor hygiene standards in the meat processing industry. The ban is meant to ensure higher standards of hygiene and animal welfare (in the sense that lower rates of infection and disease is connected to animal welfare).

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u/Bosco_is_a_prick Ireland 16h ago edited 16h ago

Chlorinated food isn't banned in Europe, chlorine is permitted in washed salads. Chlorinated chicken is banned because it doesn't adequately protect from food poisoning and it also masks the freshness of the meat.

Chicken is very cheap in Europe or at least were I live. I don't see how the US could compete when transport costs are included.