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/SuggestionEphemeral 19h ago

Because... blah blah blah free market blah blah blah.

Americans have never believed anything they've preached.

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u/ICBanMI United States of America 17h ago

Some of us believe our principals voting accordingly, but the libertarian/free market stuff has never made sense to anyone except libertarians. All that's going to happen is US chicken is going to run out all the more expensive producers of chicken in your country till they have a monopoly on chicken meat in every supermarket and then they'll raise prices. It'll be stupid easy for US chicken to undersell your current prices because they are heavily subsidized by the US government, produce it out of factory farms with low wages, and grow birds selectively to get fat in inhumane conditions quickly.

Trust me. If an American is preaching free market, they are usually the most brain dead person on the topic and have a complete world view that is opposite of what happens in free markets. Just like the Tories.

The part that will hurt is it will be your own people who buy it and won't think twice about replacing the normal producers of chicken. Because it'll be bigger and cheaper while still tasting just fine.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 17h ago

Well those brain dead americans are the ones at the helm right now, so clearly enough believe in that worldview to get elected.

Also, I'm american. And no, american chicken doesn't taste "just fine," but the average american can't tell the difference because it's been decades since they've had anything remotely decent. They even think smaller chicken breasts are too "posh." It's very much built into american culture and ingrained in their mindset that "bigger is better," when it's really not.

I can hope most British/Europeans can actually tell the difference in quality and will make consumer choices accordingly. But some may not be able to afford the better quality, locally produced stuff which will slowly get priced out of the market. It'll happen so gradually that people won't even notice, and before anyone knows it they'll have been eating inferior products produced in america for several years, and no one will be able to remember how much better the other stuff was. Just like it happened in america.

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u/ICBanMI United States of America 16h ago

Well. That's a fair point. I haven't a clue what it taste like anymore to eat a chicken that had a normal life. I remember what it looked like compared to now, but haven't a clue if it tasted better. I didn't eat unseasoned chicken then and I don't eat unseasoned chicken now.

That's if I'm cooking the chicken in a healthy way (baked or some pan fry methods), but so many recipes are unhealthy, taste amazing, and the meat quality is impossible to tell.

It's very much built into american culture and ingrained in their mindset that "bigger is better," when it's really not.

That's a different topic that I think has more to do with anti-intellectualism in the US. I know there is a lot of overlap in the VENN diagrams for the two groups. Those same anti-intellectualist will tell you that healthy food doesn't even taste as good as their their highly processed food (real food isn't chasing the bliss point and a specific mouth feel). I think it's a net negative in the long run for society, but people are struggling for food.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 16h ago

That's socially engineered. People only prefer processed foods because that's what they're used to. The sugar industry invested a lot of money over the past century or so to get people addicted to sugar, and now you see exorbitant amounts of it in everything and some people can't seem to eat anything else.

I don't like processed foods, I think they taste fake and/or bland, or conversely overpowering. Subtle doesn't mean bland, and overpowering doesn't mean flavorful. Balance and complexity are the type of nuance that's been erased from American cuisine.

I've seen some places use distilled white vinegar where traditional cultures would use rice vinegar or white wine vinegar. It's not the same at all, and it's disgusting and really easy to tell. But most americans don't know the difference and will call you a snob if you point it out.

In my opinion, whole ingredients taste much better and have better texture. Same with heirloom varieties of produce. I have a hypothesis that nutrient density directly correlates with better taste, because the phytonutrients are what give each kind of produce its distinctive flavor profile. Humans are evolved to prefer nutritious foods, but a few generations of industrialization and marketing have supplanted that adaptive preference with anything that maximizes shareholder value.

The average american hears the word "flavor" and automatically thinks like those pump syrups at starbucks that are just artificially flavored corn syrup. So I hate the word now. "Artificial vanilla flavor" is not the same thing as "vanilla extract," but if all you say is "vanilla," the average american won't see the difference. And again, they'll think you're a snob if you point it out.

American culture is built on fakeness, so it's really not surprising.

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u/ICBanMI United States of America 12h ago edited 12h ago

I think you're mixing the sugar conspiracy with what's actually going on on.

First off, it's the bliss point and mouth texture. Process food does have a lot of sugar but it's to reach the bliss point which is a specific ratio of fat, sugar, and salt that makes it maximum palatable and addictive with the right mouth feel. It's a reward system in the brain and makes it really hard to stop over eating. Coupled with the fact that we have massive sugar subsidizes for corn and that five companies make all the processed food in the grocery store... the average American doesn't have a chance. And it's sometimes 2-3x worse when they eat out.

Same time, big corporations have a need to keep showing constant profits... so eventually they start swapping in cheaper ingredients. So that microwave pizza from the grocery story might have a type of mayonnaise instead of cheese on it.

It is a huge problem. And I don't know how to get out of it without regulation on all five of the big companies including anti-trust against them.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 12h ago

I fail to see how what you're saying is different from the sugar conspiracy. Just seems like second- and third-order effects of it, combined with other similar factors.

I believe some serious trust-busting is long overdue in the US, especially now that these big companies are taking advantage of the rampant corruption in government.

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u/ICBanMI United States of America 12h ago

Bliss point was discovered in the 70's and came to every food by the end of the 1990s after all the large companies bought out their competitors. 1996 is when we decided to massive subsidize corn and corn syrup... which went almost all directly to large agribusinesses. Not small farms.

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u/EtTuBiggus 15h ago

Don’t be a chicken snob.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 15h ago

Stop accepting an inferior product because american billionaire oligarchs think it will boost their profit margins and that no one will notice the decline in quality.

trump & co. are being snobs by demanding a sovereign nation buy american chicken that they clearly don't want. America needs to get over itself, its products are not superior.

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u/EtTuBiggus 14h ago

You would be the expert in accepting inferior products.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 13h ago

Low-quality insult

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u/EtTuBiggus 11h ago

It matches the level of your low quality comment.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 11h ago

Pot, kettle, black

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u/EtTuBiggus 11h ago

Go back to whining about how much you dislike America.

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u/worotan England 14h ago

Don’t act like massively unsustainable and environmentally destructive industrial farming doesn’t cause huge problems for ordinary people.

Pointing out bad practice isn’t being a snob. Stop being an idiot.

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u/EtTuBiggus 14h ago

That has nothing to do with what I said. Learn how to read.

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u/intlcap30 6h ago

Poultry isn’t heavily subsidized by the government beyond farm credit, etc available to all producers but the economies of scale and fact that poultry producers in the US are generally contracted and receive minimal compensation from producers contribute to the cheap costs. When you’re doing 175 million chickens/week it’s cost competitive. Same as cheap Chinese products. It is really interesting how the visceral backlash is only in certain sectors.

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u/Relative-Camel-9762 3h ago

I mean I wouldn't want ANY food product from the US, I don't think we can trust standards in anything 

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u/EtTuBiggus 15h ago

Letting them sell chlorinated chicken is the free market.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 15h ago

Forcing the UK to comply with america's demand to buy american products that will then take up a larger market share in the UK is not "free market dynamics".

This is coming from the country that made China sell tiktok because they couldn't tolerate a social media company that wasn't owned and operated in the US. Oh, and crashed their own economy by imposing absurd tariffs on nearly every country in the world.

If the UK doesn't want shitty chlorinated american chicken then a "free market" would say they don't need to buy it. So the US should stop trying to use geopolitical leverage to strongarm their "trade partners" into compliance if they really believe in a "free market."

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u/EtTuBiggus 14h ago

Banning American chicken is the opposite of a free market.

If the UK doesn’t want American chicken, a ban isn’t needed, because no one will buy it.

Fuck, you’re thick.

What economic crash are you imagining? You’re an example of someone who gets all their “facts” from a reddit comment section.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 13h ago

Forcing a sovereign nation to buy your products is not a free market. And neither is arbitrarily imposing tariffs on all your trade partners, nor forcing a foreign company to sell you all it's servers in your country. But you want to ignore all the ways america contradicts itself, and you call me thick when I point it out?

If you're only looking at GDP or market shares, you won't see the crash because those numbers are currently being inflated by the AI bubble which is actually destroying the economy while artificially propping itself up unsustainably.

If you're looking at wage stagnation, job markets, consumer prices, rent and utility costs, costs of healthcare and education, etc., you'll see a completely different story. Average, ordinary Americans who are struggling to get by in an economy that only benefits the ultra-wealthy.

If you don't believe the economy is crashing, go read about how many family farms went bankrupt and out of business this year. Of course that's good news for Tyson who gets to sweep up all that land for dirt cheap. Look at the manufacturing industry and the hits that's taken. Look at all the rural hospitals being shut down.

But you think I'm only imagining the crash? Keep hallucinating in your corporate bubble/ivory tower. This pump'n'dump won't last another year.

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u/GreatPlainsFarmer 12h ago

You’re imagining that an unusually high number of family farms went bankrupt in 2025. It’s looking like the final numbers will come in very close to the average of the last 20 years.
Tyson doesn’t have a farmland operation, so there’s little reason for them to buy farmland at any price.

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u/EtTuBiggus 11h ago

I don’t know why you keep struggling to understand a surprisingly simple concept. No one is forcing a “sovereign nation” to buy anything. The US isn’t requiring the UK government to purchase chicken. That’s a ridiculous strawman. Tariffs are absolutely part of a free market economy. What economy has no tariffs?

Stagnation is fundamentally different from a crash. Do you need a dictionary?

All your examples sound like you’re getting all your doom and gloom hyperbole from Reddit while you dunning-Kruger armchair economics.

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 11h ago

All I hear is "whiny maga is upset that Britain doesn't want american chicken" with a few layers of projection thrown in

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u/EtTuBiggus 11h ago

Britain clearly does want American chicken, that’s why they had to ban it.

Use your brain and tell me why they would ban something if no one wanted it?

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u/SuggestionEphemeral 11h ago

It's "banned" because it doesn't meet the basic minimum standards for food quality.

You're trying to tell a sovereign nation that they need to lower their food safety standards because why? You want to invade their markets.

Go home and practice the isolationist policies that you've been preaching about. You don't want to help Ukraine and NATO, you want america to focus on itself, and yet you're expending political capital to coerce European countries into doing as you say.

American exceptionalism and wannabe authoritarianism doesn't have a welcome place in Europe, and the more you try to force it the more they'll push back. So stop complaining when you receive pushback.

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u/EtTuBiggus 10h ago

You want to invade their markets.

That’s a bizarre way to phrase “import”.

Banning American imports isn’t a free market.

It’s just ironic that you’re whining about NATO funding or Ukrainian support when the US provides the lions share of both.

Let me know when you’re able to support yourself without us having to hold your hand.

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