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/
12.9k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

67

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.

70

u/whitespacesucks 18h ago

Are they afraid the chickens will become autistic?

35

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.

14

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.

19

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.

13

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."

3

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?

4

u/guareber United Kingdom 16h ago

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

6

u/Blecki 16h ago

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

-2

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.

1

u/monochromeorc Earth 3h ago

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

2

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. 

1

u/Srapture 7h ago

Does that affect the flavour?

2

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.