As threats go

[Suff]

It is hardly earth shaking and totally unlikely to sway the man in the street.

The UK will be flooded with cheaply produced food should it lower its regulatory standards after Brexit,

I can just see the man in the street listening to this. "If you don't do what we say, you will have more food choice, cheaper than ever".

Cue man in the Street, scratching head, wondering why we ever did what they said in the first place.

Yes it plays well with French and Polish farmers and their governments. But it is not exactly a crowd pleaser.

After all, I thought we were going to starve in 6 weeks shortly after going broke??

Someone needs to get their story straight. Like the EU withdrawing from talks on a Brexit deal if we didn't ditch the Internal Markets bill. Or not.

I'm not surprised that people are confused.

[Kaz]

You might want to eat chlorinated chicken, or hormone-filled beef, but I don't But then you live mostly in France, safely covered by the EU food safety regulations

[Suff]

There is a difference between chicken washed in a very dilute solution of chlorine and chlorinated chicken.

The biggest objection to chlorine solution washed chicken is that it has been used to mask poor abbatoir regulation in the US from time to time.

It would appear that it is acceptable for people to chlorinate themselves regularly but not to kill off bacteria, like campylobacter, with a mild dilute chlorine wash.

Personally I would prefer chicken which has a preventative wash than the 75% of chickens found in UK and European supermarkets infested with a bacterial infection. Especially as significant numbers of EU citizens die of campylobacter,poisoning in the EU, every year. Far more than the US. Salmonella, on the other hand, is another issue.

But that's just me.

I found it amusing that having plentiful availability of cheap food was a threat.

It tickled my funnybone.

When I came to France, food was plentiful, cheap and very good. Meat quality was outstanding and the budget was easy to balance.

Today food in France is significantly more expensive than the UK, poultry and pork are heavily injected with water, you have to pay an arm and a leg to get good quality steak and Cod is €5 a kilo more expensive than fillet steak.

Until France shut down the trucking companies over VAT violations (France charges 5% Vat on food), Brits were doing their daily shopping in the UK, getting it sent over and saving money on the weekly shopping bill.

[Workingman]

People are not confused at all, they can see we are in a race to the bottom. Yes, we might get some cheaper food, but we don't know the conditions it was grown in or the pesticides and insecticides used, and that's before we get to the chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef.

It's fine for you living in France / EU where you can grow a wider selection of fruits and vegetables all year round or import them from your neighbours grown to higher EU standards.

And if you are going to quote EU v UK v US numbers to support your opinion please try to use up to date figures and not ones from 2015. Ta. Could you also please provide a link to the practice of meat plumping being only done in the EU and mainly in France. I think the UK and other places once did it as well, before it was frowned upon here and in the EU.

As for your claim for campylobacter.....

Reported deaths attributed to campylobacteriosis increased from 62 in 2016 to 72 in 2017.

Those are in the EU of some 480m people, scary eh, and....

In 2017, Germany (69,178 cases) and the U.K. (63,304) accounted for 53 percent of confirmed cases.

foodsafetynews.com.

[Suff]

[quote="Workingman"]
It's fine for you living in France / EU where you can grow a wider selection of fruits and vegetables all year round or import them from your neighbours grown to higher EU standards.

Actually the French eat seasonal veg. You do find fruit and veg all year round, but it is in smaller volume and lower quality. The French don't expect to eat summer veg in December and if you want a strawberry in December you can go whistle, you don't get them as nobody is looing for them.

As for higher standards? We avoid Spanish veg and buy French veg when it is available. Spanish veg is crap. All year round!

[Suff]

Anyway, we get away from the point. I had to hear and read, horror stories of how the UK was going to run out of food as if we are the most incompetent produce managers in the world. All because the EU were going to close the borders.

Now a senior EU puke tells us that if we don't do what they say we'll be buried in food.

The irony is too thick to cut with a chainsaw.

[Workingman]

I had to hear and read, horror stories of how the UK was going to run out of food as if we are the most incompetent produce managers in the world. All because the EU were going to close the borders.

No you didn't, you made that up.

England. Britain, the UK, call it what you will, has not been self-sufficient in food since the 17th century. It's not that we are incompetent produce managers or hopeless farmers, it's just that we do not have the land or the climate to feed our population.

And you French might avoid Spanish food (allegedly) yet it is France's fifth largest import partner for food and the top four are all EU. Oh, and it's meat is not chlorinated washed or hormone-fed, bit of a sod that, what?

[Suff]

No you didn't, you made that up.

UK’s worst-case no-deal Brexit plan warns of food shortages, public disorder
Border Chaos, Food Shortages: Stark Warnings for Britain on No Deal Brexit
Brexit food shortages: What to stockpile as no-deal Brexit looms
No-deal Brexit will bring food shortages despite assurances, supermarkets warn
Food shortage warning for Britain in event of no-deal Brexit
Britain would face food shortages in no-deal Brexit, industry body says
Britain is risking a car-crash Brexit of food shortages, another recession and isolation

Let me be clear. Food shortages == running out of food.

Now that took 5 minutes. If you want me to be bloody minded about this, I can spend the next half hour filling this page with the thousands and thousands of words of DRIVEL written about how the UK would not be able to get enough food, medicine or other goods if we don't knuckle down and do what the EU says.

Now a senior EU politician stands up and completely and utterly contradicts the whole raft of lies and actually tells the truth. Albeit spun so as to be a BAD thing for the UK.

More home truths about US dilute choline washed chickens...

Brazil sent one million salmonella-infected chickens to UK in two years

20% of chickens infected with Salmonella.

All imported into the UK whilst in the EU. Brazil is the largest chicken exporter in the world and we, even within the EU, are buying their chicken. With our very high standards.

Beware the politician who is telling you the "truth". They are telling you their "truth". I mean why would we want to buy dilute chlorine solution washed US chicken when we can buy chicken from Brazil of which 20% is infected with Salmonella. Buying US chicken might even improve the situation. But for god's sake don't tell the people about that; they might want it and then where would we be?

[Workingman]

Link one is an old article which was about what might have happened had we not gained the transition period and crashed out on no-deal on Oct 31 last year. Even Minister Gove was sympathetic to the claims when he said “If we do leave without a deal on Oct. 31 there will inevitably be bumps in the road,”. It's a scenario that never played out, though, as we got the transition till 23:00 on 31/12/2020.

Link two is bad, very bad. 20% of ALL chickens with salmonella - we are all going to die! Except we are not. It's 20% of Brazilian chickens and I freely admit that figure is terrible, but what does it represent for us in the UK? It represents 100,000 chickens in one year. OK, it's a large number, now put it into context. We in the UK slaughter on average about 20 million chickens per week - 20 m / week. Brazil's birds represent 0.0001%. It's hard to know what happens to the Brazilian birds but I have never seen one for sale to the public. I suspect that most if not all of it is made into pet food and that any salmonella is killed in the cooking process.

[Suff]

Apologies for not being specific enough. I haven't forgotten what was said last year or how we were lambasted with claims that not being under the EU Rules would mean we would have food shortages. I wasn't talking about last week or last month, I was talking about the general situation.

For the poultry. We exported 470 thousand tons in 2019, imported 400 thousands tons and produced 1.7 million tons.

We import broilers, not sure that we import any other kinds of chickens. That detail is not there.

The point is that if we are importing broilers for animal feed, then it is irrelevant whether it is Brazilian chicken with a 20% incidence of disease or US chlorine washed chicken.

More interestingly, the major US producers are buying up UK farms and producing megafarms in the UK. Look it up.

The whole point is that the whole thing is rhetoric, marketing games, market protection and blackmail. People have decided to stand on one side or the other of this line and treat it as categoric fact which cannot be argued.

So when some Politician stands up and contradicts the "facts of the matter", I reserve the right to heckle.