While they be eaten' US pork.
USDA just approved chicken from China for use in our dinners.
Sorry, but this is downright scary. Over the past year we have been getting take out less and less, partly for financial reasons, but mostly because the quality of the food has become abysmal....fake cheese being an important factor....
Looks as if it is about to get worse. I do not want to eat any food product that originated in China, but especially not chicken.EVER.
Chinese farmers were caught selling chickens sick or dead from disease to be made into chicken nuggets and other tasty treats, which they exported to Japan.
Now they can send them to us.
These are the same folks who peddled chicken feet that had been in storage for over 40 years, and do you remember melamine? Contaminated baby formula? Deadly dog food?
Yum.
They are also in the process of purchasing the largest pork producer in the world, Smithfield, and the government has just approved the sale. Along with bricks and mortar plants they will be buying safety know-how, and a heck of a lot of pork.
Who do you think is coming out on the better end of these deals?
Not so many years ago, small meat growers and processors abounded in the US. Within twenty miles of here there were at least two small, family-owned turkey farms that provided the best fresh turkey you could imagine. We bought products from one of them to fill the freezer every fall. They were fantastic!
The original mortgage on this very farm was in part paid off by raising chickens for the little grocery market in town.
Then the very same government that is allowing our food production to be sold overseas, while inflicting inferior products on us, came up with regulations that made it virtually impossible for small operations to function in an economically reasonable manner. They went out of business.
It was bad enough to lose the special quality of locally-grown and processed foods in favor of the uniformity and "safety" of the giant corporations that serve us now. But for our government to fly in the face of common sense to allow chicken from a country with perhaps the most utterly appalling food safety record in existence is obscene.
Bring back the little guy! Ease some of the stupid restrictions on local food processors so people can buy chickens grown by their neighbors. *We were told by the owner, years and years ago, that one of the local turkey growers sold their birds because they were required to provide a separate set of stainless steel pans for every set of entrails from every single bird. I wasn't there at the time but......*
And, boy, am I kicking myself! I keep a bookmarks folder of Farm Side research, week-by-week. A few months ago I wrote about the dead chickens going into chicken nuggets business and had a nice set of links to Asian newspaper stories with the details. Since the folder gets really cumbersome, I deleted them when I went on to the next week's work.
Funny thing.....none of those stories are appearing anywhere, no matter what search terms I combine to find them.....hmmm........
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6 comments:
This is horrifying.
According to your linked article, at least "The processors will only be allowed to re-export heat-treated/cooked chicken that has been initially slaughtered in the U.S. or another nation that exports slaughtered chickens to the United States."
That's a little bit less awful than thinking of eating chickens that were grown in China. I'm not a big chicken nugget eater anyway.
Here's another article about the recent approval and how it happened.
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/09/how-chinese-processed-chicken-was-approved-for-export-to-usa/#.UitfzMabNGM
Jan, sure is!
June, Although the link suggests that a two-week audit is exhaustive, ongoing oversight would seem necessary to me. As to the origin of chicken to be processes, other sources say that the rules will quickly be amended to remove that requirement. I didn't link to all the horror stores I found, but Chinese poultry has in recent years been found to be adulterated by anti-foaming agents, mysterious fibers, etc. the USDA has also recently scaled back inspections of food plants in other countries that sell food here. I am very uncomfortable with this and predict quality issues at the very least, with safety issues also very likely IMHO
A "little bit less awful" isn't good enough for me.
These products don't need to be labeled with the country of origin, so we won't know where the chicken was raised, where it was slaughtered, or where it was processed. China's track record is so abysmal that I certainly don't trust two weeks of "inspections". We've been had.
Threecollie, you made the important point, IMO, when you talked about the draconian regulations that have obliterated local food production and processing.
Yes, this is obscene and downright scary. It isn't just about chicken nuggets, which one may or may not eat.
NW, you betcha. And now we can just wait for the other shoe to drop. Of course all we will hear is the bang. It takes an amazing amount of research, every time there is a big ecoli recall, to find out the origin of the products involved. This chicken business is going to make it virtually impossible. The only upside I can find is that maybe Chinese competition for pigs will drive up the price a bit to hog farmers. Maybe. Meanwhile, at least it is fairly easy to grow your own, both chicken and pork.
The worst part is they legally COULD be labeled as USA "grown" poultry.....so now we have to look for where its processed.......
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