What Are We Eating!!

Image Courtesy of Saxton Horne

As you can tell by now, I am a big advocate for news and issues presented on NPR. I was reading a health article that discusses reasons why European countries do not want to import food from America. The main argument of the article centered on the use of chemicals by American food producers. The article, aptly titled “European Activists Say They Don’t Want Any U.S. ‘Chlorine Chicken’” raised some personal concerns I’ve always had about how food is processed in the US.

According to the article, American producers often use chlorine to disinfect their chicken primarily because production is on a large scale and it also saves time. Additionally, cleaning chicken with chlorine also removes diseases like salmonella and other bacteria. While taking this step to make food cleaner for consumption might be a good idea, the issue of having side effects of using such chemicals in food cannot be ignored. According to the article, Europeans use a different and efficient approach to preventing the same issue that the US uses chemicals for. Their flocks of chicken are tested regularly for salmonella and if any of these chickens test positive, farmers have to get rid of the entire flock. If we are to compare, the European approach is much more effective as they are able to eliminate the problems at the root.

As a society, I believe that if we do not condone drinking water from pools because of the chlorine and chemicals in them then there should be no reason to use those chemicals in our food. I believe this issue relates to many of the reasons why most Americans have multiple health complications often tends to be passed on to future generations. Compared to chicken prices in Europe, American chicken prices are cheaper but in the long term the externalities of both systems suggest that it would be worth is to pay more for non-chlorine cleaned chicken. In this sense, I gladly side with European countries not wanting to buy poultry produce from America.