this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Lots of American food is actually banned in the rest of the world, especially the EU.
Good thing the US has a great healthcare system.
https://www.fodmapeveryday.com/12-american-foods-banned-from-store-shelves-in-other-countries/
I saw a thread recently with Americans discussing who washes their chicken in the sink before cooking it, which is a concept I'd literally never even heard of in Europe.
That's not a thing most Americans do, just an fyi.
It's not, but only because doing so causes even more problems, even though there's reason to do it
Maybe I'm out of the loop here, but can people safely eat raw chicken in Europe?
You have to cook chicken in the US. I kinda figured that was a global thing.
Yeah you have to cook chicken everywhere, people wash the raw chicken in the US because of the chemicals the meat has been soaked in
No, we really don't.
Also most of the chickens have just been simply brined. The only "chemical" you find in there is sodium chloride.
> people wash the raw chicken in the US
No they do not
The washing is to get any residual poop off the chicken. If the chicken was rinsed in chlorinated water, running water over it for a few seconds won't do anything.
Several years ago protocol was changed to not wash chicken because it was found the water splashing was more dangerous than sticking the chicken in the oven to kill any pathogens.
Never had to wash a chicken breast in my life, but, the FDA allows for a chemical rinse, but does not require it. I buy smaller, higher quality chicken breasts because they taste better compared to the bloated, plumped, and cheaper packs, so the chicken I buy may not get this chemical process.
That being said, there is no shortage of sanitization steps in packaged products that will leave residue on food. I'm more concerned that the FDA allows the chemical bath to make up for the shortcomings in animal welfare at production facilities that leads to contaminated chicken in the first place. That bothers me more than a small amount of chlorine on the meat.
The only thing that leads someone to thinking this is true is brain damage
It was a thing until recently when it was found washing is more likely to spread disease from splashing than just sticking it in the oven to kill everything.
Can you define "recently"? I've been cooking for ~20 years now, and I also took a food-and-nutrition class in highschool which had a pretty significant unit on food safety and cross contamination. I'm confident saying that washing chicken was not the norm at least as far back as 2006.
Sorry, I'm old now so "recent" is messed up in my mind. Pretty sure I learned the change from Alton Brown Good Eats 1999.
Chicken production is horrible everywhere, but in USA it is next level disgusting.
Besides the chlorine treatment, which they have to do because the production is unsanitary, they also ship the frozen chicken to China, where it's chopped up, only to be send back to USA, still frozen. Trump was angry with UK not wanting to import it.
It makes no sense that sending a frozen chemical shit chicken all over the world, should somehow be better or cheaper than simply raising a chicken in Europe and just chopping the head off.
US chicken is not chlorinated any more. This myth just won't die in Facebook.
anything cage free, range free are horrible. you are looking for pasture raised, or expensive garden raised.
We have all kinds of different labels to differentiate eggs. Consumers still buy a lot of the cheapest. In my opinion it would make sense to outlaw the production of those instead of leaving the choice of animal welfare to the wallet of the consumer.
That's not really a necessary thing as far as I can find. It's more of something that people do because their parents and grandparents did it too
I've been unlucky enough to stumble upon a YouTube video of a guy doing a live stream where he is going to cook fried chicken and someone commented he should wash the chicken.
He did. With dish soap.
That's just reaction baiting at that point
The guy was genuinely miffed by having people laughing at him because he was about to wash the chicken with dish soap.
So much so, he did it nonetheless, while saying out loud "you wanted me to wash the chicken, I be washing the chicken".
It was genuine.
Streaming steaming with reactions. It was not genuine.
He should have used a bath bomb and candles.
That would have been entertaining.
People do all kinds of stupid stuff that they don't need to do or shouldn't do. But yes, this is one of those stupid things that some people might do in America. I've never known anyone that does this.
I would do it with whole chickens, to get off all the excess saline solution they package it with, but not to try and sterilize it. That's what cooking is for
Americans have a lot of mythology around chickens fed by Facebook.
This one time someone tried arguing with me and trying to say that american food is fine and europeans only don't like it cause they're snobs and that it should be imported without regulation because "free market" or whatever, and I was just like "my fellow american, I've been eating this garbage my whole life and I can tell you with confidence that the difference in quality between it and European food is palpable. You don't even need lab testing to tell you american food is garbage."
And he basically just changed his tactic from calling me a snobby european to calling me a euraboo, and continuing to deny that there's anything wrong with american food and that European regulators are simply trying to capture the market. So I asked him if he'd be alright with importing Chinese cars to the US and he basically had an aneurysm. Fucking capitalists, man...
I was feeling pretty gaslit though. No matter how many facts and research I gave him about industrial practices and corporate capture of regulators, he just kept denying that there's any problem and doubling down that the real problem is European countries refusing to import this garbage, and waxing eloquent about how the consumers deserve to be able to choose to ear american-produced garbage food if they want to. I kept telling him nobody wants too and he was like "so let people import it," not seeing how businesses would inevitably choose the cheapest option thereby taking away the consumer's ability to choose the higher quality locally produced and healthier options...
This took place on lemmy, too. Wasn't even reddit.
That article has inaccurate information JSYK, brominated vegetable oil was banned in the US before the article was published.
I'm sorry