This August the Department of Agriculture ended the ban on poultry imports from China into the United States. This ban makes it easy for American food companies to get their supply of chickens from China. The same country that has had rivers flooded with dead pigs, and just recently had an avian flu outbreak.
The impact of this decision could have long-lasting effects on how the USDA regulates its imported chicken–meaning that meat safety regulations could be much more lax. There have already been cries from Americans to mark processed foods, and to label GMO inflicted food products. This plea has been regularly ignored and people continue to ingest foods with ingredients they can’t even pronounce.
This new development could up the scare factor when sitting down to a box of chicken nuggets, or a tub of chicken wings. In a Bloomberg report, it describes the complicated process of having to import the chickens. Technically chickens will be slaughtered here in the United States, and then they will be sent to China for processing and will be exported again back in to the states. Now this plan to begin with is difficult to comprehend. It is truly hard to believe that it is much cheaper to send chickens to be processed in China, than have them shipped back, rather than to just have a regulated processing plant here do the job.
It also raises the question; can China even meet the already not so strict food safety standards that the USDA currently upholds? According to the New York Times, USDA inspectors are not allowed in the processing plants in China. So this chicken debacle just got a lot scarier. A country that has had countless health scares from contaminated foods, can now handle the chicken we send them with no supervision. To add to that there is no way in telling if companies will label products that have been processed in China, meaning Americans are not even given the option to make an educated decision.
Most have seen the infamous McDonalds “pink slime” photo, which turned out to be the run-off of cow connective tissue in ground beef. While the photo did draw out cry and made McDonalds stop using a chemical that attributes to the “pink slime,” when will this capture the nations attention? It is absolutely reprehensible that the companies will be able to get away with serving Americans drastically unregulated food.
Sadly, it will probably take a major food poisoning scare or health crisis to occur in the states before Americans will hear about this, other than from the few articles whizzing around on the web. This is not national news, yet. But all it will take is one outbreak and the whole country will be up in arms. But the fact remains that our policy makers and health safety officials are not currently looking out for the best interest of the American people, and should be held to a higher standard.
