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I’ve avoided all food from America for more than a decade.
Genuinely can’t think of anything we eat that comes from there. It’s too far for anything fresh and too expensive for anything cheap.
Look for soy ingredients.
I never ate American food to my knowledge. Not out of volition but I rarely see American food sold here in Ireland.
They had food and safety regulations?
Beef must contain at least 35% beef to be called beef in the states. That is the level of regulations they had, so now? Does beef need any cow?
Your beef can legally contain mostly not beef?
Mine?! Oh don’t put that evil nationality on me. But yes the fools in the states seem to require that something called beef needs to be comprised of at least 35% cooked beef
Kinda disingenuous as the list you linked is for prepared meals like beef dumplings. In what world would you consider that product to be 100% beef? lol
Ah yes, it is I and the rest of the world that is crazy. When we ask for “beef” dumplings we clearly only want at least 35% beef inside…
Oh and for our Beef and gravy as well:
Well… yeah? I mean think about what a dumpling is, how much flour and water it takes to make? I don’t understand your point?
35% is low, and prepared meals include things like “beef taco filling” or “dumpling filling”. You seem to think there is only 35% and 100%. Unless you are being disingenuous.
I suppose they have regulations for the safety of manufacturers from consumers.
About 10 years ago I worked for a company that wrote software for restaurants’ food safety inspectors in South Dakota… All 3 of them… 3 people to inspect every restaurant in the entire state. They were over 5 years behind on some of the inspections.
If that’s how food safety was prioritized back then, just think what it must be like today.
Your experience is not universal, but it is also not unique. South Dakota has one of the lowest population densities in America and I think you’ll find if you look around that most places similar to it have similar experiences with food safety inspections, in restaurants and in manufacturing, worldwide.
And do not be mistaken, the US wants this for Europe too. They want a few rich people to dictate everything world wide.
Eat our chlorine chicken!
Fuck. That. Shit.
Europe is already moving in wrong directions here and there (hello chat control) so we gotta be enormously careful that they won’t bend the knee on anything else
Europeans need to hold these corrupt politicians in the positions of power accountable.
I am consistently shocked how much higher quality the food is in France and The NL when I visit; even the sloppy mall restaurants were higher quality. Paris was off the charts. The worst quality food we had there was above average for here.
WEAKENED regulations??? How much weaker could they get??? Our diet is already 103% high fructose corn syrup. The other 47% is grease!
SOME people tell me that those numbers don’t add up, but I checked. They do add up. 103% + 47%. Those are the numbers! What? You think I’m wrong??? I’m using the same math skills they taught in 11th grade at public schools, here in the USA! Basic math! I know my stuff! Even Scott Steiner checked my math. He said it spells disaster for you at sacrifice!
Hey, at least it’s HFCS and not lead… You only need to figure it out that lead is clearly a better sweetener and then, as a stabilizer, start using asbestos.
uhhh it’s also lead. I had to switch to a new protein shake brand because the one I was drinking was found to have unsafe levels of lead in it, and it was difficult because several other major brands also had unsafe levels of lead.
If it’s happening in one industry, I bet it’s happening in others.
Chocolate too. I love dark chocolate, but most of them were full of heavy metals. Though that is likely world wide based on the brands that had problems. Trader Joes being in there was the biggest blow in our household.
Time to start growing our own
I give them a year.
Lead in the foreskin reduces autism.
It’s a historical fact that Europeans are very bad at math, since they waste so much time on useless topics like history in school. In the US, we do it right: The Book about American history is about 3 times thicker than the world history book! No time wasted on heathen stuff like the Age of Enlightenment or the blasphemic utterings of old greeks!
US history and World History are taught as two separate subjects. Ypu should know more of your own history than that of foreign nations because US history is more directly relevant to modern Americans lives than say the Crusades or the history of Denmark would be.
A lot of what you are complaining about is that the USA isn’t as Eurocentric as you would hope they would be.
I’d say it is rather important to know where you are coming from. The people colonizing the USA did not appear out of thin air, but out of a complex group of nations with a wealth of backgrounds, which is completely lost if you don’t learn enough about the world at large. And this is not about eurocentrism at all, since there are a lot of people out of African and Asian nations too.
I also think it is not surprising that the average American doesn’t know shit about the complicated development of the human race, which comes with a shocking ignorance towards ideas like humanism and why the founding fathers were so adamant about the separation of church and state, which is increasingly becoming lost in the USA (hint: it’s because the founding fathers knew about all this stuff!).
If you compress 10,000 years into a third of 250 years, this is what you get.
You know they say that all men are created equal, but you look at me and you look at Lost_My_Mind and you can see that statement is not true. See, normally if you go one on one with another commentor, you got a 50/50 chance of winning. But I’m a genetic freak and I’m not normal! So you got a 25%, AT BEST, at beat me. Then you add Kurt Angle to the mix, your chances of winning drastic go down. See the 3 way at Sacrifice, you got a 33 1/3 chance of winning, but I, I got a 66 and 2/3 chance of winning, because Kurt Angle KNOWS he can’t beat me and he’s not even gonna try! So Lost_My_Mind, you take your 33 1/3 chance, minus my 25% chance and you got an 8 1/3 chance of winning at Sacrifice. But then you take my 75% chance of winning, if we was to go one on one, and then add 66 2/3 per cents, I got 141 2/3 chance of winning at Sacrifice. See Lost, the numbers don’t lie, and they spell disaster for you at Sacrifice.
Fat, happy and docile, the way we like them. - US business
WEAKENED regulations??? How much weaker could they get???
DO.NOT.CHALLENGE.THEM!
With those numbers, we can also explain why Americans are fat.
Even Scott Steiner checked my math.
Seems like
Oh wtf Matt Damon is the lead on that? I did not remember that and now I feel kinda old for that.
Regulations so weak they kNoOoOoW they can’t beat you
YSK that average or even lower quality meat from the EU would almost always be considered ‘premium’ by US standards. What Americans eat on a daily basis is straight up illegal in the EU. Leave it to the richest country on the planet to feed its citizens with literal poisoned trash.
Americans eat as if they had an excellent healthcare system. Or a healthcare system at all.
It’s the opposite: the state has no responsibility to heal anyone, so they don’t give a crap about prevention through regulation.
They eat exactly as the healthcare system they have.
“Freedom” means freedom from safety nets
Americans eat like they believe in God’s salvation.
Can confirm. The UK has some of the most delicious meat I’ve tasted, and I know for a fact that someone right now living in the EU cringed internally just reading this sentence lol
Nah the UK adopted EU food safety standards in full and didn’t get rid of them post brexit.
…yet.
Good to know! Canadians embarrass themselves copying America in this regard.
Soon US “beef” (may or may not contain animal protein) and US “nacho cheeze” (contains no dairy) will be all over the UKs shelves.
How do you think we became the richest country on earth? Capitalism run amok and fucking people over.
Why do you believe the USA is the richest country in the world?
You are without a doubt the country in the world with the most debt however.
GDP (nominal), global economic output, total household wealth/assets…
Technically we are. It’s just very, VERY poorly distributed.
Do you have a valid source for that claim?
bleached chickens
To expand on this example, people worry about the bleach when they hear this but it’s not used at dangerous levels as I remember it.
The issue is the meat is so disgusting in the first place it needs to be washed to not kill off its consumers. We don’t wash meat in Europe, because we have standards
To go even further, in Japan they have a breed of chicken so clean that it’s eaten as sushi. Here in the US, undercooked chicken or unwashed eggs are a salmonella risk - as is pretty much any other food due to contamination. There was a massive recall on lettuce a few years ago across the country for salmonella contamination.
Nah, Japan just takes that risk and minimizes it by butchering the chicken much closer to the time it us served. In the USA your bird was killed much earlier and preserved by chilling/freezing.
There’s no magic breed of chicken that has no salmonella.
Which is also why the advice in any actual first world country is not to wash meat, because the small amount of bacteria that may be present which cooking will deal with, just ends up in your sink ready to contaminate everything else
That is the USDA/USFDA advice as well. the “wash” takes place in the slaughterhouse and Europeans just use different chemicals.
Cheese wiz in cans, banned in Canada.
Do you think no one cooks or something?
Edit. Apparently cooking is bad if you’re American.
are you buying the meat from a butcher that only sources from local farmers? If you can afford that, yeah it’s probably on par with what Euros can buy in a grocery store. If you can’t afford that, then it doesn’t really matter if you’re the one cooking it or not, the meat is gonna be low quality.
Most American cities no longer have local butchers, it’s not like Europe. Many are reliant on bigbox stores for their base necessities especially in rural areas. So it’s not even a class issue, it’s an accessibility issue. It’s the reason why companies started rolling out subscriptions like Butcher Box. You’d never see that sort of thing take off in Europe.
Yes, grocery stores source food from local farms.
We don’t have animals made of corn sugar. You can dismount from your high horse.
I don’t see show cooking oversugared toxins is gonna make them less toxic.
You live in a perfect world don’t you?
No, I live in an extremely shitty world where a majority of people are selfish idiots who only focus on their own bellies.
But I am Finnish and although (I find the country much more problematic than most would assume — vis-a-vis the population’s self-imposed authoritarianism), our food regulation isn’t too shabby.
vis-a-vis the population’s self-imposed authoritarianism
People voted for conservatives didn’t they?
Thus the “self-imposed”, although it’s not just about the current government.
I do think that about the USA actually, yes.
What magical country are you from?
“the rest of the world” / “Europe” / “Nordics”
Take your pick.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300778/
Fat land: how Americans became the fattest people in the world Reviewed by: Samuel Klein Greg Critser… Fat land: how Americans became the fattest people in the world. 2004.University of California Press: Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston, Massachusetts, USA.224 pp. $24.00. ISBN: 0-618-16472-3 (hardcover).Inline graphic
We are in the midst of a national obesity crisis, and Americans are getting heavier. Today, about 65% of adults and 15% of children and adolescents in the US are overweight or obese.
Two thirds of adults are obese. that’s horrifying.
Your moms horrifying
I would agree, but she can still walk herself to where she needs to go. Can yours?
That’s the lamest response I’ve ever heard lol
You can do better. Try again
Warming food in microwave isn’t cooking.
Oh, ok, so you’re just a smug self-important asshole. Got it.
Their goods were appealing?
I was born in a country where my mom constantly worried abot food safety and constantly lectures me about how dangeous food can be, she told me she breastfed me because she didn’t trust the baby formulas.
Now we get to experience nostalgia!¹ 🫠
Didn’t even need to return to my birth country…
(¹nostalgia of having to worry about food safety again)
👊🇺🇸🔥
Good job moving to hell I guess.
- I didn’t choose it lol, I was a kid, no choice
- From memory, the apartment building I used to live in my previous country was looked like it’s deteriorating. Air pollusion was horrible.
- It was 2010 when we moved, trump wasn’t even a thing.
- From “More Hell” to “Slighly Less Hell” is still an improvement, even if it’s still in the realm of “Hell”. Too bad Norway didn’t accept us.
- Late stage capitalism aside, I kinda enjoyed the internet for the past 15 years… in my previous country, they built a wall around the internet. I didn’t even have internet access by the time I left around 2010.
So… any Europeans looking for marriage so I can get into the EU? /joke
yeah no… lol. Sorry that I’m not rich and privilaged to get into actual good countries.
You can marry me! And enjoy:
Even worse AQI
Doctor who graduated in googlelogy
No anesthetic for dental care (A relative of mine says it’s easier for him to tell when he hit a nerve that way)
Sexual harrasment encouraged at work
Nearly every country hates you
Clean coal
So what do you say?
Is it Mongolia? Sounds like Mongolia
Serbia actually.
I’ll take it. Does Serbia allow gay marriage?
Oh…
I don’t think so. It’s pretty conservative.
It may be shocking that American food can get any worse considering they’re 50% corn syrup and 50% microplastics but somehow American corporations found a way, soon they’ll probrally start adding sawdust to bread like they used to before the FDA
You think that’s bad, milk was so much worse. Companies fed cows leftover brewing grains which made their milk shitty, added cow brain to imitate cream, plaster of Paris to whiten it, and formaldehyde to preserve it. Thousands of kids died because of it and it’s a big part of why the FDA was founded in the first place.
To be clear this was almost 120 years ago
And also somehow just a few years from now at the same time.
What?! Yikes
OP forgot to mention that everything they were talking about was going on over 119 years ago as the FDA was founded in 1906
I didn’t forget, the context of who I replied to said “like they used to before the FDA” and I provided an example of what was happening before the FDA. Also yeah it was over a hundred years ago but what do you suppose has made stories like swill milk seem like a thing of the past? It’s not capitalists being more enlightened or empathetic it’s regulation. Those stories and more are going to pop back up again as the US guts the FDA
Wood is too healthy for the American population
Not even real wood, wood thinner and artificial wood pulp made out of microplastics
You should see what we call Parmesan cheese over here.
They already add sawdust to a ton of shit.
Ja, they label it as cellulose. Technically true and something that does have valid food manufacturing uses, but using it as filler is ridiculous.
Unclear how true this is but I was told years ago that Taco Bell cut their beef with cellulose…so…cardboard so Jokes on you, we may have figured out the sawdust angle years ago. Capitalist innovation baby
No one wants to visit that fascist state anymore.
I mean…the UK doesn’t have much room to talk either…
Joke’s on us. Remember the ‘great deal’ for 15% tariffs? Guess what was included in that. Yep: Better access to the EU market for US agricultire products and the axing of what they call “unfair” trade barriers. Which includes among others plant-health measures, health regulations, vehicle safety regulations and more generally easier mutual recognition of assessments of conformity.
Was anything signed? Last I read, it was only some kind of oral promise.
Not that I know of. There have been discussions around putting some of that into legislation though. I’m not sure about how serious that is, since most of all of this is done behind closed doors.
Wrong meme template. This one is for when you see somebody else getting in trouble for a thing you’re doing wrong too.
What you wanted was something more like the Jeremy Clarkson “Oh no! Anyway…” template.
European food safety regulators aren’t the best according to OP, so not entirely wrong
Nothing is perfect but EU food regulations are pretty fantastic.
I work in the food industry in my country. Can confirm. The amount of test we have to pass so a new machine can be added to the production line is borderline paranoic. But as a result, the worst incident that happens is when a product doesn’t freeze in the right position and the customer opens it and it’s ugly. It’s bad for the company, because the product is not good looking but hey, at least there’s no risk of killing someone with it.
AFAIK eggs are done ‘differently’ (with pros and cons compared to the processing in the US, but no clear winner) and there’s more access to certain types of raw milk products, but otherwise it seems to me that Euro regulators are more cautious than US ones. I think in a lot of cases new stuff here is “allow it until it’s proven unsafe,” while there it’s more often “ban it until its proven safe.”
So same template but for dystopian surveillance and blaming immigrants for everything
A meme template can be used in different ways than its first user originally intended, doesn’t make it wrong… If it’s funny, it works. The end.
I agree since memes shouldn’t be limited to one way.
It’s not funny and it doesn’t work, because the meme template was used incorrectly.
Are we gatekeeping meme templates, really? Damn.
We always have, I’ve never seen a meme template used incorrectly without lots of comments calling it out for being wrong, even when it was actually funny.
See idgaf about how a template is used as long as it’s funny. If it’s used incorrectly but is funny it’s a ‘spin’ or variant or remix or even a ‘subversion’ if the joke is about the template itself (meta commentary).
The former shows knowledge of the template and intent.
But if it is unfunny and it’s used incorrectly then oftentimes it is so because it’s used incorrectly.
The latter shows a lack of knowledge of the template and lack of intention.
This all also applies to art
And just like art, it’s all subjective. Someone will always find it funny, perhaps even a clever use of the template.
Gatekeeping memes is absurd, always has been. You find it funny, great. You don’t, bummer. Move on.
Just like art.
Eating food is now a lottery in the US. The EU and UK abhor the idea of needing to wash chickens in bleach. Standards are ready so poor that this isn’t sufficient to keep people safe. [Edited, managed to type “for lunch” instead of “in bleach”. One handed typing on train excuse]
Wash chickens lunch?
I assume they are referencing the US practice of washimg chicked carcases in chlorine.
The EU claims that allowing that type of washing makes producers less incetiviced to avoid bacterial contamination elsewhere in the production chain and therefore more likely to expose customer to disease. US companies treat the animals like shit, and treat the meat like shit and then argue that washing the carcases in chlorine solves it and makes it a more competetive product that they really want to sell on the EU market.
The US market only ever optimise for cost. So they get shitty products. Since they have lots of monopoly going on, they get shitty and expensive combo. Other markets try to make ‘good products’ competetive and regulate markets, so the products available will be good and reasonably priced.
Allowing sub standard US products on the market will make for more expensive and more dangerous products.
Yes, thank you. Reference the need for washing chickens in bleach. My silly typing without checking. Most of the rest of the world use quality assurance rather than forgetting about standards and relying upon the nuclear option to make terribly prepared poultry slightly safer.
My typo, corrected now. One-handed typing on a train does not always work well.
I seem to be out of the loop. What happened?
The EPA Is Embracing PFAS Pesticides. These Are The Health Risks
https://time.com/7336883/epa-pfas-pesticides-health-risks/
FDA poised to kill proposal that would require asbestos testing for cosmetics
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/28/fda-proposal-asbestos-testing-talc-cosmetics
Trump blames others but Washington air crash comes amid upheaval in US aviation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/30/trump-washington-plane-crash-analysis
Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts
https://www.propublica.org/article/foreign-food-safety-inspections-historic-low-fda
These things are for sure what’s giving me anxiety as an American. I’m trying to start a community garden for those who live in apartments and cannot grow their own food. Otherwise I don’t know what to do. It seems history teaches us revolting is the only way out of this but I don’t see Americans actually doing that. They will not even strike.
That’s a good thing you’re doing there. If you’re looking for advice, just contact me. My dad grew up on a farm and passed most of his knowledge to me, so I know hacks that most people don’t.
From the first article:
Worse, there is no firm definition of exactly what a PFAS is—at least in the United States. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which works with 38 member nations including the U.S. to foster international cooperation and economic growth, defines PFAS as industrial chemicals that have at least one fully fluorinated carbon atom—which is a carbon atom with two or three fluorine atoms attached to it. There are about 15,000 species of chemicals that meet that standard. But the EPA has pushed back, broadening the definition to two fully fluorinated carbon atoms. “The final definition does not include substances that only have a single fluorinated carbon,” the agency wrote in its formal report in 2023—during Joe Biden’s presidency. That change is worrying.
A minimum of 2 fully fluorinated carbon atoms instead of 1 is NOT broadening the definition. That’s narrowing it.
A minimum of 2 fully fluorinated carbon atoms instead of 1 is NOT broadening the definition. That’s narrowing it.
Think of the definition as a sluice gate. When you allow more things through, you’re opening it wider, therefore broadening the definition. I know it’s counter-intuitive sometimes to think of it like that. Narrowing the definition would be to let fewer things through, thus closing the gate.
Edit: Reading through the discourse below, I think I see the points made. It might should be reversed.
Allowing more things through, if I understand your analogy correctly in this case, is broadening the exceptions – things not matched by the definition.
But, I’ll bite, let’s dive in. In a Venn diagram, substances with a minimum of 2 fully fluorinated carbon atoms is a subset of substances with a minimum of 1fully fluorinated carbon atoms, yes? Similarly, M&Ms with only red and green colors is a subset of M&Ms of any color, yes? If a person was to change their personal definition of acceptable M&Ms from any color to only red and/or green, would you call that broadening that definition?
But wouldn’t requireing two fluoridated carbon atoms instead of just one to qualify as PFAS, encompass less chemicals, thus narrowing the definition?
The EPA definition would exclude chemicals like trifluoroethanol, so the EPA’s definition is narrower, not broader.
From a strict organic chemistry perspective, trifluoroethanol contains a perfluorinated methyl group, and methyl is a type of alkyl, therefore it must be considered a PerFluoro Alkyl Substance.
Ass cancer is the price for freedum!
wait what. how do I not know this being an American?
Media lies
Media hides
toche
something about how food is dangerous in America now. bites into hamburger I dunno, I only have like 100 rare diseases now.
