20130903

Don't Trust a Chicken Nugget That's Visited China

Would you willingly eat a chicken nuggets processed in a country that has no intention of meeting U.S. food-safety standards? Most Americans likely wouldn't.

That may explain why the U.S. Department of Agriculture waited until Friday -- the day before a long holiday weekend -- to announce that it had ended a ban on Chinese chicken imports by approving four Chinese poultry processors to ship processed ("heat-treated/cooked") chicken to the U.S. The report on the approved poultry plants noted that the audit set out to “to determine whether the People's Republic of China's (PRC) food safety system governing poultry processing remains equivalent to that of the United States (U.S.), with the ability to produce products that are safe, wholesome, unadulterated, and properly labeled." Needless to say, the Chinese plants passed.

Initially, at least, the chickens will be slaughtered in the U.S. (or another nation that's allowed to export slaughtered chicken to the U.S.), then shipped to China for processing and re-export. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, according to the New York Times, no USDA inspectors will be present in the Chinese processing plants (despite the fact that China has never before been allowed to export chicken to the U.S.), thus offering consumers no guarantees where the processed chickens were in fact slaughtered. Even worse, because the birds will be processed, the USDA will not require point-of-origin labeling (under USDA rules, foods that have been cooked aren’t subject to point-of-origin labeling). In other words: Consumers will have no way to tell if those chicken nuggets in the supermarket freezer were processed in the U.S. or in China...




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-03/don-t-trust-a-chicken-nugget-that-s-visited-china.html

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