This is not the first time other nations have balked at U.S. meat. In 2007, a rumor in Taiwan that a ban on the growth promoter ractopamine, widely used in the U.S., was to be lifted caused riots. Chanting "We refuse to eat pork that contains poisonous ractopamine," and "Get out, USA pork," protesters threw eggs at police, soldiers and reporters and pig dung at government buildings.
Europe has banned U.S. beef for years because of the use of the hormones oestradiol-17, zeranol, trenbolone acetate and melengestrol acetate in its production which the European Commission links to cancer.
Chicken has also been an issue. During the 2014 European elections, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said"There will be no imports of chlorinated chicken from the U.S....I have prevented those imports for years, and I will continue to prevent them. No question." Chlorinated chickens? Yes, the U.S. dips chickens into chlorine to prevent pathogens like salmonella which are ubiquitous in U.S. meat production.
And then there was BSE also known as mad cow disease. Within 24 hours of discovery of the U.S.'s first mad cow in 2003, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea and ninety other countries banned U.S. beef. Ninety-eight percent of the United States' three-billion-dollar overseas beef market evaporated almost overnight.
Government Supports Meat Suppliers Not Consumers
If Covid were in U.S. meat, at least until it was cooked, would Big Meat and the government admit it? In 2003, the government said the first U.S. mad cow, which came from Canada, was located and "This product was disposed of in a landfill in accordance with Federal, State and local regulations."
But the Los Angeles Times reported that despite "a voluntary recall aimed at recovering all 10,000 pounds of beef slaughtered at the plant the day the Washington state cow was killed, some meat, which could have contained the Washington cow, was sold to restaurants in several Northern California counties." Worse, the identities of the restaurants were hidden from the public according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
In the next few years, the government hid the identities of an Alabama and Texas ranch that both produced the first homegrown mad cows from the public. The USDA's charter is to support food producers not the public so why would it want a meat supplier to suffer a loss of consumer dollars?
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