# USDA to label Chinese processed Chicken as made in USA



## Southern by choice (Jan 19, 2014)

Please contact your representatives!

http://economyincrisis.org/content/...-chinese-processed-chicken-as-made-in-america


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## elevan (Jan 19, 2014)

All the more reason to grow your own or find a local foods grocer!


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## kinder (Jan 25, 2014)

We have people in need of jobs, housing, food, and so much more.! And then they do some more stupid stuff like this. When will they wake up??? It makes me .


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## greybeard (Feb 13, 2014)

The rest of the story.......
Key word being "processed". According to the USDA announcement, It is American and Canadian raised poultry that is sent overseas for processing in foreign plants whose operations and inspection protocols have passed USDA standards and do their own inspections in adherence to USDA guidelines--the same guidelines followed in US and Canadian processing plants.

(Without venturing into politics too far) The news reports I have read were all issued prior to passage of the US Farm bill, which has already been signed into law (Feb 7, 2014) . I haven't read the whole act yet, but COOL (Country Of Origin Labeling) is included in the new legislation. As a result of not having read the act, I do not know how COOL will affect this story or the poultry processed in China. (I have a package of ground beef in my freezer right now (from Walmart) that has country of origin labeling. "Product of USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Mexico". Meaning the batch and lot it came from is a mixture of beef from some or all of those countries.) It does have a USDA stamp, but I'll just about bet my last $1 that a USDA federal inspector didn't put it there.  

Contrary to popular belief, Federal USDA inspectors inspect even very little US produced and processed meat (or anything else). Due to the huge quantities of meat and poultry processed every single day, an army of federal inspectors would be needed and even if that were economically possible, processing would slow to a crawl and our facilities would not be able to keep up with everyday American consumer demand, much less, exports to other countries. 
USDA and Federal Safety and Inspection Service people do inspect facilities on both a routine scheduled and surprise basis, but for the most part, that stamp we see on retail and wholesale carcasses and packages is placed there by a state inspector or a company's own inspector that is, by law, required to follow USDA guidelines. USDA doesn't inspect every piece or package of meat. Their job entails making sure the plant and it's product is in compliance with safety standards. 

To say that our home processing is better, may or may not be true. 
Most of our own homes would not pass USDA requirements for cleanliness and hygiene. Not enough seamless stainless steel counters and washing sinks for one thing. Too much wood, plastic and wood products around, below, or above the processing areas. Clothing for another, but USDA doesn't require we all wear clean sterile aprons, gloves, or hairnets when we process our own produce. Our water isn't hot enough, our disinfectants not strong enough, and our freezers not cold enough. Our floors are too dirty and so are our ceilings and ventilation systems. They do however, require these things and a whole lot  more from any commercial processor.  They HAVE to adhere to minimum USDA/FSIS standards. Our home processed foods are safe mostly because we cook them well. 

This procedure has been in effect for years. Many of our beef products are born and weaned here in the US, then shipped live or as a carcass to Mexico. It gets processed in Mexico, then shipped back to the US for wholesale or retail use. Inspected by USDA approved inspection protocols. The inverse is true as well. 

We can point to past and current problems with Chinese quality and safety problems, but even our own US located processing plants don't have a full time federal inspector. Last Dec, USDA inspectors made a surprise inspection on Rancho Feeding Corporation. What followed, was a massive 9 million lb recall of beef from a single Calif processing plant that was initially announced by USDA and FDA, forcing the company to make the recall. The meat was processed from Jan 2013-Jan 2014--a year's worth of beef. Obviously, that plant had been out of compliance for some time, even with Calif approved inspectors on the job. There wasn't much info with the recall.
_The company issued the recall after they were found to have processed “diseased and unsound animals” and carried out the processing without the benefit of a full USDA inspection._
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/02/some-retailers-identified-in-massive-beef-recall/#.Uvz3Q_ldW20

We buy and drive cars everyday, fly in airplanes every day that are either completely built in foreign countries, assembled in foreign countries, or made with parts made in foreign countries. Why? Because these cars meet and even surpass US safety and performance standards. 

We can complain about the loss of jobs (and I do) but to infer that the very act of allowing Chinese processing plants is automatically a bad thing from a food safety standpoint is more than a little speculative IMO.


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## Womwotai (Feb 13, 2014)

Good post Greybeard.  You make a good point about our home processing not meeting the rigorous standards required of commercial processors.  I personally abide by the theory that we need exposure to bugs in order to develop resistance/immunity to them.

When my daughter was a baby, she crawled around putting everything she found in her mouth, as babies do.  My friend's baby of the same age, was followed around by her mother having everything snatched away from her as soon as she picked it up.  Her toy basket was dumped in a sink of water and bleached every single night, while, I confess, my daughter's was…..not.  My daughter never had so much as a sniffle in the first two years of her life.  I never saw my friend's daughter that she didn't have disgusting looking snot coming out of her nose.  One little anecdote but from there I formed the theory that hyper-cleaning may actually be bad for us.

I don't use anti-bacterial soap, since it kills the good bacteria along with the bad.  I try to keep a clean house but I'm not fanatical about it.

Several years ago I worked with a French woman and an American.  One morning at work, the American lamented that she had had to throw out more of an expensive meal she had prepared the night before, than had been eaten.  I asked "why?" and she responded that it had sat out for over an hour after they'd eaten dinner.  The French woman and I looked at one another.  We were both raised in countries where it is routine to leave a meal out overnight, rather than put hot food in a refrigerator and mess with its efficiency.  In France, food sits out sometimes for days, while the family dips into it at mealtimes.  Food poisoning in France is almost unheard of.  I also have never had food poisoning.  Yet it is common here.

Back to the topic at hand….when I process at home, I do so in a clean kitchen.  But you're right - it is not seamless stainless steel washed down with disinfectants, or any of the other stuff I would have to do to pass inspection.  I understand that there have to be guidelines and that even with these guidelines in place, sometimes there is a huge recall because something along the way was overlooked and tainted meat is released to the public.  But I have to wonder if those guidelines aren't a little "over the top".

Regarding the chicken processed in China….I've been following this since it was first proposed.  I think it is NUTS that a chicken can be shipped to China on ice, processed, and shipped back - again on ice - and it is still cheaper than keeping it here.  Chicken is not an expensive meat - I just can't imagine how this can be profitable.  But I also don't think work should be kept here just to keep jobs here.  At the end of the day, we have to be competitive.  If the Chinese can do it more competitively than Americans, perhaps we have to look at why American processors cannot compete and change THAT.


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## greybeard (Feb 13, 2014)

Yep, they (rules making entities) shoot for perfect knowing if everyone makes it almost perfect then "close" will be good enough.


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## Southern by choice (Feb 13, 2014)

USDA is a bit of a joke IMO but China? Yeah, they just have such a "great" track record for safety of any kind.

I'll stick with growing  my own and I don't buy made in "China".


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## greybeard (Feb 13, 2014)

*Our own record, isn't stellar either. Even without Chinese food products.*

*Chicken--What’s going on with the nation’s most popular meat? (Americans buy an estimated 83 pounds per capita annually.) Though 48 million people fall sick every year from eating food tainted with salmonella, campylobacter, E. coli, and other contaminants, “more deaths were attributed to poultry than to any other commodity,” according to an analysis of outbreaks from 1998 through 2008 by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).*


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## Southern by choice (Feb 13, 2014)

Hopefully this will encourage others to grow and slaughter/process their own food. 

I still think it is senseless to ship chicken to China to be processed.
And shipped back. AND the American people should know this.

500 people lost their jobs 15 minutes from me because another plant went  down. China can do things cheaper - maybe because of "slave" labor.


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## greybeard (Feb 13, 2014)

Southern by choice said:


> Hopefully this will encourage others to grow and slaughter/process their own food.
> 
> I still think it is senseless to ship chicken to China to be processed.
> And shipped back. AND the American people should know this.
> ...


I understand your concern and share them. But I also have a very good and realistic understanding of US and global economics. China is the biggest marketplace in the world and depending which month it is, the 1st or second largest economy n the world and it is growing right now at about 5% per year, while ours is trailing at 3% and only that much in the last year. For our economy and nation to grow and prosper, we have to be able to sell our goods overseas. We sell cars, planes, car parts and ag products to them, but not much of their mainstay meat--poultry. 

Let's back up a few decades and look at a different economic sector. Automobiles. US Big 3 (big 4 back then because American Motors was still around) used to sell cars al over the world. Still do, but eventually, when the rest of the world rebuilt after WW2, the Japanese, Italians and Germans began building their own vehicles again. Since the Japanese and Germans beat us to the punch on robotics and electronics, they built them at a lower cost and with good quality. Many many Americans began buying them for the quality beginning in the late 60s. By the mid 70s, there were Honda, Toyota and BMW dealerships all over the US.  Thus began the car wars. Billions of $$ were leaving this country every year, since the profits went back to the country of origin. At first, we tried import/export quotas. That didn't work. Our economy was still a juggernaught at the time (50s,60s,70s) and we had excess manufacturing capacity and  we badly needed them to buy OUR 'stuff". Bring their $ into our country.
The quota thing was a disaster. If we put a limit on what they could sell here--they reciprocated and wouldn't allow our stuff in their country. This tit-fo-tat was across the board--Tires, heavy equipment, farm equipment, cars, airplanes, military hardware, ships, washing machines, radios and TVs. We began to see layoffs in our plants because we couldn't sell our exports--they were just buying their own stuff or someone besides ours.  Jobs became a much bigger issue so a deal was worked out. They could sell their stuff here, and we could sell their stuff over there, but only as long as a certain amt of the goods was manufactured here in the US. Foreign car plants sprung up all over the US and are still here providing American jobs. They still sell a lot of autos here, but at least we can sell some of our stuff there and we get jobs in exchange.

Fast forward to mid 2000s and we want to sell our cars in China, since their marketplace opened up after the Chinese govt made some serious changes after Tienanmen Square.  They said "OK, but we need to shift from a strictly Chinese agrarian economy to an industrial economy, so you will have to build them over here--you can have the profits--we need the jobs."  That, is where we are now, with GM, Ford, and Chrysler in partnership with Chinese company SAIA  building cars in China for the Chinese. China is pretty much propping up the US auto industry with our sales in China. If not for the car and truck sales we have in China today, all 3 companies would be less profitable if not actually suffer losses each qtr. I'm 64, and if I live another 40 years, I will see Saia vehicles in Saia delaerships here in the USA. SAIA is junk right now (think Yugo) but they are on the cusp of being exportable vehicles. Their cars just passed a US NTSB safety crash test last month with 4 stars. 

Now, agriculture. We have always exported a lot of rice, corn, soybeans, and wheat to China, as well as modern farm equipment. Their farm economy consisted of small one family farms-hundreds of thousands of them. China has embarked on a long term plan of being 100% 'food' self sufficient. They have a huge land mass, but lack the know how to be efficient in farming. When the big h5n1 bird flu outbreak began in Asia, the Chinese realized that there poultry industry was in jeopardy. 100s of thousands of birds were slaughtered to keep it from spreading to pandemic proportions, and when the 2009 h1n1 swine flu pandemic scare came about, the Chinese officials really took notice. Their countrymen began to fear eating or even raising their own produce-pork and poultry-the mainstay of centuries.  They knew then, they needed to modernize and do so quickly. In 2011 and again in 2012, they ask the USDA to help, and we sent a team over. The Chinese also sent a team to this country for about a month touring and learning how our processing plants were laid out and operated. This was not a cursory visit. By every account, the team members asked lots of questions, took lots of pictures and vides and took lots of notes. 
Another trade-off is in the works--another deal. I suspect very much, that these 4 Chinese processing plants are but the beginning. They will eventually take our export live birds, process them all over China and sell them to the Chinese as a safe food source. This is how they get their foot in the door. The US is the world's largest poultry sector both in production and consumption, but we have a lot of room for expansion in the production side and we will eventually be selling lots of the Gospel Bird to the Chinese. Maybe within 5 years. 

They are going to do the same with beef and dairy. We cannot sell beef to the Chinese market due to an ongoing embargo against US/Canadian beef because of Mad Cow--BSE.
But, the Chinese are acquiring a taste for beef and thier ag sector has it's eye on building beef herds as prelude to becoming diverse and self sufficient. They are buying up high quality bull semen from some of the best sires in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as embryos from the best cows. We made another trade off last year. China agreed to limited importation of US beef in a couple of small areas. Honk Kong and Shanghai. The deal is they get to process hanging carcasses from " 'Murica "and sell it in those 2 areas. If it works out, and no BSE problems arise, they will probably lift their embargo completely. We agree to help them become beef producers and they buy our imports.  
Such, is the state of the global econoy today.


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## Southern by choice (Feb 13, 2014)

Definitely not the same America I grew up in. Very sad.
I am not ignorant to global economics... I just don't have to like where all this is heading.


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## greybeard (Feb 13, 2014)

Don't care much for it myself, but that genie is out of the bottle now. I can remember seeing the very first foreign car ever to show up in the town I grew up in--a white boxy looking English Ford. Next one was a VW beetle. Hitler's revenge my father called it.


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