> The Department of Agriculture prohibits travelers from bringing most pork products into the U.S. because they can carry maladies such as foot-and-mouth disease and African swine fever.
I wonder what this actually looks like in practice? Is this a real risk or "we've always done it this way"? Do different non-US countries have different risk profiles?
The customs people took a chunk of prosciutto my parents brought back to the US that my Italian in-laws had given them. What a waste. And Italy takes its food very seriously and professionally. I'd even go so far as to say that it's mostly higher quality than in the US in many ways.
At least for Australia and New Zealand, who are probably the most biosec paranoid countries, there are a large number of reasons. mostly do to with introduction of pests and other potentially ecologically damaging effects, see introduction of cane toads. Those pests can be anything from viruses to mites (see current bee crises) through to domestic animals. Part of this paranoia comes from the evolutional isolation, and part of it comes from the fact that they are islands, and so it is feasible to implement measures to block the importation of foreign materials.
Food, unless it has been thoroughly cooked or cured, is a risk and the diversity of stuff people bring back is enormous. Obviously Australia and New Zealand import food, but that requires licences and is regulated and inspected.
I would have thought that land border inspections would be less paranoid about food provided that the neighbouring country has similar regulations. But I guess that better describes e.g. mainland EU borders or the US-Canada border rather than the US-Mexico border.
I hope we really are learning from our past mistakes. The US tries to stop all kinds of foods from crossing the border including fruits and vegetables because of what other problems they might bring. I don't have any problem with the bologna being included. Seems like there's a market for it though, so local sources should increase and grow more popular.
The US-Canada border has the same restrictions. You can't bring many fresh foods over the border even if you're actually reimporting a product produced in the same country.
The risks are very real. The US pork industry is substantial in scale, and because of a combination of geographic isolation and legal measures like this, has managed to keep several nasty pathogens out.
Remember when Bill Gates was going around about 2 decades ago, warning everyone of the risk of a global pandemic? The specific scenario/simulation his foundation used as an example was a mutation of swine flu emerging in rural Brazil then making the leap to the global food system via the US.
I get its frustrating not to be able to take stuff home. I gained a dozen pounds of water bloat I ate so much charcuterie in Tuscany. But the bottom line of these laws is that the health of the industry as a whole matters more than us individuals enjoying what's ultimately a luxury not necessity.
Aside: I'd say Italy is a mixed bag in terms of food handling. I toured a cattle ranch and it was pretty grim. Lifelong intensive confinement seemed to be the norm. But what I would say I loved about Italy is the importance food is given in ordinary life. Sure, I'm not overly romanticizing things, people of people just order some dominos in Italy too, but I think it's fair to say there's a higher priority paid to proper food vs the US.
>Sure, I'm not overly romanticizing things, people of people just order some dominos in Italy too
I don't think very many do, given that the Italian Domino's franchise recently went bankrupt [0] having managed to open 29 of its planned 880 restaurants.
Of course, plenty of Italians eat fast food (McDonald's is reasonably successful there), just not imported American versions of Italian food.
I have a long standing personal joke about how no matter where you go in the world, you'll see Domino's delivery scooters there most likely, except in the US. I dunno why I find that so amusing but I do.
an inhumane in operation. A lot of the vulnerability to disease outbreaks animals suffering under industrial farming have is the result of the horrifying conditions they live in. I wont claim that if we treated animals better the need to regulate what enters the country wouldn't exist, but it would make outbreaks less disastrous.
I think it's possible to have large scale industrial agriculture while still not being needless cruel to the animals you raise. It just requires people at those corporations to give up a little bit of their profits instead of giving up their humanity
If the problem is really about "maladies", I've always though that irradiating food products at customs would be a good compromise to allow people to keep what they brought (for a nominal fee).
Maybe it isn't effective against viruses or prions.
Maybe the public perception that irradiated food becomes radioactive is to strong.
Maybe the problem is actually about protecting domestic industry...
It is ineffective against prions, and not very effective against virus. But also, irradiating food is a complex process that depends on expensive machinery. It's not something that customs can do in a rush.
I think lot of countries have restrictions like this to prevent foreign pests and diseases from coming in. Right now California is dealing with cockroaches from Turkestan and Florida with African snails. Its easy for pests to spread when there is no native predators. California also does further pest inspections if you enter by roads.
I don't believe it has to do with X country takes food more seriously. I do believe it has to do with labelling at some point, say something that is labelled from X country but is coming in from Y country. The person bringing it in from Y country will argue the label is true and that it is from X country but it just costs less in Y country. But, how can border agents guarantee that it is what the label says it is? They can't. Same thing with that prosciutto, you say it is Italian made but there is no way border agents can honestly guarantee that it is and that any possible bugs/bacteria/etc aren't in it. Also, I believe that it is the whole transport of such meat/agriculture products. Things like temperatures, packaging, labelling, etc are important when it comes to food safety. Something that is deemed unfit for human consumption may get a pass elsewhere. I'm pretty sure it is an 80% of the stuff out there is safe but 20% is unsafe so customs just tackles all 100% as unsafe to prevent mistakes.
From the point of view of customs, there is no upside to allowing people to bring anything through. So, that doesn't really explain why this is different from other things that are allowed.
>there is no upside to allowing people to bring anything through. So, that doesn't really explain why this is different from other things that are allowed.
The difference is the potential downside of some things as compared to other things. It's all about balancing risk.
If you only flagged items that are actually dangerous you wouldn't have the opportunity to flex your authority as often.
Do you want to be the head of the department that "saves American lives by preventing the import of contraband" a million times a year, or a thousand times a year? Who do you think gets more funding?
I think it's funny that you think Customs and Border Patrol agents have to justify their work at all. There were literal TV shows making them out to be the saviors of America.
They also don't need any excuse to flex their authority, they've been given broad ability to violate rights with very few specific requirements. Remember, these are the same people who can legally deny you entry to the US if you don't show them your facebook profile if you aren't a US citizen.
My understanding of this, and this is also something that is enforced at certain us state borders as well, is this is primarily about insect and other parasites that may be on/in the fruit (or their eggs). I remember having to toss a bunch of fruit at the california border a few years back.
but it's not found in the cuts used to make Bologna...
And BTW it's been heavily controlled and it was mostly a domestic threat spread in living animals through their food supply.
Hand foot and mouth disease is usually not lethal and it spreads through close personal contact. If they wanted to block it at the border, they should block the people, not the food.
Pork is not implicated in prion disease, according to NIAID. [0] It might make sense to suspect any particular bologna could contain other meats, but as TFA explains Mexican bologna tastes better because it doesn't contain beef (or presumably, venison.)
once you start assuming that anything can end up in anything, everything can be depicted as dangerous.
do you really know what's inside fruit, vegetable, salad, juices, sodas etc?
do you really know what's inside domestic bologna sold and produced inside USA?
why imported one (main topic of the discussion) should be more dangerous, given that US are one of the worst places in the west for food handling?
I would assume the contrary, when in the US imported food is of better quality in general. And I am willing to spend to 2x or 3x cap to buy real Italian prosciutto from real Italian people than eat cheap, but US made ham.
p.s. my family home made cured meats for generations, we know exactly what they are made out of, what we put in it. Simple as that.
I mean I mostly agree with you, Guanciale is always going to be pork jowl. But cured sausages... a little less specific generally in terms of what primals/cuts you might source from... and at least in america where the primary touchpoint for bologna is oscar myer .. at that point it's more 'big hotdog' than anything.
> Is this a real risk or "we've always done it this way"?
I assume the risk assessment assumes some percentage of sick pigs are contained within each. In the US, this percentage is tracked. From another country, the upper, and probably very realistic, bound is 100%. Think small, unvaccinated farm, or one that slaughters sick pigs because they need the money. It would be interesting to see their math.
It's not so much about Italy's food regulations but rather the fact that individual travellers are not certified importer entities thus there is no reasonable way to assure the piece of prosciutto your parents bought was actually produced in strict compliance with American & Italian laws.
There was a time when US border patrol at the canada-US border was most concerned if you were bringing in any citrus fruits, regardless of where you’re going.
I’m happy to share that I have never done such a thing to keep the New York, Pennsylvania or Ohio citrus industry safe.
(While ignoring that Toronto was exporting hundreds of trucks a day of garbage to Michigan dumps)
Then there is the current ban on most Personal fresh egg/chicken imports from US into Canada due to avian flu outbreak, just to make sure I don’t feed them uncooked to a bird in Canada (as opposed to… eating them), ignoring the fact that birds fly and pose 1000x bigger threat where I live, <100km from the border.
>ignoring the fact that birds fly and pose 1000x bigger threat.
Are you suggesting the border control become bird hunters? That'd be pretty fun.
Border control enforcing whatever the current bans on birds are does not impact the effort (or lack thereof) on other controls, such as flying birds. Different people, different jobs.
It’s what happens when there’s a problem and every department gets a memo asking how it can contribute.
Instead of sending resources toward what can actually solve the problem (e.g. taking money from your department to testing agricultural flocks), just create some senseless barriers that won’t help anyone at all and distract yourself from whatever your dept’s focus should be.
I would assume a lot of this prosecution and confiscation is more a function of tariffs and ag industry protectionism. Am I really to believe that a tube of bologna is a disease threat to American pig farming?
The article is about travelers bringing processed meats. So because its banned, it gets smuggled, which now is a major human health concern due to improper storage, also consumes resources and time from our CBP from looking for actual threats. Coming from Mexico, bugs don’t mind national borders on their own accord, and a product that is legal 100 ft to the south but illegal just a skip away makes little sense.
I understand strong restrictions on overseas seeds and bugs (especially in New Zealand’s case where they have a defined, delicate ecosystem), but it just seems like US is beating up on its little neighbor.
I’m just saying this whole article details a little corner of American law enforcement that is an overzealous interpretation of a reasonable, because SOMEONE out there made a big stink about it. “Whoa whoa whoa, you can’t bring this low cost meat product across the line to sell in US markets!! US Markets are only for big US Farming Corporations!
"Defining Law Enforcement's Role in Protecting American Agriculture from Agro-Terrorism" by Terry Knowles ISBN 1437929710, 9781437929713
On page 141:
"For example, Chimex brand bologna has been found to foster the CSF (classical swine fever) virus. A high death loss - 60-80% -could occur if the CSF virus entered a healthy swine population."
Losing 4/5ths of your pigs...probably justifies being extra careful about what ppl. are allowed to bring into the country....
I think this is potentially a pretty fair startup idea. Here in Michigan I knew farmers who had meat packing plants on the farm. Most of them closed because they couldn't compete on price with the big meatpackers. There are also several large meatpacking plants in Detroit though most of them have been closed for up to thirty years.
Here's a niche where you could compete as long as you could get distribution and create a strong brand name. There's no good reason you couldn't create bologna just as good as the Mexicans. In fact there's a good chance you could export it to Canada as well.
Additionally they probably couldn't compete with food safety regulatory requirements and related baseline costs required for revenue positive distribution.
The problem is, Germany (or France for Romandie and Italy for Ticino) is EU - unless you look at labels closely, that cheap meat is probably sourced from the eastern countries like Poland which have truly abysmal record on meat quality and safety (ie using salt for roads for meat/food and distributing it also in surrounding countries). If its from Germany and cheap, be assured the lowest allowed standards were adhered to (or not).
Swiss have mostly higher safety standards than EU, plus much higher wages. Thus the prices.
As for smuggling - I do it too... but it depends which border crossing you use. On some, chances for search are maybe 20-30%. Way too high risk to save maybe 100-200 chf and risk a much higher fine. On some crossings I know nearby to France, practically 0 (but even at those, I have sworn border cops are never there till I saw them once in 10 years...)
Cool article, funny to think about people smuggling bologna but it makes sense!
Really got a kick out of the part where they mentioned people insisting on Mexican mayonnaise - mostly because it’s a contrast to a recent nytimes article about Mac salad on Hawaii where the interviewee insisted something like “it HAS to be Hellman’s mayo”.
I’m not a bologna fan (or spam fwiw) but can someone smuggle up some choriqueso tacos for me please?
Lastly it’s great to read about a working Malinois - tough job all things considered
Two words I never thought I'd see next to each other.
Growing up we ate the Oscar Meyer product. Not great, but when you're 10 years old, it's fine. But they've got a point - bologna for adult tastes just doesn't exist, and someone should give it a whirl.
> honest I always thought mortadella was overrated
> I'm more of a salame kind of guy.
two times wrong:
- mortadella is delicious, if you don't like it, fine, you're the rounding error, but nobody is over selling it, people just love it because what's not to love about it?
- salame is not an alternative to mortadella, it's a completely different product (mortadella is cooked, salame is air-dried), in the same way a steak is not an alternative to bresaola (same animal, different process).
Go to a sandwich shop that has them both, and you'll probably find two sandwiches on the menu that are identical up to substituting salami and mortadella.
I would be very surprised to find a menu anywhere, except for maybe in some high modernist bullshit cuisine, that substitutes ice cream and broccoli.
That's because what is sold in America as bologna is mostly an American product and not actually descended from Italy. Like many things in the US, it was produced and sold by and for immigrants.
specifically, traditionally mortadella from Bologna is without pistaches, I prefer the variant we have in central Italy (the one from Rome), that always contains them.
Original mortadella was born in Latium, Bologna made it popular.
Some have olives as well, I tried it myself years ago. Mortadella is delicious though in the US there are two versions for sale. I forgot which, is the one that is a bit too dry and not to my taste. In my 40s now I stay away from processed meats as much as I can.
I see this marketed all the time as olive loaf here in Appalachia. There's a lot of Italian influence here in the coal fields, but most of the Italian product names have died off.
I remember watching a youtube video on Doctor Sausage. Next time I meet an older/elderly Eastern European who lived in the Soviet Union I should ask them how they remember it.
EDIT: here it is, this is the video I saw, includes one interview with a babushka:
About every five years or so I feel like I don't remember why I don't eat bologna so I buy a pound and eat baloney sandwiches for a week (because when I eat sandwiches I do the sameish sandwich all week). After about three days I go to the bathroom and remember why I don't eat bologna sandwiches regularly.
That's a thought you're free to have, but it isn't really relevant to the article - the Department of Agriculture is the agency that prohibits this, for reasons related to potential damage to US livestock - African swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease are specifically mentioned.
There is no implication in the article that this stuff is unsafe to consume by humans.
European pig farms are culled after the first confirmed African swine fever, or foot-and-mouth disease occurrence. Carcasses of wild pigs and boars are tested for these diseases too, and if they find an occurrence in the region, they will test every farm in that region. If you have a pig at your private farm, you are obliged to give some samples to a veterinarian for tests as well (and it's funded by the government). I would say that EU and Japanese veterinary norms are much stricter then US ones, but you still cannot import much of the food products from here.
L. monocytogenes is found all the time in processed meats coming out of highly regulated plants in the US. I hope you understand that "processed" does not mean that all viruses and bacteria have been removed or killed from the product. Especially when the meat is processed in a plant with even laxer safety standards than what we have in America.
You said "Given how heavily processed bologna is, I'm going to call bullshit on that" in response to someone who said "the Department of Agriculture is the agency that prohibits this, for reasons related to potential damage to US livestock - African swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease are specifically mentioned."
Why would you say that instead of "bologna is not a vector for african swine fever or foot-and-mouth disease"? What does how heavily processed the bologna have to do with your point, and why did you bring it up if it has nothing to do with it? That's literally the only thing I argued against.
Processed meats usually have preservatives like nitrates or nitrites in them. It doesn't matter what bacteria is detectable when the meat leaves the factory. The bacteria are not going to propagate in the meat.
I'm not sure what the situation is in the US, but farmers north of the border get upset when their livestock is ordered to be destroyed due to disease. So yeah, there is probably lobbying. It's simply not for the reasons implied.
The article touched upon other illegal imports due to invasive species, such as wood products. I doubt that there is a wood carver's lobby that is trying to have the work of foreign craftsmen banned. They don't need such a lobby since once an alien species (or disease) gets a foothold it is near impossible to stop and very difficult to slow.
> The article touched upon other illegal imports due to invasive species
Import of plants into the US is completely unregulated, which is why fruit trees and interesting plants from all over the world are available in the US.
It's because inbound international mail isn't inspected, which isn't the case in most other countries.
Both of your statements are false. Things slip through cracks, but there's an extensive amount of enforcement effort that goes into regulating and restricting entry of plants into the US.
Further, of course inbound international parcels are inspected [1]. As with any sort of border inspection, USPS and CBP rely on random samples and targeted efforts of limited scope.
There are more types of fruit trees in the US than in any other country. I'm active on fruit tree enthusiast forums where members buy seeds online from every corner of the world. They are never inspected.
By comparison, I have to open every single package I import in front of a customs agent, and I live in a third world country. This is after they've been x-rayed by customs.
I mean, just recently Americans all over the country were receiving seeds in the mail from overseas and your govt had to issue warnings. Such warnings would be unnecessary in my country because every package is inspected.
Millions upon millions of packages arrive into your country every week from Aliexpress and other foreign online marketplaces. None of these are inspected.
Again, your statements are false. The fact that the majority of parcels aren't being individually inspected doesn't mean that none are inspected or that violators are absolutely immune to consequences.
As implemented currently, US import inspections are designed to maximize throughput while catching the most flagrant violators. Extremely easy-to-smuggle items in low risk categories like seeds are obviously more often than not going to make their way past enforcement checkpoints under this arrangement.
A big thing in the debate around TTIP had been the European "fear" about American cholrinated chicken. Here in Europe people were afraid of having chicken meat disinfected by dunking them in chloride, as it is done in the US. Which to me seems to be the better alternative to pumping them full of antibecterials, as we do here in Europe ...
Quite different safety traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.
I haven't met anyone afraid of eating meat dunked in chlorine because of the chlorine - it's because of the reasons why American chickens need a chlorine wash in the first place. And it's because it's cheaper and more efficient to just let chickens stand in their own shit for so long their feet dissolve and then just wash the meat in chlorine to avoid any bacterial contamination, than provide chickens with decent living conditions in the first place.
Never heard of European chickens being "pumped full of antibacterials" - would you mind explaining what you mean?
The EU approach to salmonella control is a combination of antimicrobials and vaccines, in contrast to the US using a dip in chlorinated water after slaughter. There are critics of both approaches, and some annoying folks that use it as a pretext for smugness (without actually engaging the reality of the differences).
Food irradiation is also restricted in Europe, relative to America. Never-mind that it has been shown to be safe and effective; countries like Germany try to restrict irradiation of food to only a few things like dried spices. (EU trade regulations partially nullify these bans, by allowing the sale of food legally irradiated in other EU countries.)
Maybe, but this article isn't about that. It doesn't say anything about whether food is safe to eat, nor does it mention the FDA.
It does mention diseases (avian influenza, mad cow disease, African swine fever) and pests (wood-boring), and it talks about the economic damage they could cause / have caused to agriculture.
It's honestly kinda amazing how much stuff is forbidden via FDA for "safety". I bet FDA bureaucrats would get a stroke if they knew millions of Germans are regularly eating raw, ground pork on bread rolls.
The FDA won't stop anybody from eating raw pork in America. They stop you from selling something like that to other people, because experience has showed that corporations cannot be trusted with something like that.
They'll prevent you from importing foodstuffs and prescriptions as well, even if it's just for personal use. Such is the case with Kinder Eggs, baby food, and foreign insulin. It has nothing to do with corporations.
The ban on Kinder Eggs is depressing. I can't even argue at this point that we aren't so dumb that we'd confuse a plastic toy for food. If the ban were lifted, I'm sure many stupid children and adults really would die or require medical attention.
Kinder eggs were invented decades after the law that bans them; the law doesn't target Kinder eggs specifically and wasn't motivated by Kinder eggs. They're banned because this (generally sensible) ban on putting inedible things inside of food doesn't have an exemption for kinder eggs. A blanket ban on the practice is easier than getting into the weeds of which specific inedible inclusions are safe and which aren't.
And seeing as we're talking about candy, I don't think fixing this is high on many people's list of priorities.
Well, some people have much stronger feelings about the candy than I do (https://freetheegg.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/cpsc-responds-to...) although for what it's worth their change.org petition went nowhere. I have enjoyed a few Kinder Eggs though and thought the toys were way better compared what you'd find in cracker jack boxes these days.
Considering billions of people outside of the US have very few problems surviving Kinder Egg, I'd like to think a sensible compromise could be reached to allow them here, but I'd agree that there are larger problems with US food safety going unaddressed which would have a bigger impact.
That actually more appropriately describes the EU safety mindset: "Ban it, unless we can show it is safe", whereas the US is more "Allow it, unless we can show it is unsafe". All sorts of things, like random food colorings, are banned by the EU, even though they have no ability to show anyone has ever been even remotely harmed by them.
I think what you're pointing out may just come down to a differing view as to what are acceptable losses for eating raw pork.
And, in fact, Germany has regulations for handling mett(which I assume you're talking about), indicating it can only be served on the day it is made, and you can't make it out of previously frozen pork.
Someone should make a web application for banned foods. Like, you would select "I am from country X, and I am travelling through country Y", and the page would list all foods that are illegal at X but legal at Y, so that you have the opportunity to try them.
How did the EU handle toxic cookware coatings like Teflon and similarly toxic alternatives? Since they were newly invented molecules, there was no safety data.
>Most of these customs prohibitions are not to protect people eating it -- it's to protect disease from being spread to local agriculture.
It's the other way around - these prohibitions are to prevent the unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses from causing outbreaks. It's these conditions that cause the US to be the only country in the world that dunks slaughtered chickens in bleach before selling them.
There's certain parts of America that regularly eat raw ground beef on slices of bread! The FDA/USDA can't really do much once the product leaves the well regulated grocery stores
More importantly, the USDA/FDA seem to significantly draw back what they consider their duty by the time the product leaves a distributor. You can order a nearly raw burger, or straight up tartare at plenty of restaurants, with the only heads up being a small notice in fine print that it could kill you, which I'm not even sure is a regulation but possibly instead a liability thing.
The FDA/USDA is just trying to stop giant companies from distributing only shit products with no alternatives like it was (supposedly) in the 20s. If you buy a cow and drink it's milk straight from the udder, the FDA does not care.
The strange thing is that generally EU regulatory agencies will do preventative policy, putting controlling regulations on something because there is reasonable suspicion it will cause harm, whereas US agencies will do reactive policy, where it is basically a free-for-all until significant harm has been demonstrated.
That link would be more convincing if it dealt in quantities rather than percentages. Does 70% mean 7 out of 10 or 700,000 out of 1,000,000? And anyway, why wasn't it 100%? People who intentionally consume raw milk know that it's raw. Why shouldn't we be more concerned about the 30% who drank pasteurized and still got poisoned?
>sparing countless people from infections and deaths
Lumping those two categories together is a disservice to truth, and possibly health. If everyone died to whom you're referring when you talk about how "apparently we're not," then perhaps we're not good at dealing with the consequences. However, if most recovered, I'd say we are. Furthermore, the consequences of what? I'd say factory farming as opposed to drinking milk in the way it was drunk for thousands of years prior. If you're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, it's best to make sure you know that the baby is indeed the problem.
You can tell young people - they have no notion where this all came from. Living in a world where almost everybody grows up, it's easy to forget that wasn't always the case.
What's-his-face- the guy who wrote about reform and the 'gate in the road', had some good things to say about all this.
The regulations only really have an effect on distribution of raw milk, not local sale. Yes, selling raw milk from a roadside stall is still illegal, but enforcement is non-existent at that scale.
With the laws in place; if you live close enough to a farm to get raw milk, it’s probably safe for you to consume.
The rest of use have to stick to milk that has been treated to survive the lengthy distribution process
So perhaps without these regulations, we wouldn't have tripped down the hill of factory farming so hard. I'd say that would have been a great alternative direction than the one we're now stuck in.
> impression that US is a nation of germophobes and FDA regulations
Germophobes I don't think so, but there's definitely something to be said about the way the regulations are setup to be protectionist of rural voter groups. And food production is a major chunk of those rural economies.
And a lot of cheese is made from excess milk, not the best milk because the best milk goes into the cold chain fresh. So it is politically convenient to make long lasting cheeses to keep the milk prices stable through the year and cut competition from outside importers (even Canada?).
The germs thing is a win-win on that respect. But if it had political negatives, the FDA would "find a way".
PS: "Food that Built America" season 2 is a great collection of anecdotes about all this
Food production takes a bit of time to ramp up. Epidemic diseases among livestock and plants can destroy months worth of production capability in a very short period of time.
Over-producing (and maintaining the capability to over-produce) is one means of protecting against such calamity. I'm not sure if there are better ways to go about it. True rural voters make up a relatively small percentage of the country's population- 20% or so, depending on where you draw the line. It's not hard to out-vote them, but it is very hard to live without them.
It's all about protecting big business. Hence why all kinds of dubious ingredients are allowed in fast food, but farmers get busted for selling raw milk.
Yup. Our dairy industry is a mere few steps away from being nationalized it's so heavily subsidized. Don't tell the rural voters that though, it sounds like communism!
There are "back channels" for european unpasteurized cheese to be sold here. I've been friends with a couple of cheesemongers who sell that stuff. I asked them how it comes over here when the FDA doesn't allow it. "In shipping containers, like everything else". I asked them what would happen if it was discovered. "They'd probably just destroy it all." I've found examples of such cheeses in great cheese stores across the USA.
A food product is much more a sum of ingredients and procedure to process them, than just something something looking/tasting similar from given country. Especially those protected as historically significant to given place.
So no, what you buy as brie, if it went through official US import channels, is not real Brie. Now how much is the real difference in taste is another topic, but we take protecting traditional methods of making these things very seriously here in Europe. Very anti-race-to-the-bottom approach.
It was probably a reference to Brie de Meaux, which is a type of brie that only comes from France and is (I believe) illegal to import in the United States.
Isn't US rare more cooked than the rest of the world? I think I remember needing to ask for medium or more in Paris to get what I expected for medium rare?
A fair amount of differences in food safety practices has to do with where cleanliness is done. For example, I'm told European eggs are usually not industrially washed, so you can leave them on the counter, but you can only do that when laying is clean. In the US, laying is dirty, so eggs are industrially washed and must be refrigerated. Both systems work, but you have to be careful about comparing steps in the middle.
I adore Mexico but knowledge of food safety is very much lacking there, and a depressingly common attitude is that getting parasites occasionally is just part of life.
With the friends and families I've stayed with down there, pretty much all fresh produce and meat is disinfected before cooking, as surface contamination is definitely typical.
here in the US i have to order my steaks rare and emphasize that i want it bloody to have even the remotest prospect of getting a steak that's not cooked more than medium rare
This is probably because American restaurants are accustomed to dealing with idiots who say they want their steak "rare" because they heard that in a movie once, but become irate and send the steak back when they see a hint of pink.
The FDA mandates any cooked steak be cooked up to 145° F, which is medium. I imagine many steakhouses don't strictly follow this, but I expect that even a rare steak ordered most places comes out medium rare at best.
> I imagine many steakhouses don't strictly follow this
..
> I expect that even a rare steak ordered most places comes out medium rare at best
Your speculation does not even remotely match reality in the US, nor are you factually correct. The FDA recommends 145* for beef, it does not mandate it. And I've never been to a restaurant anywhere in the US that refused to serve a steak at 125 if so ordered.
I know that various government organizations say that 145°F is the minimal safe temperature for a steak, and I know that health inspectors check that food has a safe internal temperature. I assumed this was the FDA, though seem to be wrong about that, and that health inspectors use the published temperature for ensuring a safe internal temperature.
Maybe I'm wrong, but there is a mandated temperature and I'm pretty sure it's well over what would be rare.
It's not mandated. You are wrong. Otherwise every restaurant serving a hamburger would have to be shut down.
The FDA has charts that simplify and explain how heat and time will kill pathogens and result in safe food. This is information meant for consumers, not restaurants, which have way different requirements that are meant to produce safe operating and serving environments, so that you don't have to rely on overcooking your meat to ensure food safety. Bringing unground beef to 145 is ONE of those values, but the temp changes based on type of food and the FDA is also open that there are other ways to make sure your food is safe and that lower temps for longer are plenty sufficient.
Restaurants then have a bit of fine print on their menu or somewhere that says "Eating raw or undercooked meat/eggs/shellfish can cause illness" and you can then order an undercooked food item.
And it wouldn't surprise me to see this requirement widely ignored. A cook could easily know to cook to the required temperature when the health inspector is watching and it's very difficult to do a surprise inspection even if they wanted to.
I fully admit I was wrong to say the FDA mandated this, but my larger point is still broadly true.
I have no experience with this subject, but I don't think hot food needing to be "held" at 135°F has any implications regarding the cooking temperature. The document you linked seems to be forbidding holding TCS food below 135°F for more than 4 hours.
One factor that further complicates the medium-rare burger issue is the fact that serving undercooked meat contaminated with E. coli is technically illegal under federal law. Even if a consumer orders their burger medium-rare, the restaurant is breaking the law if that burger happens to have E. coli in it. -- https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/06/rare-burgers/#:~:text....
"The federal food code allows restaurants to serve undercooked burgers as long as they have a clear written warning, such as a statement on the menu, regarding the dangers of eating raw or undercooked meat. "
That's as plain as day that there is no mandate to serve steak/burger at the 145 (for steak) or 165 (for ground beef) recommended internal temps. I wish that article cited its sources for the claims it makes. It's possible that the actual law prohibits knowingly serving contaminated beef, instead of it just happening due to supplier contamination.
That was in 1993, so maybe the "illegal to serve beef with e. coli" is from newer legislation but notice Jack in the Box was not put on trial for any federal crimes.
My reading of the article is that it's legal to serve undercooked beef as long as (a) you warn the customer and (b) it doesn't happen to contain E. coli. But since you can't ensure (b) you may be breaking the law without realizing it.
You're very mistaken. FDA guidelines are just that, not mandates, and they're largely aimed at the lowest common denominator of what some teenage idiot will do in a chain restaurant kitchen.
Culturally older folks in the US are likely to prefer meat with little to no pink, so you will find a bias that direction in some restaurants. A proper fine dining establishment however will have zero problem giving you exactly what you ask for with a steak, including blue/pittsburg rare. I wouldn't say tartar is popular but it's not an uncommon site on an upscale menu.
I live in a place where a form of steak tartar is a common local delicacy but no restaurant I'm aware of sells it because it wouldn't pass a health inspection.
Health inspections aren't national, so maybe someplace does allow steak tartar, but many have some kind of mandated temperature.
I'm not aware of any place that has a ban on tartar, just it isn't common outside of continental style fining dining. I've certainly had it in several states, more than I can remember. I generally only order it at places that are breaking down their own primals and where it's clear they have attention to sanitation.
> Culturally older folks in the US are likely to prefer meat with little to no pink
Not just in the US. I’m from Ireland and my grandmother was horrified at LIDL advert showing a should of beef cooked medium rare, going so far as to call it raw.
you are overlooking several other "american" issues.
1) Lawsuits
- The US court system is often used as some sort of "i won the lotto" system where people do dumb things, and somehow win substantial sums of money. It is often easier to preemptively prevent anything that could trigger a lawsuit
2) Powerful lobby groups.
- Many things that are legal elsewhere are not in the US, and often there is a government lobby group behind it.
I should probably look into this more, but I think quite often they pasteurize the product, then put approved bacteria cultures back in. Some dirt and (animal) digestive tract bacteria is fine, but some is not, so I'm not sure companies would let random stuff grow in their products even just for QA reasons. How would they give you a number of bacteria CFUs if they got in from floor dust and fecal contamination?
I wonder what this actually looks like in practice? Is this a real risk or "we've always done it this way"? Do different non-US countries have different risk profiles?
The customs people took a chunk of prosciutto my parents brought back to the US that my Italian in-laws had given them. What a waste. And Italy takes its food very seriously and professionally. I'd even go so far as to say that it's mostly higher quality than in the US in many ways.
Food, unless it has been thoroughly cooked or cured, is a risk and the diversity of stuff people bring back is enormous. Obviously Australia and New Zealand import food, but that requires licences and is regulated and inspected.
I would have thought that land border inspections would be less paranoid about food provided that the neighbouring country has similar regulations. But I guess that better describes e.g. mainland EU borders or the US-Canada border rather than the US-Mexico border.
Same with the US and immigration..
And yes, of course it is more complicated than that but I cannot forgo of the irony of our existence.
Remember when Bill Gates was going around about 2 decades ago, warning everyone of the risk of a global pandemic? The specific scenario/simulation his foundation used as an example was a mutation of swine flu emerging in rural Brazil then making the leap to the global food system via the US.
I get its frustrating not to be able to take stuff home. I gained a dozen pounds of water bloat I ate so much charcuterie in Tuscany. But the bottom line of these laws is that the health of the industry as a whole matters more than us individuals enjoying what's ultimately a luxury not necessity.
Aside: I'd say Italy is a mixed bag in terms of food handling. I toured a cattle ranch and it was pretty grim. Lifelong intensive confinement seemed to be the norm. But what I would say I loved about Italy is the importance food is given in ordinary life. Sure, I'm not overly romanticizing things, people of people just order some dominos in Italy too, but I think it's fair to say there's a higher priority paid to proper food vs the US.
I don't think very many do, given that the Italian Domino's franchise recently went bankrupt [0] having managed to open 29 of its planned 880 restaurants.
Of course, plenty of Italians eat fast food (McDonald's is reasonably successful there), just not imported American versions of Italian food.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/10/dominos-retrea...
I have a long standing personal joke about how no matter where you go in the world, you'll see Domino's delivery scooters there most likely, except in the US. I dunno why I find that so amusing but I do.
an inhumane in operation. A lot of the vulnerability to disease outbreaks animals suffering under industrial farming have is the result of the horrifying conditions they live in. I wont claim that if we treated animals better the need to regulate what enters the country wouldn't exist, but it would make outbreaks less disastrous.
Maybe it isn't effective against viruses or prions.
Maybe the public perception that irradiated food becomes radioactive is to strong.
Maybe the problem is actually about protecting domestic industry...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55622331
The difference is the potential downside of some things as compared to other things. It's all about balancing risk.
Do you want to be the head of the department that "saves American lives by preventing the import of contraband" a million times a year, or a thousand times a year? Who do you think gets more funding?
They also don't need any excuse to flex their authority, they've been given broad ability to violate rights with very few specific requirements. Remember, these are the same people who can legally deny you entry to the US if you don't show them your facebook profile if you aren't a US citizen.
One of the problems for meat was also that people would bring homemade goods inside commercial containers, or bring wild animal meat...
sounds more like it's related to tariffs and whatnot, bologna is cooked, so there's no risk of spreading germs.
This is not true. Prion diseases can for sure survive cooking.
Foot and mouth can too I believe.
but it's not found in the cuts used to make Bologna...
And BTW it's been heavily controlled and it was mostly a domestic threat spread in living animals through their food supply.
Hand foot and mouth disease is usually not lethal and it spreads through close personal contact. If they wanted to block it at the border, they should block the people, not the food.
I would also wager you are far too confident that central nerves aren't ending up in the chubs.
[0] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/prion-research
coppa di testa [1] is made with srcaps from pork head, it was never involved in the ban regarding the "mad cow" disease
[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppa_di_testa
do you really know what's inside fruit, vegetable, salad, juices, sodas etc?
do you really know what's inside domestic bologna sold and produced inside USA?
why imported one (main topic of the discussion) should be more dangerous, given that US are one of the worst places in the west for food handling?
I would assume the contrary, when in the US imported food is of better quality in general. And I am willing to spend to 2x or 3x cap to buy real Italian prosciutto from real Italian people than eat cheap, but US made ham.
p.s. my family home made cured meats for generations, we know exactly what they are made out of, what we put in it. Simple as that.
I assume the risk assessment assumes some percentage of sick pigs are contained within each. In the US, this percentage is tracked. From another country, the upper, and probably very realistic, bound is 100%. Think small, unvaccinated farm, or one that slaughters sick pigs because they need the money. It would be interesting to see their math.
Swine fever just recently has a vaccine. I doubt many US pigs are vaccinated: https://www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-african-...
I’m happy to share that I have never done such a thing to keep the New York, Pennsylvania or Ohio citrus industry safe.
(While ignoring that Toronto was exporting hundreds of trucks a day of garbage to Michigan dumps)
Then there is the current ban on most Personal fresh egg/chicken imports from US into Canada due to avian flu outbreak, just to make sure I don’t feed them uncooked to a bird in Canada (as opposed to… eating them), ignoring the fact that birds fly and pose 1000x bigger threat where I live, <100km from the border.
https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/services/fpa-apa/bringing-apport...
Are you suggesting the border control become bird hunters? That'd be pretty fun.
Border control enforcing whatever the current bans on birds are does not impact the effort (or lack thereof) on other controls, such as flying birds. Different people, different jobs.
Useless laws are detrimental if you want a society that respects and trusts the law.
Instead of sending resources toward what can actually solve the problem (e.g. taking money from your department to testing agricultural flocks), just create some senseless barriers that won’t help anyone at all and distract yourself from whatever your dept’s focus should be.
Win-win?
I understand strong restrictions on overseas seeds and bugs (especially in New Zealand’s case where they have a defined, delicate ecosystem), but it just seems like US is beating up on its little neighbor.
I’m just saying this whole article details a little corner of American law enforcement that is an overzealous interpretation of a reasonable, because SOMEONE out there made a big stink about it. “Whoa whoa whoa, you can’t bring this low cost meat product across the line to sell in US markets!! US Markets are only for big US Farming Corporations!
"Defining Law Enforcement's Role in Protecting American Agriculture from Agro-Terrorism" by Terry Knowles ISBN 1437929710, 9781437929713
On page 141:
"For example, Chimex brand bologna has been found to foster the CSF (classical swine fever) virus. A high death loss - 60-80% -could occur if the CSF virus entered a healthy swine population."
Losing 4/5ths of your pigs...probably justifies being extra careful about what ppl. are allowed to bring into the country....
Here's a niche where you could compete as long as you could get distribution and create a strong brand name. There's no good reason you couldn't create bologna just as good as the Mexicans. In fact there's a good chance you could export it to Canada as well.
https://www.sqfi.com/partners/compliance-and-integrity-progr...
https://safefoodalliance.com/food-safety-resources/what-is-g...
https://www.fda.gov/food/hazard-analysis-critical-control-po...
https://www.sysco.com/dam/jcr:596b9459-7e35-4ee0-8a4d-16b8bd...
The price of meat here is discouragingly high (IMO rightly so), and incredibly cheap in neighboring Germany.
The duty-free limit is also incredibly low (1kg per person and day), similar to the amount of spirits (1L per), and the customs you pay after hefty.
The statistical likelihood of being stopped is slim enough that its not even considered "smuggling".
Swiss have mostly higher safety standards than EU, plus much higher wages. Thus the prices.
As for smuggling - I do it too... but it depends which border crossing you use. On some, chances for search are maybe 20-30%. Way too high risk to save maybe 100-200 chf and risk a much higher fine. On some crossings I know nearby to France, practically 0 (but even at those, I have sworn border cops are never there till I saw them once in 10 years...)
Where I live now (still EU) the origin and various other traceability information has to be available, and for some reason meat quality is far higher.
Really got a kick out of the part where they mentioned people insisting on Mexican mayonnaise - mostly because it’s a contrast to a recent nytimes article about Mac salad on Hawaii where the interviewee insisted something like “it HAS to be Hellman’s mayo”.
I’m not a bologna fan (or spam fwiw) but can someone smuggle up some choriqueso tacos for me please?
Lastly it’s great to read about a working Malinois - tough job all things considered
Two words I never thought I'd see next to each other.
Growing up we ate the Oscar Meyer product. Not great, but when you're 10 years old, it's fine. But they've got a point - bologna for adult tastes just doesn't exist, and someone should give it a whirl.
Whatever the hell is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_sausage vs the real deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortadella
But to be honest I always thought mortadella was overrated. I'm more of a salame kind of guy.
> I'm more of a salame kind of guy.
two times wrong:
- mortadella is delicious, if you don't like it, fine, you're the rounding error, but nobody is over selling it, people just love it because what's not to love about it?
- salame is not an alternative to mortadella, it's a completely different product (mortadella is cooked, salame is air-dried), in the same way a steak is not an alternative to bresaola (same animal, different process).
and yeah salame definitely better.
ice cream and broccoli are both food too...
> and yeah salame definitely better.
according to your taste maybe, and that's completely fine
but AFAIK people love them both.
I would be very surprised to find a menu anywhere, except for maybe in some high modernist bullshit cuisine, that substitutes ice cream and broccoli.
I can assure you it is the contrary.
Mortadella is also more popular because it is perceived as lighter and with a smoother flavour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZaOK0Cj3ug
Nitpicking, but Italians don't call it Bologna anyway. In Italy Bologna is just one very specific thing: a city (where I'm from :))
Original mortadella was born in Latium, Bologna made it popular.
But I am talking about the fourth image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Mortadel...
Mortadela_com_azeitonas.jpg
Auto translate tells me that "azeitonas" [Portuguese (Brazil) detected] translates to "olives" in english.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor%27s_sausage
EDIT: here it is, this is the video I saw, includes one interview with a babushka:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcxQBkdughc
https://www.myfermentation.com/meat-and-fish/Lebanon-bologna...
Doesn't have to. Although they are common.
It's very fatty and greasy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is no implication in the article that this stuff is unsafe to consume by humans.
A more likely reason is that domestic pork producers have a powerful lobby.
However, bologna is not a vector for african swine fever or foot-and-mouth disease or (as far as I can tell) any other threat to US livestock.
Thus "bullshit". Re-read the thread.
Why would you say that instead of "bologna is not a vector for african swine fever or foot-and-mouth disease"? What does how heavily processed the bologna have to do with your point, and why did you bring it up if it has nothing to do with it? That's literally the only thing I argued against.
what does bologna being heavily processed have to do with "bullshit" though?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunch_meat#Types
The article touched upon other illegal imports due to invasive species, such as wood products. I doubt that there is a wood carver's lobby that is trying to have the work of foreign craftsmen banned. They don't need such a lobby since once an alien species (or disease) gets a foothold it is near impossible to stop and very difficult to slow.
Import of plants into the US is completely unregulated, which is why fruit trees and interesting plants from all over the world are available in the US.
It's because inbound international mail isn't inspected, which isn't the case in most other countries.
Further, of course inbound international parcels are inspected [1]. As with any sort of border inspection, USPS and CBP rely on random samples and targeted efforts of limited scope.
[1]https://www.uspsoig.gov/document/prohibited-inbound-internat...
By comparison, I have to open every single package I import in front of a customs agent, and I live in a third world country. This is after they've been x-rayed by customs.
I mean, just recently Americans all over the country were receiving seeds in the mail from overseas and your govt had to issue warnings. Such warnings would be unnecessary in my country because every package is inspected.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/03/mystery-seed...
Millions upon millions of packages arrive into your country every week from Aliexpress and other foreign online marketplaces. None of these are inspected.
As implemented currently, US import inspections are designed to maximize throughput while catching the most flagrant violators. Extremely easy-to-smuggle items in low risk categories like seeds are obviously more often than not going to make their way past enforcement checkpoints under this arrangement.
I can pretty much guarantee that nobody in this HN discussion has ever had a parcel opened, nor knows anyone who has ever had that happen to them.
I mean, there's an entire industry of buying prescription medicine online from India and other places, which simply wouldn't fly in any other country.
Quite different safety traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Never heard of European chickens being "pumped full of antibacterials" - would you mind explaining what you mean?
https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/european-union-bans-an...
We do that here in the US too. Chlorination was on top of that.
Maybe, but this article isn't about that. It doesn't say anything about whether food is safe to eat, nor does it mention the FDA.
It does mention diseases (avian influenza, mad cow disease, African swine fever) and pests (wood-boring), and it talks about the economic damage they could cause / have caused to agriculture.
And seeing as we're talking about candy, I don't think fixing this is high on many people's list of priorities.
Considering billions of people outside of the US have very few problems surviving Kinder Egg, I'd like to think a sensible compromise could be reached to allow them here, but I'd agree that there are larger problems with US food safety going unaddressed which would have a bigger impact.
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2018/12/17/tips-eating-canni...
https://www.wpr.org/cannibal-sandwiches-polarizing-and-misun...
I think what you're pointing out may just come down to a differing view as to what are acceptable losses for eating raw pork.
And, in fact, Germany has regulations for handling mett(which I assume you're talking about), indicating it can only be served on the day it is made, and you can't make it out of previously frozen pork.
Don’t be the small player.
It's the other way around - these prohibitions are to prevent the unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses from causing outbreaks. It's these conditions that cause the US to be the only country in the world that dunks slaughtered chickens in bleach before selling them.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/us-trade...
The FDA/USDA is just trying to stop giant companies from distributing only shit products with no alternatives like it was (supposedly) in the 20s. If you buy a cow and drink it's milk straight from the udder, the FDA does not care.
The regulators sure are. The people want to buy raw milk, and are told we're not grown up enough to handle the consequences.
Lumping those two categories together is a disservice to truth, and possibly health. If everyone died to whom you're referring when you talk about how "apparently we're not," then perhaps we're not good at dealing with the consequences. However, if most recovered, I'd say we are. Furthermore, the consequences of what? I'd say factory farming as opposed to drinking milk in the way it was drunk for thousands of years prior. If you're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, it's best to make sure you know that the baby is indeed the problem.
You can tell young people - they have no notion where this all came from. Living in a world where almost everybody grows up, it's easy to forget that wasn't always the case.
What's-his-face- the guy who wrote about reform and the 'gate in the road', had some good things to say about all this.
{edit: Chesterson's Fence}
With the laws in place; if you live close enough to a farm to get raw milk, it’s probably safe for you to consume.
The rest of use have to stick to milk that has been treated to survive the lengthy distribution process
Germophobes I don't think so, but there's definitely something to be said about the way the regulations are setup to be protectionist of rural voter groups. And food production is a major chunk of those rural economies.
And a lot of cheese is made from excess milk, not the best milk because the best milk goes into the cold chain fresh. So it is politically convenient to make long lasting cheeses to keep the milk prices stable through the year and cut competition from outside importers (even Canada?).
The germs thing is a win-win on that respect. But if it had political negatives, the FDA would "find a way".
PS: "Food that Built America" season 2 is a great collection of anecdotes about all this
Over-producing (and maintaining the capability to over-produce) is one means of protecting against such calamity. I'm not sure if there are better ways to go about it. True rural voters make up a relatively small percentage of the country's population- 20% or so, depending on where you draw the line. It's not hard to out-vote them, but it is very hard to live without them.
So no, what you buy as brie, if it went through official US import channels, is not real Brie. Now how much is the real difference in taste is another topic, but we take protecting traditional methods of making these things very seriously here in Europe. Very anti-race-to-the-bottom approach.
A fair amount of differences in food safety practices has to do with where cleanliness is done. For example, I'm told European eggs are usually not industrially washed, so you can leave them on the counter, but you can only do that when laying is clean. In the US, laying is dirty, so eggs are industrially washed and must be refrigerated. Both systems work, but you have to be careful about comparing steps in the middle.
With the friends and families I've stayed with down there, pretty much all fresh produce and meat is disinfected before cooking, as surface contamination is definitely typical.
Your speculation does not even remotely match reality in the US, nor are you factually correct. The FDA recommends 145* for beef, it does not mandate it. And I've never been to a restaurant anywhere in the US that refused to serve a steak at 125 if so ordered.
Maybe I'm wrong, but there is a mandated temperature and I'm pretty sure it's well over what would be rare.
The FDA has charts that simplify and explain how heat and time will kill pathogens and result in safe food. This is information meant for consumers, not restaurants, which have way different requirements that are meant to produce safe operating and serving environments, so that you don't have to rely on overcooking your meat to ensure food safety. Bringing unground beef to 145 is ONE of those values, but the temp changes based on type of food and the FDA is also open that there are other ways to make sure your food is safe and that lower temps for longer are plenty sufficient.
Restaurants then have a bit of fine print on their menu or somewhere that says "Eating raw or undercooked meat/eggs/shellfish can cause illness" and you can then order an undercooked food item.
And it wouldn't surprise me to see this requirement widely ignored. A cook could easily know to cook to the required temperature when the health inspector is watching and it's very difficult to do a surprise inspection even if they wanted to.
I fully admit I was wrong to say the FDA mandated this, but my larger point is still broadly true.
>Cook rare beef to at least 130°F
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/business/food-operators/food-s...
I realize it says temporary, but you can check the full guidelines where it says that 130°F is only permitted if you cook it for 112 minutes.
One factor that further complicates the medium-rare burger issue is the fact that serving undercooked meat contaminated with E. coli is technically illegal under federal law. Even if a consumer orders their burger medium-rare, the restaurant is breaking the law if that burger happens to have E. coli in it. -- https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/06/rare-burgers/#:~:text....
"The federal food code allows restaurants to serve undercooked burgers as long as they have a clear written warning, such as a statement on the menu, regarding the dangers of eating raw or undercooked meat. "
That's as plain as day that there is no mandate to serve steak/burger at the 145 (for steak) or 165 (for ground beef) recommended internal temps. I wish that article cited its sources for the claims it makes. It's possible that the actual law prohibits knowingly serving contaminated beef, instead of it just happening due to supplier contamination.
For reference, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Jack_in_the_Box_E._coli_o...
That was in 1993, so maybe the "illegal to serve beef with e. coli" is from newer legislation but notice Jack in the Box was not put on trial for any federal crimes.
Culturally older folks in the US are likely to prefer meat with little to no pink, so you will find a bias that direction in some restaurants. A proper fine dining establishment however will have zero problem giving you exactly what you ask for with a steak, including blue/pittsburg rare. I wouldn't say tartar is popular but it's not an uncommon site on an upscale menu.
Health inspections aren't national, so maybe someplace does allow steak tartar, but many have some kind of mandated temperature.
Not just in the US. I’m from Ireland and my grandmother was horrified at LIDL advert showing a should of beef cooked medium rare, going so far as to call it raw.
1) Lawsuits
- The US court system is often used as some sort of "i won the lotto" system where people do dumb things, and somehow win substantial sums of money. It is often easier to preemptively prevent anything that could trigger a lawsuit
2) Powerful lobby groups.
- Many things that are legal elsewhere are not in the US, and often there is a government lobby group behind it.
Think things like this : https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-anti-consumer-25-chicken-...