The most sensible European regulations of those listed in the article kindly submitted here are
"What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001."
and
"What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for 'non-medical purposes,' i.e., growth promotion."
I'd like to see the United States follow that lead immediately, and I write this as a man who has several uncles and cousins who are farmers, including some who raise cattle. It makes sense to me to have lines of defense against transmission of animal-infecting, and especially antibiotic-resistant-animal-infecting, microbes to human beings, by controlling what animals raised as lifestock eat and how they are treated with veterinary medicines.
For the other regulatory practices mentioned in the article, especially washing chicken carcasses, I'd like to see more detailed evidence of the safety trade-offs involved in the practices of the United States and of Europe. I'm less sure on some of the other issues that science actually supports the European practice.
>Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001.
Saw a Dirty Jobs segment some time ago in which a Nevada pig farmer picks up all the waste from several casinos' buffets, hauls it out to his farm, hand-picks the plastic and other inedible crud out of it, liquefies it, steams it to kill off some of the bacteria, then feeds it to his hogs.
My first thought was that it was pretty clever of him to find a near-zero-cost source of food for his pigs. Then I thought a while longer and realized that those buffets serve a whole lot of pork. Some of which goes uneaten and into the trash... he's turning his pigs into cannibals! And then slaughtering them and selling the meat to the buffets. "Better eat that bacon, boy; three generations of pigs gave their lives for it!"
> "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001."
I think this came in the aftermath of the Mad Cow Disease that affected the UK in the mid-'90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...). I know that UK does not necessarily mean Europe, but nevertheless, that was really huge no matter where in Europe you happened to live, it showed that an entire industry could vanish over night just because of bad industry practices.
> For the other regulatory practices mentioned in the article, especially washing chicken carcasses, I'd like to see more detailed evidence of the safety trade-offs involved in the practices of the United States and of Europe.
There was the relatively recent story in Forbes[1] (HN comments at [2]) about the difference in US/UK treatment of eggs, where the UK standard is to leave them unwashed to protect a natural anti-microbial coating, and the US policy is to wash and artificially disinfect them (at the cost of removing the original coating)
There are some similarities there, and I'm curious about whether the additional cleansing steps are necessary, or part of a process optimisation that allows for more variation in the cleanliness of incoming birds (ie: permitting a faster/messier slaughter or whatever)
The alternative, that it's something like the ammonia used to kill dangerous pathogens in 'recovered meat', is (IMO) more of a concern.
The fact that you have to qualify your comment with your links to farmers puzzles me. I mean, I understand why you did it, but it's puzzling to me that attitudes are such that you need to. The Brave New Antibiotic-Resistant Apocalypse will hurt farmers just as much as the rest of us, after all.
The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current situation is causing a tragedy of the commons. The commons in this case is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Every individual farmer is better off if they use non-medicinal antibiotics than if they don't, but they're all collectively better off (along with the rest of us) if none of them do. In short, the current market is forcing them to act in ways that are bad for humanity. If I were a farmer, I'd seriously dislike that, and lobby for laws that made it possible to do the right thing.
Feeding cows chicken litter isn't a big deal, it's not just chicken poo, but the uneaten or spilled food, the bedding material, and pieces of feathers. Runoff from chicken litter causes a lot of issues for rivers and streams, and it can't always be used for fertilizer. Feeding it to cows to improve their mineral uptake, it has about the same caloric value as hay, and it's higher in protein.
HN kicks up an almighty fuss about any attempts to regulate our industry (see online payments, sales taxes, etc.) but we are happy to pass judgement on others.
In Europe we can barely stop people from selling horsemeat as beef. I'm not sure how effectively we are implementing any of these rules, and I'm sure a farmer who wishes to do so can flout them at will.
One positive thing to come from the rise of supermarkets and chains is that their own brands suffer when their suppliers fuck up. They alone have the power to police their producers. And we see this in this article with McD's et al pushing for higher standards.
> HN kicks up an almighty fuss about any attempts to regulate our industry (see online payments, sales taxes, etc.) but we are happy to pass judgement on others.
In every industry, the people within the industry think that "they're different" and because they're morally upstanding they don't need to be regulated, but all those other fuckers, well they need to be kept in line. On HN you see this very clearly with attitudes towards the tech sector versus the financial sector (meanwhile my non-tech friends wonder why Facebook and Google are allowed to basically stalk you through the internet).
In my view the horsemeat-as-beef scandal demonstrates that the system works and that mislabeled meat gets detected. In this case the meat was perfectly edible, it was just mislabeled.
I don't ingest web applications and startups as the raw source of energy required to sustain my basic bodily functions. Food must be held to a higher standard.
The article is also a little slanted, in that the described only those practices permitted in the US, but banned in the EU.
There are many practices where the reverse is true, such as the manufacture of certain cheeses from non-pasturized milk being permitted in some parts of the EU, which can lead to a number of diseases.
The flipside of this are things like the banana regulation, more commonly known as Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94.[1] I believe it's now rescinded under ridicule but there are people who try to deny it even existed. It's well worth reading in full on eur-lex for riveting prose like "the measurement, in millimetres, of the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis".[2]
Regulations over the official ingredients of jam, battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages, the list goes on. It's harder for legal systems other than the common law because of the way they work but I'm of the opinion that we should at least trial putting a word count limit on the total body of law and regulation.
A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
> "the measurement, in millimetres, of the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis"
Oh, look, a good definition in a legal document. Don’t people normally complain about ambiguous laws leaving interpretation open to the courts[0]?
> Regulations over the official ingredients of jam
So that consumers can buy jam everywhere in the EU and get more-or-less the same rather than (possibly annoying) surprises. The problem here arose because the word ‘jam’ (or more precisely, ‘marmelade’) was used differently in different parts of the EU prior to regularisation. I am happy about it.
> battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages
Everybody can make any type of sausage, what they cannot do is claim that said sausage was made somewhere else. What exactly do you find unreasonable about that?
> It's harder for legal systems other than the common law because of the way they work but I'm of the opinion that we should at least trial putting a word count limit on the total body of law and regulation.
So you prefer to have such regulation spread not only over a defined body of laws but also over each and every court decision made within the last n hundred years? On the contrary, I would argue that civil law is inherently superior to common law, as it puts the legislation where it belongs (the legislative, i.e. parliament, and, by extension, the various ministries) and gives consumers and businesses security that, if they follow said legislation, they have a reasonable chance of doing everything correctly, rather than having to take into account court decisions on the other side of the country or hope that the court in question will invent new laws according to the way they want, rather than their legal opponents.
There is absolutely no reason to impose a total word count limit on the body of laws. There is a reason to keep that body of law reasonably organised, accurate and easily understandable, which is usually the case, and more so in the EU than the US (otherwise, legal fees would be much higher in the EU, as people would require more help understanding the law, right?).
> A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
Well, that’s what you get for becoming less and less competitive and instead extending bureaucracy more and more to accommodate more and more public officers, paid for by cheap credits, assumed to be backed by more sanely operating economies. Greece’s fault, you could only blame the EU for allowing them in.
[0] Or are you just annoyed that this is measured in millimetres rather than imperial attolightfortnights or similarly ridiculous unit?
If your comment about "right to make certain types of sausages" refers to the various protections around food actually coming from a particular area I actually think that is a good thing.
After all (to pick an example from the news today) - if something is described as "Stornoway Black Pudding" I'd like to believe it actually came from Stornoway:
For context, you always have to keep in mind why those laws exist.
What is the goal that is towering above all else for the EU? The one it has actually been relatively successfully implemented? Creating a common market, of course!
For a common market to exist it is obviously not enough to open up the borders to people, labor, goods and capital. It is also necessary to have common rules and regulations for the goods and services sold throughout the common market. If that weren't the case, individual countries could easily erect trade barriers between them (through rules that are mutually exclusive, e.g. so that a Spanish manufacturer of wine harvesters can't export her Spanish harvesters to France, at least not without massively changing the production process and in essence opening two manufacturing lines, one for Spain, one for France).
So the EU parliament gets this stack of laws on fruits from 27 countries and is told to turn that into one unified law for the whole of the EU. That's basically what's happing. The EU is not so much in the business of making new regulations, it very often just unifies.
Now, it's important to stay vigilant throughout this and pay attention and tell the EU when it screws up, but I do not see any kind of systemic issue. I think it all works pretty well for what it is.
battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages
What do you mean? There are people in England who think that the EU is going to ban British Sausages being called "sausages", forcing them to be called "emulsified high-fat offal tube".
It was actually a joke from the political satire show "Yes, Minister" from 1984 (watch the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzeDZtx3wUw ). There are a lot of euro-scare stories in England of similar levels of ahem reliability.
Rather than trying to ridicule the "banana regulation" and "sausage naming rules" you should do a bit more reading on the true advantages for consumers of classifying fruit and vegetables by quantifiable and tangible aspects (size, shape, colour, etc.); and stopping scams by implementing designation of origin legislation on produce such as sausages. The economic impact of these are measured in billions.
I too would find it naïve at best to think that the EU was perfect; everyone knows that it isn't.
I don't understand your complaint about civil law, though; why is common law better than civil law? Civil law has the added benefit of being fairly simple and court rulings not making precedence.
>A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
To be fair, that's a greek thing and not an EU thing.
There is nothing ridiculous about that regulation. 80% of it is common sense written down. The line you quote is describing where to measure the thickness, since it varies across the length.
According to the article this regulation is still in effect.
Regarding the Greek cafe, there are plenty of crazy regulations like that in the US, usually centered around alcohol.
For example, in Virginia (where I live), ordinary stores can sell beer and wine, but nothing harder. Liquor can only be sold in state-run stores. I suppose the intent is to discourage consumption of hard liquor... and it seems to work on me. The state-run stores are inconvenient enough that I go for softer fare instead of tracking one down.
I knew a couple who bought a gas station and turned half of the convenience store part into a restaurant, while keeping the convenience store part open as well. They had a license to sell alcohol, but not a license to serve alcohol. You could go over to the convenience store half and buy a six-pack of beer, but you couldn't get a beer in the restaurant, and you couldn't bring the beer you had just purchased.
I recently moved into a newly-constructed house. One of my neighbors had to delay their move-in date by a couple of days, because the builder forgot to paint the curb yellow behind the house to indicate that it was a fire lane, and the county wouldn't give them an occupancy permit. This street has plenty of "fire lane" signs, has very little curb at all (it's mostly driveways), and nobody in their right mind would park on it, but it had to be done. The builder rushed the job, and a few months later, basically all of the paint has flaked away and nobody seems to care. Somehow, this was unacceptably unsafe when we were moving in, but it's fine now....
The Greek example sounds worse, but of course a singular example is hard to draw a lesson from. I imagine we'd all benefit everywhere if regulations were treated as a means to an end rather than ironclad law, in any case.
|"You know how arsenic goes inorganic—and thus poisonous—in chickens' guts?"
Correct chemistry but perhaps misleading to non-chemist readers. This is one reason that I oppose product labels advertising "green, organic, natural" products. I cannot help but think that some fickle readers will draw some association between inorganic and poisonous.
It must pain HNers in US that if they perceive these items as problems then they have little access to tasty unpasteurized cheeses which would help ease the blows.
You can get raw milk and cheese all over New Hampshire, including in supermarkets, and apparently many other states for that matter[1]. I never even knew there were restrictions in some states until your comment.
Apparently, even where raw milk/cheese is banned in the U.S., cheese produced from raw milk is legal as long as its been aged for more than 60 days.
Huh? The selection of both pasteurized and raw-milk (local and imported) cheeses at the little local co-op here in northern New England is astounding; far more options than I’ve seen in all but the best cheese shops abroad—-I can get all of my favorite foreign cheeses here, whereas I’ve never found my favorite american cheeses while traveling.
My wife and I made strawberry ice cream from raw milk and raw cream just last week. It's easily available in California, just like unpasteurized cheeses.
The FDA banned interstate commerce of unpasteurized milk products (except cheeses aged past 60 days). This means that companies cannot produce unpasteurized products in one state to sell in others.
However, despite the interstate commerce ban, some 29ish states have various states of unpasteurized sales, ranging from allowing it in grocery stores to only allowing it to be sold from the farms.
In my state, raw milk products cannot be sold at grocery stores except where allowed by federal law (cheeses past 60 days).
The US is now the control group to see if these practices make any difference. There's no reason to implement any of them unless someone demonstrates that Europe has a better outcome on the various claimed side-effects.
For example, if honeybees fare no better in Europe than the US, then we can eliminate the theory that neonicotinoids are a problem.
1. Being from UK where we have just had months of "how the hell did horsemeat get into every burger and lasagne meal?", the idea Europeans have this food business sorted is laughable.
2. All western countries have high standards in food processing. The differences are arbitrage not horrors that will kill us all, as this article rather lazily implies.
3. processing food is mostly the problem. Processing meat is almost the whole problem.
I don't see where TFA aruges that the food business in the EU is sorted, rather that many practices which are rightly illegal in the EU are legal in the US.
Murder is illegal everywhere, but that's not to say it never happens.
How can you take such decisions while considering only the purported benefits and not the costs as well? Let's take antimicrobial sprays for example. They presumably protect some consumers from food-borne illnesses. Shouldn't this be balanced against the risk of rashes and such? If say we estimate antimicrobial sprays save a hundred thousand salmonella etc. cases a year at the cost of ten eye irritations, maybe they're not such a bad deal after all.
Meanwhile in Europe unpasteurized raw milk (good/bad?) is allowed to make cheese and wooden force feed geese to produce foie gras, horse meat and marmite yeah there I said it. I bet European countries have a lot of "traditional" foods grandfathered in even though barely safe. I'm sure the blame game can be used to make the US or European countries look bad.
Although it's great if rules can make us safer and animals lives better but even though there are some good rules and common sense to get rid of antibiotics, heavy metals and nasty pesticides. But this strikes me as noses turned up especially quoting radical animal rights groups such as the essentially ten year old Humane Society of the United States organization (pretty much ex-PETA extreme extremists took it over) .
Well, of course it's a toxin. There's a reason it's added to water: In small amounts, it is not harmful to human health but is harmful to bacteria that cause cavities.
This is the problem any time an industry gets big enough to control legislature in Congress. It's happened in finance and it's happening in agriculture. Practices that are most likely detrimental to the long term health of the population continue apace because it makes someone a lot of money. Changing that at the governmental level is almost impossible, not to be all cynical and jaded. The American consumer has long decided they were only going to choose on price and it's a lot cheaper to have agriculture in the state it is than to fix it.
What you can do is shop locally, start a garden, support local farmers, start hunting and fishing, etc. Is it harder and more expensive? Yup but that seems to be the state of affairs we find ourselves in. On the upside, growing food in a garden is extremely fulfilling.
Realize the USDA is primarily tasked with promoting agricultural business, only secondarily protecting the public. Guess what takes precedence. The FDA is also limited in anything affecting another agency's primary area. Thus FDA cannot affect usage of antibiotics in animal feed.
It's a big turn off to me to see these kinds of purely political articles on HN. I like my life somewhat compartmentalized -- I'd like to be able to discuss technology, science, and startups with people without getting dragged into "OMG the US government is bought by industry!"
I wonder if livestock producers still feed Arsenic to livestock meant for organic products? It would be a shame if they do this by exploiting the technicality that Arsenic is entered through the feed in "organic form".
We live in a world where economic growth is more important than health issues. Having a strong economy means having bad health, and somehow the strong economy can repair the health problems it caused.
Like a lot of other political decisions in the US - they still choose to go with the unlogical choices which in this case would be to not implement some of these bans. I guess there are commercial interests behind these decisions like the gun politics, alcohol laws, etc. What else can you expect in this semi-corrupt country?
The fact that the US doesn't care wether or not we eat these harmful things is outrageous. Quite honestly, I don't see why they wouldn't ban it because those who let this slide and know about it are probably eating it too.
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
"What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001."
and
"What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for 'non-medical purposes,' i.e., growth promotion."
I'd like to see the United States follow that lead immediately, and I write this as a man who has several uncles and cousins who are farmers, including some who raise cattle. It makes sense to me to have lines of defense against transmission of animal-infecting, and especially antibiotic-resistant-animal-infecting, microbes to human beings, by controlling what animals raised as lifestock eat and how they are treated with veterinary medicines.
For the other regulatory practices mentioned in the article, especially washing chicken carcasses, I'd like to see more detailed evidence of the safety trade-offs involved in the practices of the United States and of Europe. I'm less sure on some of the other issues that science actually supports the European practice.
[+] [-] R_Edward|13 years ago|reply
Saw a Dirty Jobs segment some time ago in which a Nevada pig farmer picks up all the waste from several casinos' buffets, hauls it out to his farm, hand-picks the plastic and other inedible crud out of it, liquefies it, steams it to kill off some of the bacteria, then feeds it to his hogs.
My first thought was that it was pretty clever of him to find a near-zero-cost source of food for his pigs. Then I thought a while longer and realized that those buffets serve a whole lot of pork. Some of which goes uneaten and into the trash... he's turning his pigs into cannibals! And then slaughtering them and selling the meat to the buffets. "Better eat that bacon, boy; three generations of pigs gave their lives for it!"
[+] [-] paganel|13 years ago|reply
I think this came in the aftermath of the Mad Cow Disease that affected the UK in the mid-'90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...). I know that UK does not necessarily mean Europe, but nevertheless, that was really huge no matter where in Europe you happened to live, it showed that an entire industry could vanish over night just because of bad industry practices.
[+] [-] shabble|13 years ago|reply
There was the relatively recent story in Forbes[1] (HN comments at [2]) about the difference in US/UK treatment of eggs, where the UK standard is to leave them unwashed to protect a natural anti-microbial coating, and the US policy is to wash and artificially disinfect them (at the cost of removing the original coating)
There are some similarities there, and I'm curious about whether the additional cleansing steps are necessary, or part of a process optimisation that allows for more variation in the cleanliness of incoming birds (ie: permitting a faster/messier slaughter or whatever)
The alternative, that it's something like the ammonia used to kill dangerous pathogens in 'recovered meat', is (IMO) more of a concern.
Purely speculation on my part though.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-ame...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325540
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current situation is causing a tragedy of the commons. The commons in this case is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Every individual farmer is better off if they use non-medicinal antibiotics than if they don't, but they're all collectively better off (along with the rest of us) if none of them do. In short, the current market is forcing them to act in ways that are bad for humanity. If I were a farmer, I'd seriously dislike that, and lobby for laws that made it possible to do the right thing.
[+] [-] nobodysfool|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexMuir|13 years ago|reply
In Europe we can barely stop people from selling horsemeat as beef. I'm not sure how effectively we are implementing any of these rules, and I'm sure a farmer who wishes to do so can flout them at will.
One positive thing to come from the rise of supermarkets and chains is that their own brands suffer when their suppliers fuck up. They alone have the power to police their producers. And we see this in this article with McD's et al pushing for higher standards.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
In every industry, the people within the industry think that "they're different" and because they're morally upstanding they don't need to be regulated, but all those other fuckers, well they need to be kept in line. On HN you see this very clearly with attitudes towards the tech sector versus the financial sector (meanwhile my non-tech friends wonder why Facebook and Google are allowed to basically stalk you through the internet).
[+] [-] Joeri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greghinch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcrh|13 years ago|reply
There are many practices where the reverse is true, such as the manufacture of certain cheeses from non-pasturized milk being permitted in some parts of the EU, which can lead to a number of diseases.
[+] [-] jkldotio|13 years ago|reply
Regulations over the official ingredients of jam, battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages, the list goes on. It's harder for legal systems other than the common law because of the way they work but I'm of the opinion that we should at least trial putting a word count limit on the total body of law and regulation.
A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No_2...
[2]http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLE...
[3]last three paragraphs http://economistmeg.com/2012/02/27/note-from-athens-feeling-...
[+] [-] claudius|13 years ago|reply
Oh, look, a good definition in a legal document. Don’t people normally complain about ambiguous laws leaving interpretation open to the courts[0]?
> Regulations over the official ingredients of jam
So that consumers can buy jam everywhere in the EU and get more-or-less the same rather than (possibly annoying) surprises. The problem here arose because the word ‘jam’ (or more precisely, ‘marmelade’) was used differently in different parts of the EU prior to regularisation. I am happy about it.
> battles over who has the right to make certain types of sausages
Everybody can make any type of sausage, what they cannot do is claim that said sausage was made somewhere else. What exactly do you find unreasonable about that?
> It's harder for legal systems other than the common law because of the way they work but I'm of the opinion that we should at least trial putting a word count limit on the total body of law and regulation.
So you prefer to have such regulation spread not only over a defined body of laws but also over each and every court decision made within the last n hundred years? On the contrary, I would argue that civil law is inherently superior to common law, as it puts the legislation where it belongs (the legislative, i.e. parliament, and, by extension, the various ministries) and gives consumers and businesses security that, if they follow said legislation, they have a reasonable chance of doing everything correctly, rather than having to take into account court decisions on the other side of the country or hope that the court in question will invent new laws according to the way they want, rather than their legal opponents.
There is absolutely no reason to impose a total word count limit on the body of laws. There is a reason to keep that body of law reasonably organised, accurate and easily understandable, which is usually the case, and more so in the EU than the US (otherwise, legal fees would be much higher in the EU, as people would require more help understanding the law, right?).
> A more depressing tale of regulatory woe, given the rocketing suicides and unemployment in Greece, is that of the bookstore/café that can't sell coffee and frequently can't sell books.[3]
Well, that’s what you get for becoming less and less competitive and instead extending bureaucracy more and more to accommodate more and more public officers, paid for by cheap credits, assumed to be backed by more sanely operating economies. Greece’s fault, you could only blame the EU for allowing them in.
[0] Or are you just annoyed that this is measured in millimetres rather than imperial attolightfortnights or similarly ridiculous unit?
[+] [-] arethuza|13 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_t...
After all (to pick an example from the news today) - if something is described as "Stornoway Black Pudding" I'd like to believe it actually came from Stornoway:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-2244...
[+] [-] arrrg|13 years ago|reply
What is the goal that is towering above all else for the EU? The one it has actually been relatively successfully implemented? Creating a common market, of course!
For a common market to exist it is obviously not enough to open up the borders to people, labor, goods and capital. It is also necessary to have common rules and regulations for the goods and services sold throughout the common market. If that weren't the case, individual countries could easily erect trade barriers between them (through rules that are mutually exclusive, e.g. so that a Spanish manufacturer of wine harvesters can't export her Spanish harvesters to France, at least not without massively changing the production process and in essence opening two manufacturing lines, one for Spain, one for France).
So the EU parliament gets this stack of laws on fruits from 27 countries and is told to turn that into one unified law for the whole of the EU. That's basically what's happing. The EU is not so much in the business of making new regulations, it very often just unifies.
Now, it's important to stay vigilant throughout this and pay attention and tell the EU when it screws up, but I do not see any kind of systemic issue. I think it all works pretty well for what it is.
[+] [-] rmc|13 years ago|reply
What do you mean? There are people in England who think that the EU is going to ban British Sausages being called "sausages", forcing them to be called "emulsified high-fat offal tube".
It was actually a joke from the political satire show "Yes, Minister" from 1984 (watch the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzeDZtx3wUw ). There are a lot of euro-scare stories in England of similar levels of ahem reliability.
The European Commission in the UK has a blog where they try to rebut false stories in the UK media ( http://ec.europa.eu/unitedkingdom/blog/index_en.htm ). (The UK's Health and Safety Executive also has a "things that are mentioned in the UK media which are wrong" section http://www.hse.gov.uk/myth/index.htm )
[+] [-] antr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Svip|13 years ago|reply
I don't understand your complaint about civil law, though; why is common law better than civil law? Civil law has the added benefit of being fairly simple and court rulings not making precedence.
[+] [-] JonnieCache|13 years ago|reply
To be fair, that's a greek thing and not an EU thing.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
According to the article this regulation is still in effect.
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
For example, in Virginia (where I live), ordinary stores can sell beer and wine, but nothing harder. Liquor can only be sold in state-run stores. I suppose the intent is to discourage consumption of hard liquor... and it seems to work on me. The state-run stores are inconvenient enough that I go for softer fare instead of tracking one down.
I knew a couple who bought a gas station and turned half of the convenience store part into a restaurant, while keeping the convenience store part open as well. They had a license to sell alcohol, but not a license to serve alcohol. You could go over to the convenience store half and buy a six-pack of beer, but you couldn't get a beer in the restaurant, and you couldn't bring the beer you had just purchased.
I recently moved into a newly-constructed house. One of my neighbors had to delay their move-in date by a couple of days, because the builder forgot to paint the curb yellow behind the house to indicate that it was a fire lane, and the county wouldn't give them an occupancy permit. This street has plenty of "fire lane" signs, has very little curb at all (it's mostly driveways), and nobody in their right mind would park on it, but it had to be done. The builder rushed the job, and a few months later, basically all of the paint has flaked away and nobody seems to care. Somehow, this was unacceptably unsafe when we were moving in, but it's fine now....
The Greek example sounds worse, but of course a singular example is hard to draw a lesson from. I imagine we'd all benefit everywhere if regulations were treated as a means to an end rather than ironclad law, in any case.
[+] [-] coob|13 years ago|reply
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-ame...
[+] [-] samolang|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zmetta|13 years ago|reply
Correct chemistry but perhaps misleading to non-chemist readers. This is one reason that I oppose product labels advertising "green, organic, natural" products. I cannot help but think that some fickle readers will draw some association between inorganic and poisonous.
[+] [-] tezza|13 years ago|reply
It must pain HNers in US that if they perceive these items as problems then they have little access to tasty unpasteurized cheeses which would help ease the blows.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/consumers/ucm079516....
I'm from Oz originally, and they unfortunately ban unpasteurized cheese too.
[+] [-] simonsarris|13 years ago|reply
You can get raw milk and cheese all over New Hampshire, including in supermarkets, and apparently many other states for that matter[1]. I never even knew there were restrictions in some states until your comment.
Apparently, even where raw milk/cheese is banned in the U.S., cheese produced from raw milk is legal as long as its been aged for more than 60 days.
[1] http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/raw_milk_map.htm
[+] [-] stephencanon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Nursie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criley|13 years ago|reply
However, despite the interstate commerce ban, some 29ish states have various states of unpasteurized sales, ranging from allowing it in grocery stores to only allowing it to be sold from the farms.
In my state, raw milk products cannot be sold at grocery stores except where allowed by federal law (cheeses past 60 days).
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cjensen|13 years ago|reply
For example, if honeybees fare no better in Europe than the US, then we can eliminate the theory that neonicotinoids are a problem.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|13 years ago|reply
2. All western countries have high standards in food processing. The differences are arbitrage not horrors that will kill us all, as this article rather lazily implies.
3. processing food is mostly the problem. Processing meat is almost the whole problem.
[+] [-] radio4fan|13 years ago|reply
Murder is illegal everywhere, but that's not to say it never happens.
[+] [-] Tomis02|13 years ago|reply
It was a scamdal. and it IS sorted out. And EU has the regulations in place, as opposed to USA.
[+] [-] zeteo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhughes|13 years ago|reply
Although it's great if rules can make us safer and animals lives better but even though there are some good rules and common sense to get rid of antibiotics, heavy metals and nasty pesticides. But this strikes me as noses turned up especially quoting radical animal rights groups such as the essentially ten year old Humane Society of the United States organization (pretty much ex-PETA extreme extremists took it over) .
[+] [-] kunai|13 years ago|reply
There is scientific proof that fluoride is a potent neurotoxin[1], and yet the government continues to insist and require fluoridation of water.
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1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation#Safety
[+] [-] scotch_drinker|13 years ago|reply
What you can do is shop locally, start a garden, support local farmers, start hunting and fishing, etc. Is it harder and more expensive? Yup but that seems to be the state of affairs we find ourselves in. On the upside, growing food in a garden is extremely fulfilling.
[+] [-] coldcode|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinpet|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drucken|13 years ago|reply
Their principles, economies, and output across a large range of sectors are much more different than many care to admit.
[+] [-] jmsduran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haliax|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|13 years ago|reply
Problem: recession.
[+] [-] heyzzz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tayllargardner|13 years ago|reply