Is chlorine-washed chicken safe to eat?

Mr Fox has insisted that “Americans have been eating it perfectly safely for years”. A 2017 report published by free-market think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, entitled “Chlorinated Chicken: Why you shouldn’t give a cluck”, said that fears over treated poultry were overblown.

It cited European Commission figures indicating that a person would have to eat 5 per cent of their own body weight of chlorine-washed chicken in one day to be exposed to harmful levels of chlorate, a chlorine byproduct.

The EU has set a maximum residue level of 0.01mg of chlorate per kg of food. It is not clear how much chlorate is present, on average, in chicken that has been washed with chlorine.

The European Food Safety Authority said in 2015 that chlorate is a potential health concern for children but the total intake in current European diets was not enough to cause problems.

In a 2005 study, the EFSA found that treating poultry carcasses with the four most-commonly used antimicrobial substances “would be of no safety concern”. It also said that spraying the carcasses rather than dipping or immersing them, as is done in some US farms, would limit the amount of exposure to chemical residues.

However, in 2008, the Council of Europe rejected a European Commission proposal to allow the use of antimicrobial chicken rinses containing chlorine, which it said can, “lead to the formation of chloroorganic compounds, several of which are persistent, bioaccumulable or carcinogenic”. In other words, the compounds can cause cancer, are hard to get rid of and have a tendency to build up over time when repeatedly absorbed by living in organisms.