You may or may not mind chicken dipped in chlorine, but there is far more at stake, for the consumer, the farmers and the ecosystem

Do you ever wake up worrying about the rights and wrongs of chlorinated chicken? Generally speaking, I don’t: if it’s something Liam Fox wants, then I most probably do not want it, and that’s good enough for me. But in the spirit of idle curiosity, if I am fine about smelling of chlorine myself, will I hate it on a chicken? And does it actually affect the taste anyway? And what else could a transatlantic trade deal do to one’s actual plate?

Nick Dearden, from the campaign group Global Justice Now, gives an overview – of chlorine, of glysophate, of GM and antibiotics, of hormones and steroids, of the US, the EU, the interests of everyone from Boris Johnson to the average pig farmer – that suggests it is not really about flavour so much as it is about everything else.

“Essentially, the chlorine debate goes back to the idea that trade deals are mostly about tariffs,” he says. “In fact, they are mostly, particularly between developed countries, about regulations. If you think of the perspective of someone who is farming chlorinated chicken, and trying to export them, they don’t see it as a regulation that has been democratically decided; they see it as a trade barrier. The US’s position is, generally, that their food is just as good as European food, and our standards are just protectionism. The problem is that American food is not the same, by any standards. So it’s become a real beef between Americans and any country with European regulations.”

The question, of course, is not what chlorine tastes like, but why it’s necessary. Farming in the US is mostly on a large, industrial scale; the animals are kept in conditions so poor that – parking considerations such as humanity for a second – the practical problem is that they get ill, or don’t thrive, unless they are also fed a lot of antibiotics and steroids, not to mention hormones that maximise growth. The EU has a “farm to fork” policy that regulates conditions all the way through the life cycle. So the issue of whatever you dunk a chicken in, at the end of its life, is really shorthand for the wider question of how that animal has lived.

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Which isn’t to say chlorine doesn’t have its own specific controversies – some people argue that these pathogen reduction treatments hide bacteria rather than getting rid of them, which is why the US has a higher level of food poisoning. US producers counter that they measure food poisoning differently, so the comparison is moot. I would come in, like Solomon, here, and say that food poisoning isn’t really what the European farm-to-fork philosophy is about – it’s actually the classic architecture of the best of the EU. Recognising that a lot of us are going to eat animals, but also feel bad about it, how do we translate that contradiction into something that makes life a bit better for a pig or a chicken?

Sustain, a food and farming charity, stresses that it’s not just the chicken: it’s hormone-treated beef and ractopamine pork – pigs fed with a growth hormone (animal lovers look away for this next bit) that turns them into “downers”, still sentient but too weak to walk to the slaughterhouse, so they have to be dragged. They are often cruelly mishandled on the way, basically treated like carcasses before they have died. “Harmonising” standards (the language is all so emollient) with the US would also mean legalising hundreds of pesticides.

What farmers and environmentalists are worried about this week, though, is Boris Johnson’s mainly rambling speech on Monday. The UK’s policy would be “determined by science”, he said, which to most of us would sound like a good thing, maybe even signalling the return of expertise and reason to the policy arena. However, to the initiated, it sounded like a statement of allegiance in the US-versus-EU regulatory battle. The EU follows the precautionary principle – unless you can prove it is safe, you can’t sell it. In the US, they prefer the phrase “guided by science”, which boils down to: “Unless you can prove this has harmed someone, you can sell it.”

And in any case, “determined by science” is not what anyone wants: to environmentalists, it is code for profit-first agriculture, in which the biggest loser is not the consumer but the ecosystem. And to UK farmers, it is a savage conundrum: how do they compete with US producers, unless they use the same chemical aids, but how do they sell into the EU, if they are not meeting its regulations? It is going to be fascinating to see the Countryside Alliance and Extinction Rebellion on the same side – and it’s coming.