I don't want shit food from the US

[flashbac]

So word has it BJ is waiting to see who wins US election. Trump = no deal with EU. Biden = half arsed attempt at EU deal.
I think Trump might win because too many people are so gullible and brainwashed.
So how can we avoid eating crap food from the US? Thus far EU standards have protected us from dangerous additives, excessive phalates in packaging, the list is long.

I rather lost interest in petitions when one with over six million signatures (10% of the UKs population) went missing.

@MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes

There’s been one on the NFU website for a while too. www.nfuonline.com/news/latest-news/food-standards-petition/

Of course we all know exactly what the opinions of people mean to the UKs rulers, but what else are we going to do, roll over?

Voting the Tories out would be a good start.

UK farmers just won't be able to compete and soon enough all your local produce is likely to disappear too

I don't buy this narrative. UK farmers are not competing in the same mass cheap market as the US. It's simple supply and demand. If the demand is not there for US beef, UK supermarkets will not buy it. If UK Macdonalds can produce a burger for £1.99 or whatever, from UK beef, then there is no benefit in switching to a US beef product, when customer don't want it.

Customer is King. I repeat, as other are so fond of doing in this thread. You can't force a supplier to buy your product if there is no demand for it. If Tesco and Sainsburys and Morrisons, and Waitrose and Aldi and Lidl, and even Iceland, all decide they will only sell UK meat, then there is piss all the US can do about it.

You can't force a supplier to buy your product if there is no demand for it.
If there is not enough other food available, there will be demand. Because the alternative would be just not to buy food, which is a radical way of expressing your views on standards.

I really hope you are right @Baaaahhhhhaahhh. I absolutely do and I'm not trying to scaremonger.

However I don't really get your argument either

UK farmers are not competing in the same mass cheap market as the US

The point is that UK farmers will soon be competing in the exact same mass cheap market as the US.

If UK Macdonalds can produce a burger for £1.99 or whatever, from UK beef, then there is no benefit in switching to a US beef product, when customer don't want it

Quite surely the benefit will be the significant cost saving on the meat.... And without intending the cast any shade on MacDonalds customers - I don't feel the vast majority will be hugely disconcerting.

The people prattling on about "buying British" must have only read one post in this thread and then switched off. Otherwise they would have stopped before posting a slogan to address the issue of UK farms being bought up by US companies so that we don't need to ship in shit meat from the US (which was never the plan). We can make our own shit meat here in the UK and feed it to ourselves while shipping the eye-watering profits back to Uncle Sam.

Just posting "oh, that won't happen" isn't really the most convincing argument as to why "it won't happen". Especially when the UK parliament has managed - with some skill it has to be said - to completely avoid committing the UK to maintaining it's current food standards.

Just posting "oh, that won't happen" isn't really the most convincing argument as to why "it won't happen"

To be fair, people said the same before the panic buying started and if it did they would just get an online delivery. People just don't believe shit times are coming and if they do they'll be a short lived pain.

“The customer is king”??
Oh my.

Have none of worked in retail at all? Customer demand matters very little. Even in ordinary times, profits in retail are made not so much on what the customer buys as the selling of shelf space to private companies.

What is in the shops is not what customers want to buy: it’s what companies want to sell you. And of course what they want to sell you is sawdust that they can pick up for free rather than good quality flour that actually costs to produce.

This is why we have food standards at all, because "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Quoted from the right-winger’s darling Adam bloody Smith! What else do you think they are there for, and how blind and privileged do you have to be to not fear their removal?

needanewidea
If we have a no deal Brexit, our food bill may rise as much as a third.

That's misleading - the claim was some everyday household items;

"In a letter to the Sunday Times, he [David Wells, chief executive of the organisation previously known as the Freight Transport Association] said: “Everyday household items we import will become more expensive under World Trade Organisation tariffs, some by 30% or more."

BBC 24 September;
""Understandably, supermarkets have worked out the cost of applying these new tariffs in this British Retail Consortium exercise on their own supply chain data - the total is £3.1bn next year, versus zero this year. That is worth about £112 per household." (approximately £2 per household per week)

"In practice, some - but not all - these cost increases would be passed on, and some lower tariffs on imports from other places could offset those rises."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54287283?fbclid=IwAR0ebKBnlQzQ554cEF0kcAiG5OaH1xVOYtLQ1-d9vpk_uXI_aD_KRoTpAlU

Irish Cheddar cheese is one product that could be affected by high tariffs, but not immediately if there is a large stockpile already in the UK - this is from 2019 but there may be similar plans now;

[Ireland's] "largest exporter of dairy products has moved to store over six months of Cheddar cheese in warehousing in the UK as a Brexit buffer."

www.independent.ie/business/farming/dairy/countrys-largest-exporter-of-dairy-stockpiles-cheddar-mountain-as-a-brexit-buffer-37781921.html

@gamerchick

Just posting "oh, that won't happen" isn't really the most convincing argument as to why "it won't happen"

To be fair, people said the same before the panic buying started and if it did they would just get an online delivery. People just don't believe shit times are coming and if they do they'll be a short lived pain.

I may be old, but my ears still work. When people say something like "that won't happen" it seems to set a sort of Alexa or Siri type trigger off that keeps my brain scanning for the follow-on reasons as to why the statement just made is going to turn out to be true. And a defining feature of the entire debate - a debate that is seeing our farmers and fishermen being thrown to the wall - is the singular. Singular lack of follow on reasons.

In this case, there isn't even a follow on "because they've made it the law not to". In fact the opposite is true. They have deliberately not made it a law not to. And given that even when there are laws to ensure public safety (such as Grenfell) you have wide boys trying their damnedest to wriggle out of them, then why - why - on earth should anyone with a working brain have any reason to believe companies would adhere to high standards when they don't have to ????

The only reason I can see, is that too many people have lived their lives quite happy to tug their forelock to anyone "in authority", rather than hold them to account each and every time they need holding to account. So no amount of research and evidence and analysis can overturn the simple "that nice Mr. Johnson said" approach to life choices.

Food standards are not a matter for politics; they are not a matter for debate; we have always had some even back in pre-Industrial Times. They exist to do a job. The removal will affect the vast vast majority of people in these islands, middle class wealth will not be enough to avoid the problems. “Local food shops and local butchers” and other imaginary avoidance crap sounds very much like “Let them eat cake” to me.

“Let them eat cake”

Let them eat cake at Aldi;
www.aldi.co.uk/british-quality

Food standards are not a matter for politics;

Oh, but they are. Because everything is a matter for politics. Unless you want to live by revolution every few years.

Deciding if a woman has been raped or not, is a matter of politics, as indeed is deciding what a woman is.

So repeated generations of peoples "not really interested in politics" leads us to here. Where a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the population gets to decide what the rest of us get to eat, to see, to hear, to do and even what to be.

[quote Clavinova]“Let them eat cake”

Let them eat cake at Aldi;
www.aldi.co.uk/british-quality[/quote]
Clavinova Antoinette ?

Clavinova Antoinette?

Coming to a town near you -

September 2020;
"Supermarket giant Aldi to open 100 new stores by the end of next year in £1.3bn investment pledge."

Well Aldi can now. Doesn't mean they'll be able to after January, so that was a fairly pointless link.

It does not matter how many stores Aldi open, what matters is what’s on the shelf. And it does not matter how many farmers union pledges they sign if that farmers union is being wiped out by globalist competition. It’s the NFU that have launched the petition I linked earlier today: they are scared of dropping food standards. They know what it means for a small nation to be suddenly thrown into the same market as one of the largest powers in the world with no protections and no power. What have ever been the terms of the UK’s ‘special relations’ with the US? We jump, and while we’re in the air they tell us how high. Out of Europe, with no back up, with nothing to offer by way of horse trading, as the powerless descendants of a power they hated and never wanted to see rise again, things will be worse not less.

Because everything is a matter for politics. Unless you want to live by revolution every few years.

You are of course quite right. I meant that this is beyond left /right labels, beyond Labour/ Tory tribalism, even beyond the divisions caused in 2016, because you are quite right.

We are not talking about bigger TVs or the arguments about who should have phones, we are talking about food. One of the basic human needs without which we all die. Thank goodness water falls from the sky here.

Everyone needs to have a damn good think about why we have food standards, why we have always had food standards, since the days of the first market charters. And then they can have a damned good think about what it is that makes the difference between us and a third world country, what is it that protects us from being force fed powdered milk containing adulterants rather than having the choice to breastfeed.

The difference is law. Real law, with standards and enforcement, and the principle of equality before it. This is the last thing that stands now between us and absolute degeneration. It’s got to the point of adulterating our food supply.

I share your cynicism about petitions @SerendipityJane, but for many this will be looked back on as the last fight for survival.

^
This.

Ok I just signed NFU petition other than check labels and not buy it not sure what else I can do. I try to shop local a lot but cannot always afford to or find places to shop in conveniently..

I’m just a person with no power to change anything it seems, and always on the wrong side.

This food standards shit has been so much on my mind. Went shopping today and for the first time I swapped out things made with processed meats. I just thought, better get the kids used to it, snack food will not contain meat now.

I know nothing has changed yet. I also know our food standards are not amazing and the supply chain is dark as hell, I know that. But I am not going to be part of this.

Reactionary and premature rant over.

Thank goodness water falls from the sky here

Floods ? Drought ?

They can even fuck that up.

Anyone seen the outright propaganda coming from official UK Trade Twitter account about soy sauce? Apparently we'll get it cheaper after brexshit due to 0% tariff. The only thing is, there is no tariff on it with EU rules. What a tinpot dictatorship we are becoming.

Sorry only just saw this.
It could affect farm shops too as the business as a whole will be affected by imported food.
Farming will be decimated.
There’s info by the NFU.

Trump will lose now we have COVID. Before COVID I'd say he would have got in again but now. I hope not a chance. I hope US eyes have been truely opened.

At least I bloody hope so.

You can by organic. We have plenty enough milk cows in uk. Why would we need to import milk from US.

@whenwillthemadnessend

None of this is about what we in the UK need to import, it is about what we will be required to import. And also what is “we in the UK”? Is a US-owned farm with US food standards, but based in the UK, still a UK farm?