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Comment by nickff

3 hours ago

This article is about the EU food supply, and does not appear to attribute the contaminants to US exports. Why are you bringing American cultivation practices into this?

If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).

EU generally leads the developed world in regulation, that has become a meme and a joke.

but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries

  • The United States has far stricter labeling standards than the EU. That's why US products appear to have more ingredients, they are required to say what their ingredients are mad from, even on identical products.

    Many things that are well known memes are completely false. Not everything in the EU is better regulated. Everyone always complains about chlorinated chicken, not realizing that <5% of US chicken is washed that way as chicken now uses vinegar washes, and those that did were at concentrations deemed safe by the FDA.

    • > The United States has far stricter labeling standards than the EU

      Source for that? All I can find says EU have stricter labeling standards except for forum comments such as yours here.

      Edit: > Many things that are well known memes are completely false

      To me it looks like "USA shows more additives due to harsher labeling standards" is just a meme, everything I've seen says Europe has stricter requirements on what you need to say about additives. So USA having much more additives listed comes from American products having more additives in them, not everything is better in USA.

  • > but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries

    That is mostly a myth. EU and US take different approaches to setting food safety regulations, which means they have different lists of banned substances. The EU bans a lot of substances that have no evidence of actual adverse effects just out of an abundance of caution or sometimes even because of uninformed public perception, which is why their regulations seem more comprehensive, but the vast majority of that has no real positive effect on consumers.

    https://blog.ansi.org/ansi/differences-between-eu-and-us-foo...

    In terms of actual food safety, the US is basically the same as the EU (it technically ranks even higher than most EU countries on the "Quality and Safety" criterion of the Global Food Security Index, but the top countries are all very close)

    https://insights.economistenterprise.com/sustainability/proj...

    (Before anyone accuses me of something, I live in the EU and generally prefer EU in terms of lawmaking and regulations. It's just that food safety specifically is a point of comparison which is much less true than people usually think)

    • The message you respond to talks about "food stuff", which is admitedly blurry. You focus on food safety, which is very good in the US. But the EU also regulates heavily food quality and sustainability, and it usually shows IMO.

> If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).

Nothing said that EU farmers used these pesticides, its related to imports. And even most imports they tested were in the legal limit even though they are from areas where these things are legal.