US no worse than EU for food problems

READING the letters pages recently, I have to say that I’ve never heard of USA Ambassador Johnson’s remarks about “backward English and EU farmers”.

I have to say that I’m not really afraid of eating American foodstuffs, one of the reasons being I can’t stand chicken and haven’t eaten it since I caught salmonella after eating chicken in Spain in 2016. I was one of 94,530 people to be struck down with it in the EU according to their own health inspectors.

It’s a fact that the European

Union has been home to some disastrous and dangerous foodrelated problems for some years. In May of 2011, 25 people in Germany and thousands more were affected by contaminated cucumbers. In 2008 the Republic of Ireland faced a massive dioxin contamination problem in its pig and beef industry. European Health officials gained support to recall a Irish meat produce. Fraud in the EU meat industry resulted in the contaminated horsemeat scandal of 2013, where standards drawn up by the EU were ignored by Eastern European Union countries.

Yet in spite of all the promises about more vigorous inspections, Belgium announced in 2018 that at least three countries had received falsely labelled meat products from an abattoir in the south of the country due to what it called ‘a significant food fraud operation’.

So all in all, I don’t think they are any worse than the EU. I attended a remainer event a couple of weeks ago and Ms Spelman announced to the audience that there had been no major food health problems in the EU since the Mad Cow Disease many years ago. I leave readers to

draw their own conclusions about Ms Spelman’s pronouncements. Stuart Eels,

Wiltshire