Brexit or Breaksit?

[hazard]

The biggest thing I think makes the EU look very suspicious at American food stuffs is the fact that we can't trace it past the meat processing facility it comes from. EU tracking rules allow such specific record keeping we can trace a piece of meat to the specific animal it came from as well as every transport, warehouse and processing facility it ever entered. And IIRC, that's publicly available information.

This is then combined with that USA regulations allow it to be usually safe instead of always safe makes it hard to track down the vectors of food poisoning epidemics. And the EU is very unhappy about things like that.

Right now there's a bit of a riot going in the Netherlands because, over the past 2 years or so, a specific meat packing plant hasn't properly attended to the hygiene rules and as a result 3 people have died to listeria infections and 1 woman miscarried over a period of something like several months. The Albert Heijn supermarket chains has been raked over the coals a bit because it failed to immediately notify the public through posting a banner on the website declaring that some of the meat it had sold were potential infection risks, unlike the other supermarkets involved in the matter. They had posted that message in the specific, affected super markets and immediately yanked all potentially infected products from the shelves.

To put it quite simply, Europeans are just on the average much less tolerant of things like that. Just ask most US citizens who come here; food quality is notably higher in Europe.