The UK Should Be Very Worried About the Future of Its Food

Have you seen a picture of Sweet Sue Canned Whole Chicken? You probably have, on the internet. You open the can, turn it upside down and a gunky, unidentifiable mass quivers its way out. Scrape off that KY Jelly and maybe you have a chicken, of sorts. Only in America.

Thanks to whoever curates Netflix's documentaries, every new vegetarian, vegan or "reducetarian" knows that a meat eater uses 18 times more land to be fed than a vegan; that cows produce 150 billion gallons of methane per day, and that methane has a global warming power 86 times that of CO2; that raising animals for food produce makes more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector; and that livestock covers 45 percent of the earth's total land.

Yet, in the UK, we have an easy get-out – a way to make ourselves feel better about the meat we eat: all of these documentaries depict the grim reality of food production and consumption in the US, a whole ocean away from us.

Entirely thanks to the EU – the UK has consistently blocked progressive food and animal welfare in farming policies – our food practices are incomparable. In Cowspiracy and What The Health, it's revealed that US commercial animals are largely fed GM corn and soy. Every teaspoonful of milk can legally have two million pus cells in it. The pharmaceutical industry sells 80 percent of all antibiotics made in the US to livestock farms, and it's no coincidence that 23,000 people there die each year from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Big Food spends countless millions lobbying Congress, promoting goods through checkoff programmes and generally manipulating the public into believing that whatever they're selling is healthy and good. The food industry shapes America's diet and health with a much stronger fist than here.

However, all good things must come to an end. We're now at threat of being fed the same bullshit, both figuratively and literally. Post Brexit-vote, the government is faced with restructuring a system of food policy and production that has been the same for the last half century. The UK alone has no food policy. Without the EU framework there, we're lost. As food policy experts said in a paper – A Food Brexit – released this month, "The pace and scale of possible change is unprecedented for an advanced economy, outside of wartime."

The plan? Go to the US for help. We are hankering after a trade deal with America in order to save the economy, to give us food; but generally, the talk has been about tariffs and deals. What seems to have been ignored are "standards".

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With this US deal, we are likely to accept imports that were previously unacceptable under EU law. One US product that Liam Fox, the trade secretary, said wouldn't be ruled out in trade deals is chlorine-washed chicken. Chlorinated chicken – washing chicken bodies with chlorine, allowing farmers to save money they would have spent on keeping the chicken sanitised throughout its life and afterwards – is both an animal welfare issue and a health issue, since unkilled germs mutate and become stronger. We don't allow it in this country because, if nothing else, guidance suggests abattoirs will start to rely on it to make rancid meat look fresher, and food standards would generally worsen. In addition, the door will also be opened to potentially allow meat that was fed with hormones and antibiotics and GM crops into the UK market.

We are being told: what are a few chlorine-dunked chickens in the grand scheme of a fat trade deal!? But no one with any knowledge of the situation is under the impression that this won't be a terrible move, and its knock-on effects vast. And if chlorinated chicken is the one item we know about, who can say what other foul business a US trade deal might introduce?

Just as food experts and many from the British farming industry strongly opposed Brexit, they are cynical about what this deal will mean for the UK.

"My impression is that this drive to 'harmonise' food trading and standards is so that food can be traded more easily. Inevitably there is going to be pressure to harmonise them downwards to the lowest common denominator," Professor Les Firbank, Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at UEA, told VICE. In other words, we're accepting poor standards in a desperate bid to stay on America's good side. In A Food Brexit, the food policy experts stress that "Brexit campaigners did not inform consumers/voters that US agribusiness is salivating at the prospect of selling foods which have weaker standards, nor that foods derived on world markets use standards which are weaker than the EU's and those of the USA."

If the US standards are so low, then the question, surely, is why can't we just trade with the EU? "The good thing about having food from the EU is that there are 40 years of food standards that have been negotiated," Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, explained. "I worry about the disruption of doing crisis-led negotiations to fill the gap of losing 31 percent of our food access with European neighbours. Secondly, I think there's something faintly absurd about sending chicken or beef across the Atlantic, when a) we can produce it ourselves; and b) we can get it at more ecologically friendly and at lower carbon cost from neighbours if we want to. It's absurd."

One of the great not-so-shocking reveals of Cowspiracy is the fact that climate change is being accelerated dramatically by not only the consumption of animal products themselves, but the fact we are flying them halfway across the world before consuming them. That too is being swept under the rug here.

Ironically, although this US trade deal is being made in order to save the dwindling British economy, it could slaughter it. If we're importing cheap, unsatisfactory goods from the US, UK farmers – already struggling – will have to match that. "The price of food could be forced down even further, and a lot of British farmers could go out of business," predicts Professor Firbank. "A trade deal which is designed to improve our trading relationships in the farming sector could actually do the very opposite. It could undermine our own production."

In order to lower our own prices of production, our standards for farming, hygiene and animal welfare are almost certain to drop. "The background to this is that it's very difficult for farmers to make money at the moment, and it has been for a while. They're largely supported by subsidies and there is tremendous competition to keep the price of food low," explains Firbank. "We spend a lot less on our food now than we did 30 years ago. Farmers don't have the profit margins to do things that are nice [for animals] unless there is a clear market benefit in that. If imported food could come in at, say, £1 a kilo, British farmers would have to produce for that same price in order to stay in business, unless they had a special niche, like organic, but they wouldn't all be able to do that."

The answer to this is what Cowspiracy, What The Health and all those other documentaries suggest: a move to more plant-based diets, grown closer to home. "From a food perspective, it's certain that more UK land could and should be used to produce crops for direct human use," A Food Brexit states. "Rather than some 40 percent of grain produced being fed to animals, the UK should begin a transition towards a more ecologically efficient food system, while rebuilding food security and supply."

Professor Lang is unsure if the impact of this will hit the general public immediately, but when it does, it will be catastrophic. The ones to primarily take the health hit will be the British working class, who will be buying and consuming the cheap meat and animal produce. Middle and upper middle classes will continue to eat quality British and organic foods. "Just go and look at the American working class," Lang warns. "They die early, they're fat. We have a national health service already under strain from us Americanising our diets. I'm being very stark – this deal has to be thought through very, very soberly."

Only one in three British citizens currently trust the government to ensure that their food is safe to eat, clearly for good reason. When asked whether he would personally eat chlorine-washed chicken, Liam Fox, the trade secretary, dodged the question. He'd no sooner eat a breast of one than he would a can of Sweet Sue lubed chicken, and yet that prospect – and more – is what he is posing to the rest of us. What we put in our mouths has never been so political.

@hannahrosewens

More on farming and food:

What It's Really Like To Work In an Abattoir

Simon Amstell On His New Vegan Mockumentary, 'Carnage'

What Would Happen If Everyone In the UK Stopped Eating Meat?