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Comment by ralph84 | Hacker News Reader

The country famous for BSE is in a bit of a glass house when it comes to farming practices.

Sure, we're not great. But it blows my mind that you would ever want to _lower_ the quality of the food you are eating.

It wouldn't make sense in a world with infinite and free food, but that is not the world we live in.

Are you implying that the UK won't have enough food to feed itself post-Brexit, to the extent that it would need to import food from the US? I thought that the problem was that the US might insist on relaxing food safety regulations as part of a larger trade deal package. Do correct me if I'm wrong.

The question isn't the quantity of food, but the cost of food. There can be food aplenty, but if poor people need to spend a large amount of their income to acquire it, there will be a benefit to having a wider sourcing of cheaper food.

The UK isn’t suffering from food shortages. Not yet, anyway.

Allocation between rich and poor is an issue, but the net imports and production are enough to cause widespread obesity.

There doesn't need to be a food shortage - the question is what percent of income do the poor spend on food, and would they spend less if they could?

The question should be: would lowering food standards make any difference?

Specifically in this case, in order to do a trade deal with a different continent, so the increased costs of transport are relevant.

I’m also told supermarket prices are very different from wholesale (and therefore import) prices. If so I would therefore expect any cost change to alter profit margins rather than family shopping bills.

Bear in mind that food poisoning isn’t free. It is not in society’s interest to have people off work sick, taking up medical capacity, and dying early. The advances in food safety over the 20th and 21st century was a great social good, and backsliding would be bad.

I do think that one problem, particularly in societies like the US where people don’t go to their GP very frequently, is that it’s pretty hard to measure impacts, because there’s little reliable data on mild (but economically impactful) cases.

Changing the standard won't necessarily impact the quality of the food.

Meanwhile, from last year: Risking food safety, USDA plans to let slaughterhouses self-police

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/461774-riskin...

What's your point?

I was pointing out that it is fallacious to conflate/equate regulatory standards and quality, not arguing that regulatory standards are useless.

I think the difference is that the BSE crisis caused massive regulatory change, with farming, slaughter and rendering practices dramatically changes across a continent. Whereas the US does seem to just have this sort of thing routinely.

Is this sort of "tu quoque" fallacy acceptable on HN? And you're talking about events from two decades ago. What relevance do they have today?

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