Your chicken is not going to China & back.

You guys, I can’t take it anymore.

I keep seeing these random posts every week on social media about how U.S. chicken is being shipped over to China for processing and then exported back to the U.S. Some posts go so far as to say that companies like Tyson are going to lay off tens of thousands of workers and just process all their chicken in China now. I even saw someone post last week that U.S. chicken companies are shipping chickens to foreign countries in order to inject them with hormones because they can’t use hormones in this country. It was unclear whether that person meant live birds were being sent away for hormone injections (say what??) or if it was the processed meat, but regardless, either scenario is ridiculous.

Here are some truths, courtesy of the National Chicken Council:

• It is true that China is approved to export further processed chicken to the U.S. under very strict conditions – including the product must be fully cooked prior to export, and no chickens raised or slaughtered in China are eligible for export to the U.S. no matter what. (This approval happened only after the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Food Safety and Inspection Service” (or FSIS) announced that the Chinese regulatory agency that oversees cooked poultry meets U.S. standards.)
• This approval process follows years of trade negotiations that have gone back and forth since about 2004, and it appears to be more of a political move in a longstanding chess game than anything else.
• Neither the U.S. – which, by the way, is the largest and most efficient producer of chicken in the world – nor China has any interest in moving forward with any arrangement to be supplied by foreign-approved slaughter plants. Can you imagine the cost to U.S. chicken companies to ship raw poultry all the way to China, process it, and then re-export it back to the U.S.?
• Hormones are illegal to use in the U.S. and have been since the 1950s. Chickens grow at a rapid rate because of advancements in genetics and nutrition – farmers don’t need hormones or steroids, so it’s ridiculous to think chicken would be sent elsewhere to get these treatments. And again, imagine the expense of doing that!

Did you know … 99% of the chicken we all eat here is hatched, raised, and processed in the U.S.  The National Chicken Council, which represents all the major chicken companies, doesn’t expect that to change anytime soon. In other words, Tyson is not laying off tens of thousands of workers and sending all its chicken to China.

I understand that some people may believe giving approval to China like this is a slippery slope – that it may lead to bigger food safety questions down the road. I’ll save that discussion for another blog post; for today, I simply want to dispel the notion that all of our chicken is being sent over to China to be processed and re-exported back to the U.S.

It’s not happening, no matter what you see on the Internet.

More info from the National Chicken Council |  Snopes.com | Tyson Foods