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When it comes to commerce secretaries, it seems fair to say that “no news is good news.” By which I mean: If a president’s commerce secretary is constantly named in headlines — in particular, eyebrow-raising headlines — that’s almost never positive for the administration.
President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, is a prime example, as he seems incapable of avoiding controversy and mockery.
He was widely denounced for suggesting recently that only “fraudsters” would worry about missing a Social Security check. And on Wednesday, he gave a bizarre diatribe on Fox News that was intended to tout Trump’s tariffs on nations around the world (which have sent the stock market reeling). Lutnick decried the fact that Europe won’t take imports of certain meats from America, something he chalked up in part to jealousy:
I mean, European Union won’t take chicken from America! They won’t take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak. It’s unbelievable!
As writer Charlie Nash explained in an article for Mediaite, there are some pretty justifiable reasons why European countries have rejected many American meats. He noted the E.U.’s ban on meat from animals treated with hormones and added:
The European Union has also restricted imports of American poultry due to its tendency to be washed with chlorine — a banned practice in both Europe and the U.K. — while in 2016, Sweden asked the E.U. to ban imports of live American lobster due to concerns over them being an invasive species.
So Lutnick seems to think the growth hormones used by some American farmers are making our cows big, strong and desirable, which I suppose may provide a boost of confidence to any cows that happened to have caught his Fox News appearance. But even the American Cancer Society says there isn’t consensus on the human health risks posed by the hormones, noting:
Some early studies found a possible link between blood levels of IGF-1 and the development of prostate, breast, colorectal, and other cancers, but later studies have failed to confirm these reports or have found weaker relationships. While there may be a link between IGF-1 blood levels and cancer, the exact nature of this link remains unclear.
As for chlorinated chicken, it’s widely opposed in the United Kingdom and has remained a worrisome issue among its residents for years, with critics claiming the use of chlorine to wash chickens allows American sellers to, as The New York Times put it, “let hygiene slide during feeding, growing, and slaughtering, and then make up for lapses at the end with a good disinfectant.”
Trump, nonetheless, is trying to make the U.K. accept chlorinated chicken as a condition for tariff relief, but a spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told The Independent on Thursday that the country’s position on the matter is “unchanged.”