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There are many things for Europeans to worry about as they watch the Trump administration blow up the international order. There is the chaos of having international markets careening around the whims of one man. There is the ominous talk from an aggressive superpower lusting over Greenland. There is the catastrophic dismantling of efforts to rally the world to address the climate crisis.

But for certain European countries, Donald Trump poses a threat that taps into a more intimate and sickeningly primal fear: that Americans will force-feed them our disgusting chicken. Specifically, our “chlorine chicken,” Europe’s term for American chemically washed poultry.

“EXCLUSIVE: UK-US Trade Deal: Keep Your Chlorine Chicken America, Britain Must Not Pay This Price,” read one British headline from May. “Don’t Like the Idea of Chlorinated Chicken? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” read another.

The panic over “chlorine chicken” is a noble British tradition that reappears every time the public considers the prospect of deepening its economic entanglement with the U.S. This particular European bogeyman dates back to 2014, when the U.S. and the European Union were negotiating a trans-Atlantic trade agreement. All the European countries shared the U.S. poultry aversion at the time: Germany calls it, we’re happy to report, chlorhühnchen. But the U.K. has more justification for its fears these days, as Brexit left its regulations more open to adjustment.

Now, the nation is in the grip of its latest chicken panic: British media have reported that the Trump administration is once again pressuring the U.K. to concede some of its food standards. In December, the Telegraph reported an alarming story with the headline “White House Demands British Supermarkets Stock Chlorinated Chicken.” According to the report, it all came down to a $40 billion technology agreement the White House had scrapped with the U.K. That failed deal was part of a cluster of agreements between the two nations meant to supplement the larger deal from May, which had excluded some economic sectors. The tech deal would have set terms for the nations’ collaboration over artificial intelligence and quantum computing. But in December, the White House quashed the deal, citing displeasure with the U.K.’s online safety rules, its digital services tax—and, strangely, food safety rules.

As the Telegraph described the negotiations, the U.S. trade envoy had been quite pointed about the food safety matter, particularly as it related to poultry and beef. Even though the deal had nothing to do with food, if the country wanted to revive it—something that promised significant investment from the U.S.—it would need to get over its squeamishness.

The British people don’t care for this. According to the British agricultural press, more than 150,000 Brits have since signed petitions urging their supermarket chains to “publicly rule out chlorinated chicken.” The angst lingers into the new year. It appears that the British public is realizing that fending the chlorine chicken off once doesn’t mean it won’t pop right back up as a matter of debate: As Trump has continued to toy with the global financial order, American unpredictability has changed the nature of this particularly British anxiety. No longer does the poultry panic emerge just for agricultural trade deals; Trump has made “chlorinated chicken” a permanent low-level threat, a dark, feathered cloud hovering over the British Isles. Thanks to Trump’s reputation for capriciousness, the great poultry panic may just be here to stay.

To be clear, “chlorine” is not a fully accurate word to describe American chicken; per the National Chicken Council, less than 5 percent of American chicken is treated with chlorine. Nowadays, the industry uses more effective cleaners, such as peracetic acid, a kind of all-purpose antimicrobial agent used in hospital cleaners, produce washes, and meat processing.

The data remain unclear as to whether the American method is actually that much worse, but the problem is more one of the general imagination: In the British mind, their chickens (and all other livestock) are dutifully cared for in sanitary, healthy conditions from birth to slaughter, keeping them disease-free from the start. Our chickens, on the other hand, are treated abominably, packed in tightly with their germy brethren, raised in squalor, pumped with hormones, and only made clean at the end. It’s a matter of washing off the filth—with unnatural chemicals, at that—versus never picking up the filth in the first place. This picture gives the Brits the heebie-jeebies. It’s not a fully accurate picture, as the British do still have factory farms, but it’s true that their standards for animal welfare are higher and that they don’t use nearly as many antibiotics. And it’s also true that their food safety philosophy about keeping away contamination at all stages is entirely different from the American fix-it-later mentality.

It was this cultural gag reflex that caused the specter of American chicken to become a major point of contention during Brexit, when people became worried the renegotiated trade deals would make their own food-safety attitudes vulnerable to assault from our population’s street-rat standards. Indeed, the U.S. tried: In 2019, BuzzFeed News reported that the first Trump administration was offering to pay up to $92,000 to have British journalists brought in on a tour of U.S. farms, with the goal of addressing “misconceptions” about chlorinated chicken.

The Brits warded off the American chicken then, but only after Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the leader of the Labour Party a “gigantic chlorinated chicken.” Then, as now, everyone across all ideological lines feared the chicken; accusing political opponents of being soft on chlorine chicken is a legitimate attack. When Nigel Farage, a Trump ally, argued that the U.K. should allow chlorinated chicken (the British already ate questionable chicken from Thailand, he argued), it was a minor scandal. In 2023, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak solemnly vowed there would “be no chlorine-washed chicken and no hormone-treated beef on the U.K. market. Not now, not ever.”

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But the Americans have fought for the chicken. Most recently, when the U.S. and U.K. negotiated a new trade deal last spring, the Trump White House did, indeed, try to bully the country into adjusting its food standards. The White House called them “non-science-based standards that severely restrict U.S. exports of safe, high-quality beef and poultry products.” (Headlines: “Trump Tells UK to Buy Their Chlorinated Chicken if They Want Tariff Relief.”) White House adviser Peter Navarro tried to assert that the Brits were missing out on a “very fine American agricultural product,” and “we don’t believe that once they taste American beef and chicken that they would prefer not to have it.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to reassure the public that the government wouldn’t budge on this, and thanks to pressure from constituents, it didn’t.

But this bowel-clenching British fear didn’t simply disappear. Trump has continued to harangue the country about food standards, even after the Brits thought they’d struck a chlorine-free deal less than a year ago. And that’s the bigger problem: Alliances depend on trust, and the U.S. can no longer be trusted to keep its word—even when it comes to not forcing our icky chicken on Europeans.

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