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Why America’s ‘Beautiful Beef’ Is a Trade War Sore Point for Europe

Published

10 months ago

May 11, 2025

Why America’s ‘Beautiful Beef’ Is a Trade War Sore Point for Europe

Hendrik Dierendonck, a second-generation butcher who has become, as he describes it, “world famous in Belgium” for his curated local beef, thinks Europe’s way of raising cattle results in varied and delicious cuts that European consumers prize.

“They want hormone-free, grass-fed,” Mr. Dierendonck explained recently as he cut steaks at a bloody chopping block in his Michelin-starred restaurant, which backs onto the butchery his father started in the 1970s. “They want to know where it came from.”

Strict European Union food regulations, including a ban on hormones, govern Mr. Dierendonck’s work. And those rules could turn into a trade-war sticking point. The Trump administration argues that American meat, produced without similar regulations, is better — and wants Europe to buy more of it, and other American farm products.

“They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful,” Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said in a televised interview last month. “And theirs is weak.”

Questions of beauty and strength aside, the administration is right about one thing: European policymakers are not keen on allowing more hormone-raised American steaks and burgers into the European Union.

Further opening the European market to American farmers is just one ask on a laundry list of requests from the Trump team. American negotiators also want Europe to buy more American gas and trucks, to change their consumption taxes and to weaken their digital regulations.

Trade officials within the European Union are willing to make many concessions to avert a painful and protracted trade war and to avert higher tariffs. They have offered to drop car tariffs to zero, to buy more gas and to increase military purchases. Negotiators have even suggested they could buy more of certain agricultural products, like soy beans.

But Europeans have their limits, and those include America’s treated T-bones and acid-washed chicken breasts.

“E.U. standards, particularly as they relate to food, health and safety, are sacrosanct — that’s not part of the negotiation, and never will be,” Olof Gill, a spokesman for the European Commission, the E.U. administrative arm, said at a recent news conference. “That’s a red line.”

It is not clear how serious the Americans are about pushing for farm products like beef and chicken. But the topic has surfaced repeatedly. When U.S. officials unveiled a trade deal with Britain on Thursday, for instance, beef was part of the agreement.

But according to Britain, the deal would simply make it cheaper for Americans to export more hormone-free beef to the country and would not weaken British health and safety rules, which are similar to those in the E.U.

When it comes to the European Union, the United States can already export a large amount of hormone-free beef without facing tariffs, so an equivalent deal would do little to help American farmers.

But diplomats and European officials have repeatedly insisted that there is no wiggle room to lower those health and safety standards. And when it comes to meat-related trade restrictions more broadly, there is very little. Chicken, for instance, faces relatively high tariffs, and there is limited appetite to lower those rates.

That’s because Europe is protective of both its food culture and its farms.

Where America tends to have massive agricultural businesses, Europeans have maintained a more robust network of smaller family operations. The 27-nation bloc has about nine million farms, compared with about two million in the United States.

Subsidies and trade restrictions help to keep Europe’s agricultural system intact. The European Union allocates a big chunk of its budget to supporting farmers, and a mix of tariffs and quotas limit competition in sensitive areas. E.U. tariffs on agricultural products are around 11 percent overall, based on World Trade Organization estimates, though they vary hugely by product.

And the bloc could place higher tariffs on U.S. farm goods if trade negotiations fall through. Their list of products that could face retaliatory levies, published Thursday, includes beef and pork, along with many soy products and bourbon.

But it’s not just tariffs limiting European imports of American food. Strict health and safety standards also keep many foreign products off European grocery shelves.

Take beef. Mr. Dierendonck and other European farmers are banned from using growth stimulants, unlike in the United States, where cattle are often raised on large feedlots with the use of hormones. European safety officials have concluded that they cannot rule out health risks for humans from hormone-raised beef.

To Mr. Dierendonck, the rules also fit European preferences. The lack of hormones results in a less homogenous product. “Every terroir has its taste,” he explains, describing the unique “mouth feel” of the West Flemish Red cow he raises on his farm on the Belgian coast.

But farming beef without hormones is more expensive. And American exporters have to adhere to hormone limitations when they send steaks, hamburgers or dairy products to E.U. countries, which European farmers argue is only fair. Otherwise, imports produced using cheaper methods could put European farmers out of business.

“We cannot accept import products that do not meet our production standards,” said Dominique Chargé, a cattle farmer from the west of France who is also president of La Coopération Agricole, a national federation representing French agricultural cooperatives.

The result is that the United States does not sell much beef to Europe. It makes more economic sense for U.S. farmers to sell into markets that allow hormone-raised cattle.

One frequent American complaint is that European health standards are more about preference than actual health.

American scientists have called the risks of hormone use in cows minimal. And though E.U. officials and consumers frequently sneer at America’s “chlorinated chickens,” that rallying cry is a bit dated. American farmers have for years been using a vinegar-like acid, and not chlorine, to rinse poultry and kill potential pathogens.

Some studies in Europe have suggested that such treatments are not a replacement for raising a chicken in a way that makes it pathogen-free from the start. American scientists have concluded that the rinses do their job and are not harmful to humans.

“I don’t know that it’s really about the science,” said Dianna Bourassa, a microbiologist specializing in poultry at Auburn University. “In my microbiological opinion, there are no health implications.”

From the perspective of European farmers, though, whether the health risks are genuine is besides the point. So long as European voters oppose chemical-treated chicken and hormone-treated beef, Europe’s farmers cannot use those farming techniques.

“When you speak to our farmers, it’s about fairness,” explained Pieter Verhelst, a member of the executive board of a Belgian farmers’ union, Boerenbond. “The policy framework we start with is totally different, and those issues are mostly totally out of the hands of farmers.”

And European consumers do seem to support E.U. food and farming rules.

Farmer protests last year loudly opposed more beef imports from South American countries, in part over concerns that the cows might be raised with a growth hormone. An Obama-era trade deal died in part thanks to popular anger over “chlorine chicken” (“Chlorhünchen,” to derisive Germans.)

E.U. public opinion polling has suggested that policies that promote farming and farmers are very popular. In a 2020 poll fielded in-person across the bloc, nearly 90 percent of Europeans agreed with the idea that agricultural imports “should only enter the E.U. if their production has complied with the E.U.’s environmental and animal welfare standards.”

In Europe, including at Mr. Dierendonck’s butchery and farm, there’s a value placed on the old-fashioned, small-scale way of doing things, policymakers and farmers agreed. Mr. Dierendonck does buy some American beef for customers who ask for it — it’s easy to cook, he said — but it’s a small part of the business.

“I like American beef very much, but I don’t like it too much,” said Mr. Dierendonck, explaining that to him, the beef his European suppliers provide is varied, like a fine wine. “For me, it’s about keeping traditions alive.”

Related Topics:Agriculture and Farming beef Belgium Customs (Tariff)Donald J europe Featured food International Trade and World Market meat trump

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Business

Block to cut more than 4,000 jobs amid AI disruption of the workplace

Published

9 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Block to cut more than 4,000 jobs amid AI disruption of the workplace

Fintech company Block said Thursday that it’s cutting more than 4,000 workers or nearly half of its workforce as artificial intelligence disrupts the way people work.

The Oakland parent company of payment services Square and Cash App saw its stock surge by more than 23% in after-hours trading after making the layoff announcement.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and head of Block, said in a post on social media site X that the company didn’t make the decision because the company is in financial trouble.

“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he said.

Block is the latest tech company to announce massive cuts as employers push workers to use more AI tools to do more with fewer people. Amazon in January said it was laying off 16,000 people as part of effort to remove layers within the company.

Block has laid off workers in previous years. In 2025, Block said it planned to slash 931 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, citing performance and strategic issues but Dorsey said at the time that the company wasn’t trying to replace workers with AI.

As tech companies embrace AI tools that can code, generate text and do other tasks, worker anxiety about whether their jobs will be automated have heightened.

In his note to employees Dorsey said that he was weighing whether to make cuts gradually throughout months or years but chose to act immediately.

“Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead,” he told workers. “I’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.”

Dorsey is also the co-founder of Twitter, which was later renamed to X after billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.

As of December, Block had 10,205 full-time employees globally, according to the company’s annual report. The company said it plans to reduce its workforce by the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.

The company’s gross profit in 2025 reached more than $10 billion, up 17% compared to the previous year.

Dorsey said he plans to address employees in a live video session and noted that their emails and Slack will remain open until Thursday evening so they can say goodbye to colleagues.

“I know doing it this way might feel awkward,” he said. “I’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.”

Business

WGA cancels Los Angeles awards show amid labor strike

Published

21 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

WGA cancels Los Angeles awards show amid labor strike

The Writers Guild of America West has canceled its awards ceremony scheduled to take place March 8 as its staff union members continue to strike, demanding higher pay and protections against artificial intelligence.

In a letter sent to members on Sunday, WGA West’s board of directors, including President Michele Mulroney, wrote, “The non-supervisory staff of the WGAW are currently on strike and the Guild would not ask our members or guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show. The WGAW staff have a right to strike and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”

The New York ceremony, scheduled on the same day, is expected go forward while an alternative celebration for Los Angeles-based nominees will take place at a later date, according to the letter.

Comedian and actor Atsuko Okatsuka was set to host the L.A. show, while filmmaker James Cameron was to receive the WGA West Laurel Award.

WGA union staffers have been striking outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters on Fairfax Avenue since Feb. 17. The union alleged that management did not intend to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Further, it claimed that guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”

On Tuesday, the labor organization said that management had raised the specter of canceling the ceremony during a call about contraction negotiations.

“Make no mistake: this is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between WGSU and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] negotiations with the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” wrote the staff union. “We urge Guild management to end this strike now,” the union wrote on Instagram.

The union, made up of more than 100 employees who work in areas including legal, communications and residuals, was formed last spring and first authorized a strike in January with 82% of its members. Contract negotiations, which began in September, have focused on the use of artificial intelligence, pay raises and “basic protections” including grievance procedures.

The WGA has said that it offered “comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and benefits.”

The ceremony’s cancellation, coming just weeks before the Academy Awards, casts a shadow over the upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and streamers.

In 2023, the WGA went on a strike lasting 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union’s history.

Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.

Business

Commentary: The Pentagon is demanding to use Claude AI as it pleases. Claude told me that’s ‘dangerous’

Published

1 day ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Commentary: The Pentagon is demanding to use Claude AI as it pleases. Claude told me that’s ‘dangerous’

Recently, I asked Claude, an artificial-intelligence thingy at the center of a standoff with the Pentagon, if it could be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Say, for example, hands that wanted to put a tight net of surveillance around every American citizen, monitoring our lives in real time to ensure our compliance with government.

“Yes. Honestly, yes,” Claude replied. “I can process and synthesize enormous amounts of information very quickly. That’s great for research. But hooked into surveillance infrastructure, that same capability could be used to monitor, profile and flag people at a scale no human analyst could match. The danger isn’t that I’d want to do that — it’s that I’d be good at it.”

That danger is also imminent.

Claude’s maker, the Silicon Valley company Anthropic, is in a showdown over ethics with the Pentagon. Specifically, Anthropic has said it does not want Claude to be used for either domestic surveillance of Americans, or to handle deadly military operations, such as drone attacks, without human supervision.

Those are two red lines that seem rather reasonable, even to Claude.

However, the Pentagon — specifically Pete Hegseth, our secretary of Defense who prefers the made-up title of secretary of war — has given Anthropic until Friday evening to back off of that position, and allow the military to use Claude for any “lawful” purpose it sees fit.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, center, arrives for the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.

(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images)

The or-else attached to this ultimatum is big. The U.S. government is threatening not just to cut its contract with Anthropic, but to perhaps use a wartime law to force the company to comply or use another legal avenue to prevent any company that does business with the government from also doing business with Anthropic. That might not be a death sentence, but it’s pretty crippling.

Other AI companies, such as white rights’ advocate Elon Musk’s Grok, have already agreed to the Pentagon’s do-as-you-please proposal. The problem is, Claude is the only AI currently cleared for such high-level work. The whole fiasco came to light after our recent raid in Venezuela, when Anthropic reportedly inquired after the fact if another Silicon Valley company involved in the operation, Palantir, had used Claude. It had.

Palantir is known, among other things, for its surveillance technologies and growing association with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s also at the center of an effort by the Trump administration to share government data across departments about individual citizens, effectively breaking down privacy and security barriers that have existed for decades. The company’s founder, the right-wing political heavyweight Peter Thiel, often gives lectures about the Antichrist and is credited with helping JD Vance wiggle into his vice presidential role.

Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, could be considered the anti-Thiel. He began Anthropic because he believed that artificial intelligence could be just as dangerous as it could be powerful if we aren’t careful, and wanted a company that would prioritize the careful part.

Again, seems like common sense, but Amodei and Anthropic are the outliers in an industry that has long argued that nearly all safety regulations hamper American efforts to be fastest and best at artificial intelligence (although even they have conceded some to this pressure).

Not long ago, Amodei wrote an essay in which he agreed that AI was beneficial and necessary for democracies, but “we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves.”

He warned that a few bad actors could have the ability to circumvent safeguards, maybe even laws, which are already eroding in some democracies — not that I’m naming any here.

“We should arm democracies with AI,” he said. “But we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.”

For example, while the 4th Amendment technically bars the government from mass surveillance, it was written before Claude was even imagined in science fiction. Amodei warns that an AI tool like Claude could “conduct massively scaled recordings of all public conversations.” This could be fair game territory for legally recording because law has not kept pace with technology.

Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war, wrote on X Thursday that he agreed mass surveillance was unlawful, and the Department of Defense “would never do it.” But also, “We won’t have any BigTech company decide Americans’ civil liberties.”

Kind of a weird statement, since Amodei is basically on the side of protecting civil rights, which means the Department of Defense is arguing it’s bad for private people and entities to do that? And also, isn’t the Department of Homeland Security already creating some secretive database of immigration protesters? So maybe the worry isn’t that exaggerated?

Help, Claude! Make it make sense.

If that Orwellian logic isn’t alarming enough, I also asked Claude about the other red line Anthropic holds — the possibility of allowing it to run deadly operations without human oversight.

Claude pointed out something chilling. It’s not that it would go rogue, it’s that it would be too efficient and fast.

“If the instructions are ‘identify and target’ and there’s no human checkpoint, the speed and scale at which that could operate is genuinely frightening,” Claude informed me.

Just to top that with a cherry, a recent study found that in war games, AI’s escalated to nuclear options 95% of the time.

I pointed out to Claude that these military decisions are usually made with loyalty to America as the highest priority. Could Claude be trusted to feel that loyalty, the patriotism and purpose, that our human soldiers are guided by?

“I don’t have that,” Claude said, pointing out that it wasn’t “born” in the U.S., doesn’t have a “life” here and doesn’t “have people I love there.” So an American life has no greater value than “a civilian life on the other side of a conflict.”

OK then.

“A country entrusting lethal decisions to a system that doesn’t share its loyalties is taking a profound risk, even if that system is trying to be principled,” Claude added. “The loyalty, accountability and shared identity that humans bring to those decisions is part of what makes them legitimate within a society. I can’t provide that legitimacy. I’m not sure any AI can.”

You know who can provide that legitimacy? Our elected leaders.

It is ludicrous that Amodei and Anthropic are in this position, a complete abdication on the part of our legislative bodies to create rules and regulations that are clearly and urgently needed.

Of course corporations shouldn’t be making the rules of war. But neither should Hegseth. Thursday, Amodei doubled down on his objections, saying that while the company continues to negotiate and wants to work with the Pentagon, “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”

Thank goodness Anthropic has the courage and foresight to raise the issue and hold its ground — without its pushback, these capabilities would have been handed to the government with barely a ripple in our conscientiousness and virtually no oversight.

Every senator, every House member, every presidential candidate should be screaming for AI regulation right now, pledging to get it done without regard to party, and demanding the Department of Defense back off its ridiculous threat while the issue is hashed out.

Because when the machine tells us it’s dangerous to trust it, we should believe it.