The US has prohibited a number of meat products from the EU for import into the US expressly because many EU slaughterhouses did not meet US standards. As a wel

The US has prohibited a number of meat products from the EU for import into the US expressly because many EU slaughterhouses did not meet US standards. As a well-known example, Iberico ham was banned from the US for decades because Spanish slaughterhouses could not pass certification by US inspectors. Historically the workaround for this was to send animals to countries like Denmark, which had slaughterhouses that could pass US certification but that made everything much more expensive. The US import standards are essentially the same as the domestic standards -- certain kinds of food are very difficult to produce in the US too (in recent decades they've been easing up on that to allow some "traditional" foods). The US definitely has its share of highly-processed and engineered food products of dubious value. On the other side, things like high-quality meat are cheap in the US compared to the EU, so people generally don't bother with oddly processed meat unless you are buying something that is explicitly expected to be highly processed. This is also very regional. The US produces vast amounts of agricultural goods of all types; depending on where you live, the local agricultural goods approximately round to "free" for the average consumer. As cheap as beef is in the US generally, for example, if you travel to where it is produced you can get amazing -- better! -- product for almost no money. Similarly, when my parents lived in Alaska, crab and salmon was essentially free.