Americans eat about 9bn chickens a year, but not the feet. Southern Chinese, on the other hand, import about 300,000 tonnes each year of the delicacy known to diners as “phoenix claws” and to the industry as “chicken paws”. It’s a match made in free trade heaven.

And yet this perfect trade of paw to claw was only reached this year, thanks to a small item included in the “early harvest” of deals announced by the Trump administration this spring. That’s despite intense negotiations under way since George W Bush was in the White House.

The item is “cooked chicken”, or chicken sold in cans and frozen dinners. And no, it does not mean that Chef Boyardee is about to sell canned chicken feet at ShopRite. Instead, the US poultry industry has succeeded in opening the US market to chicken cooked in China after a long and dramatic saga designed to open the Chinese market to American chicken feet.