The reason food safety regulations exist and are much stricter than what you need to apply at home is partly because it affects people at scale, and partly because individuals have no control of it.
So exactly because dining out can be unsafe, food safety should be strictly regulated ("guaranteed").
It seems that the disagreement is mostly how many expectations someone can put into a "guarantee".
> We've accomplished an pretty astonishing modicum of safety and thereby trust in food service.
I completely agree. But I also want to add that it's an unstable equilibrium:
Some years apart you get some scandal where someone kept meat mostly frozen for 30 years.
If that bothers you, you just have to remember the old adage: “if you want something done right, diy.”
Almost every time I've actually gotten sick from food has been eating out. I've also seen some close calls like when my fiancee was served 'rare' pork... Which isn't a culinary thing.
The scare of pork is the risk of trichinella. To such such a degree that some speculate that is why Muslims have codified it as haram.
Trichinella is practically non-existant in domestic pigs in EU due to regulation/industry.
In the US you should take more care. You should however remember that cooking food safely is not a magic temperature but a function of temperature and time. The threshold for pork is then 63C because mostly everything unwanted is dead at that temperature.
But if you keep it at a lower temperature but for a longer time you will have the same effect. An easy way to do this is using "sous vide". Simply put a water bath at a constant temperature. This has the advantage that if you vacuum your meat it can go into the water straight from the freezer without defrosting first. I usually add one hour to the sous vide time to allow for defrosting time.
So I usually sous vide pork chops (from the neck) at 54C for some hours and then pan sear to finish the crust. With quality pork I honestly find this superior to a regular bovine steak!
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html#Safety
On the other hand, like you, essentially every food poisoning I've had was dining out. Suburbs with lax food safety enforcement, city with some of the most rigorous inspection regimes in the country, wherever.
Once my wife & I both got food poisoning ordering completely different food, as though the entire food station was contaminated.
It's not hard at all if you're cooking chicken. All it can take is reusing the cutting board without washing.
If you're careful about it, it's hard. But plenty of people aren't careful. They think the risk is "overblown", they assume salmonella in chicken is as rare as salmonella in eggs.
This makes it pretty easy. And then they think they caught a stomach flu or something.
Who separates meats in their fridge and on their cutting boards, dates the opening times of items, etc? Similarly, a home dishwasher doesn't actually sterilize anything, which is why its safer AFA chemicals. It's just providing the hope that small doses of something you've already interacted with won't cause sickness.
But once you've been sick from some contamination you won't really notice it, but guests might. Some restaurants run the same way as typical homes, and will be universally contaminated and someone who eats out regularly with variety is going to have similar consequences to being a guest in houses all over town..
Don't let the Germans know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett
https://www.seriouseats.com/case-for-raw-rare-pink-pork-food...
Food safety is a matter of both temperature and time (https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-s...), and we’ve all but eradicated trichinosis in commercially available pork.
Like a big pot of soup, some fried meat and whatever side dish like cooked cabbage. The idea is to spend the unpleasant cooking time once, put it all in the fridge then for a few days at least the whole effort is just to retrieve servings and heat them before eating.
Most of the times I finish what I cooked before starting to spoil but even spoiling isn't very sudden. Like I ate 5 days old soup yesterday and tasted a little funny but it was all good, no side effects. There's still a bowl left at the bottom of the pot today and by the time I'm hungry it's too late to start thinking and waiting for alternatives so what the heck. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger I guess. Therefore it happens sometimes that I wakeup at 2 AM with an acute feeling that a bowel evacuation is imminent if you know what I mean :)
Also, it helps a lot to have strict sanitary standards for yourself, like always using a clean, fresh utensil to scoop out your servings. Or if you use the same one, start from the most-recently cooked food and end at the oldest, so you're not potentially introducing bacteria or mold from older stuff into newer stuff.
I eat leftovers sometimes up to maybe 10 days at max, but I am pretty good at avoiding any issues from it.
Nevertheless, for good results it must be done at a low power (I use 440 W in a 1000 W oven) and a long time, e.g. 20 to 25 minutes for chicken, about 30 minutes for turkey and more for pork/beef. For organs, e.g. livers, hearts, gizzards, a somewhat shorter time is enough.
When done for the first time, experiments are needed to determine the optimal power and time, which depend on the type of oven and on the amount and kind of meat. Once determined, the results will always be the same and the meat is very tasty, because it loses nothing, except a part of the water content (roasted meat has typically 2/3 of the weight of raw meat, due to water loss).
The meat should be microwave-roasted after removing the bones, and preferably after being cut in bite-sized pieces, which will avoid too violent steam expulsions if the power level is set too high.
Plus he was twelve, definitely in the age range where such errors are the expected product of experimentation in an unfamiliar world.
Somebody microwaved a whole brisket, and it was surprisingly good.
Where I live, the former is far more trustworthy, with home dining only winning on price and ingredient choice - not safety.
