Imagined you bought a meal and had to go to the hospital because they cut corners on food safety?
Regulation is a balancing act between compet in forces not just a Boolean good/bad
There's a strange thing about that. I enjoy traveling and living in developing nations. Food safety organizations and inspections are basically nonexistent. And in a decade I've gotten food poisoning exactly once - no hospital visit even then. It's anecdotal, but it's also very typical among other expats. People that make their living selling food generally know how to cook and enjoy it! And they also know full well what happens when they serve bad food. Think about the places you eat at. There's going to be a handful of places you eat at, over and over again. And this is also typical. Serve bad food just once, and a business stands to lose immensely. They're going to not only permanently lose that customer but also deal with all the terrible word of mouth that they will spread.
And in the end the biggest risk of food poisoning is often not from the food itself, but from unclean handling of the food. And all the FDA rules and regulations in the world don't mean a thing when a disinterested minimum wage worker chooses to not wash her hands after a bathroom visit, or just keeps on prepping after sneezing on the produce. The one time I got food poisoning was not from one of the literally thousands of dishes I've ordered from street vendors, but from a western-targeted chain restaurant. Instead of having the business owner being the person prepping the food, it was our low wage disinterested worker -- same story as the times I've gotten food poisoning in the US.
This video [1] just makes our whole system of food safety regulation seem so backwards, at Berkeley no less. Not an appeal to pathos, but an appeal to logos. We're treating people like shit and deterring entrepreneurship for the sake of enforcing these rules and regulations which don't really have such a major benefit as we might believe. It's an undesirable cost:reward ratio.
Instead of theoretical ideas about what would happen to the food industry or your anecdote about being fine when eating food that was unregulated I am going to point you to "Jungle" by Upton Sinclair.
You can't just acknowledge that your evidence is anecdotal and then still use it for the basis of your argument. Your anecdotes are not data and they prove nothing.
I'd agree data is very important. So what data, exactly, is your implied view that the FDA is the primary reason US food is safe to eat, based on? Anecdotal evidence is of limited value, but that value does tend to far exceed blind speculation. Let's say I told you that in some developing nation that 'only' 1 in 6.7 people contract some form of foodborn illness each year. You'd probably laugh at my usage of 'only' there and try to frame that as evidence of the hugely positive role that the FDA has had in the US. The problem there is that that number is actually from the US [1].
The issue with data is that it really just doesn't exist on an international level. Most nations do not provide cleanly comparable numbers. The WHO has collected and presented some data here [2] but it's not even close to an apples to apples comparison. It focus on 'disability adjusted life years' (DALY) as opposed to raw occurrence rates. DALY is a measurement of years of life lost, which means it works as a proxy for healthcare and knowledge of a population. It's also heavily driven by effects on children < 5, who make up 40% of all effects in their data. I am most interested in incidence rates among those with normal and developed immune systems since it does seem to be incredibly comparable and that is where the vast majority of the FDA's effect would lay.
