Vegetables have had a lot of foodborne outbreak scandals, but two times since the 1980s they have also impacted meat in a big way.
Mad Cow disease in 1986 and Listeria in 2019 killed people. Mad Cow disease was due to poor quality control and a lack of coherent meat-chain understanding - the annual Burns Supper is coming up but you still can't buy haggis from Scotland - while more recent Listeria was just sloppy controls. Those can happen anywhere in the food chain but there may be ways to reduce the risk without making the perfect the enemy of the good.
A farm may tout it uses no antibiotics, for example, but if that were true not only would they be at serious financial risk, they could also be a key source of diseases resulting from food. Slaughterhouses, refrigeration, shipping, storage, packaging, all could impact food safety, but not all problems are the same risk.
Dr Bojan Blagojevic of RIBMINS COST Action notes that Scandinavia and the Netherlands have the best meat safety in Europe because they look at relative risk (tackle the big issues) rather than the absolute risk (any trace of any chemical) that American activist groups promote. If there are 1,000 possible problems but 10 cause 90% of the illness, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good and dilute efforts across all 1,000.
Common sense tells you if you try to control everything you can really control very little and yet zero risk is now common in America, in everything from NASA to drug regulations. It has made no one safer to double the cost of getting a drug to market - no one is safer because FDA has doubled the bureaucracy and cost of medicine approval, it just blocks out competitors of Big Pharma.
The EU's COST Action program sounds great, except most meat issues will still occur due to storage and preparation in the home - and yet companies will take the blame. The EU hasn't shown much interest in streamlining the political part.
