Even cooking the food isn’t enough in many circumstances, because some food poisoning isn’t caused directly by microbes, or is caused by microbes with spores that can survive being cooked. Microbes multiply in the bad food and produce toxins as a byproduct, or they use hardy spores to multiply instead of dividing. Even if you thoroughly cook the food to kill the microbes, that doesn’t eliminate the nasty toxins or spores they left behind.
Botulism is a good example. Botulism is caused by the botulinum bacteria, but the bacteria itself isn’t harmful. It’s only because the bacteria produces a potent neurotoxin that causes paralysis. Cooking food that was infected with botulinum isn’t enough to eliminate the risk of botulism, because heat doesn’t destroy the neurotoxin.
Or hell, there are microbes that can tolerate temperatures that most food safety standards would consider safe. For example, there is a microbe found in starchy foods that causes something called Fried Rice Syndrome. The spores aren’t killed at boiling temperatures, (which is the temperature you cook rice at), so they can multiply even after the rice is fully cooked. It’s called Fried Rice Syndrome because it’s most frequently seen when people order Chinese takeout for dinner, leave it sitting out on the counter, reheat it a day or two later, (thinking that the heat will kill any microbes and make it safe again), and then suddenly their liver is fucking shutting down. Because the spores weren’t killed when the food was cooked, had time to bloom while sitting out on the counter, and have now thoroughly infected the food.
That’s part of what makes food safety standards so important. They aren’t just focused on what is safe after cooking, because they can’t trust that all foods are cooked well enough to be safe.
Exactly this. The entire market is held together by people who are willing to bend over backwards to keep it working. And all it takes is two or three of those to decide “enough is enough” at the same time, and suddenly all of the market’s sins are laid bare. And at that point, the investors panic and everything snowballs.