> Legal codes requiring certain minimum standards exist for good reasons.

And sometimes for bad reasons. Couple of examples - cooking meat to 160 F / 71 C, Nycity inventing dangers of sous vide. The whole zone thing. Food codes sometimes grossly misinterpret or twist science. Or are made towards large scale operation - you will almost certainly have contamination when cracking 1 000 000 eggs. But with basic chance of even having salmonella in the egg 1/20000 even very sloppily prepared breakfast will be safe.

And there's the nanny state aspects. Hundreds of millions of people in China eat unregulated street food and they aren't amidst an epidemic of food safety deaths. I think Americans overreact and over regulate things that the market should naturally handle. If you don't like a restaurant because of cleanliness issues, don't eat there. This is a problem the free market can solve (and does well, ironically in China of all places.)

I am rather obsessed with food safety in my own kitchen but I don't see that obsession something that ought to make the cooked food business as highly regulated as it is. As with the sous vide example or the ridiculous import ban on certain French cheeses, the government overreach is stifling. For example, a chipped tile in a NYC kitchen could result in a health code violation. Does a chipped tile really pose that much of a food safety risk? Regulation seems to be a mild form of extortion, especially in NYC. You get a C rating but want an A? If you know the right people in NY, that 'problem' can be easily fixed -- irregardless of the actual violations in question! The shakedown aspects of local health departments is astounding.

You must have never had salmonella poisoning. It's extremely unpleasant, and I'd certainly take the trivial extra effort to lower the risk to 0.

The effects of automobile accidents are also extremely unpleasant; how would you rate your willingness to take the extra effort of not traveling to prevent them?

I'm willing to live in a society that mandates annual vehicular safety checks and seatbelts.

A lot of states in the US do not mandate annual vehicular safety checks.

High. Now that I know the statistics I simply don't feel safe in a car, and will take a longer way around / spend more money to take the train instead.