> they don’t get in trouble for you throwing away good food, but they potentially get in lots of trouble if you eat bad food on their recommendation. Their incentive in that situation is to be almost comically conservative
This seems like a common failure mode of bureaucracies. It reminds me in particular of the FAA's medical division (just because that's one bureaucracy I butt heads with a lot). They'll never get in trouble for saying no; "comically conservative" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Unless you've had personal, repeated experience dealing directly with the FAA on aeromedical matters, I suggest you listen to someone who actually has. I know how to do a risk analysis, and aviation is a much more varied field than just scheduled air carrier operations.
I'm a professional flight instructor. I also sit two desks over from a non-FAA-affiliated flight surgeon at my day job. I watch student pilots go through the medical process all the time. It is infuriating to see the outlandish and expensive hoop-jumping nonsense that these folks get put through. I'm talking thousands of dollars of exams in some very common cases that have absolutely no evidentiary basis for increased risk. And those are the ones that don't just get denied outright, with no avenue for appeal.
On the rare occasion when aeromedical does see the light, it's pulling teeth. It took years for the American Diabetes Association to convince the FAA that they were wrong about diabetes. And when they finally relented, they dragged on their feet on actually issuing the medicals.
The aeromedical division has become so hostile and ossified that Congress has had to tell them to cut it out.
It's a problem. And it's exemplary of what happens when an authority has the kind of incentives under discussion here. They will never get in trouble for saying no, even when saying no flies in the face of all actual evidence.
This seems like a common failure mode of bureaucracies. It reminds me in particular of the FAA's medical division (just because that's one bureaucracy I butt heads with a lot). They'll never get in trouble for saying no; "comically conservative" doesn't even begin to describe it.