The US is more obsessed with food safety, but the food is, overall, just as safe (or just as dangerous, if you prefer) as elsewhere. Hard stats are difficult to come by, but Europe had a massive outbreak of E. coli in 2011 which mostly impacted people in Germany, and was variously blamed on an organic bean sprout farm in Germany, on fenugreek imported from Egypt, and on cucumbers imported from Spain. (It was probably the bean sprouts, although the evidence is circumstantial.)

The one exception is eggs. The US obsession with food safety has led to a law requiring eggs to be washed; ironically this removes a protective coating that protects eggs. In non-US countries you are vastly more likely to find a bit of dirt adhering to the shell of the egg, but you're a lot less likely to get salmonella. Whups.

> If there's a problem in your own kitchen

For E. coli, the problem originates on the farm, not the kitchen. The current best guess is that somehow human feces contaminated the manure an organic farm in Lower Saxony was using to grow bean sprouts, and boom, 4000 people sick and 51 dead.

It's not really about restaurant meals, or industrial farms, or globalization; it's about food safety being really hard.

The US is in a weird position. If you look to Western Europe (say, France, Britain, Germany) there's just as much regulation about food safety but a lot of ingredients have a very different production pipeline than in the US. In the US you have a lot of very aggressive processes designed to pump out cheap meat and produce at low cost. Animals are raised in high density feedlots (CAFOs), animals are routinely fed antibiotics to encourage weight gain, a lot of food processing is heavily centralized, etc. This makes the spread of pathogenic bacteria in animals much more prevalent and it raises the impact of even small slip ups in sanitation resulting in contamination. On the farther end of the scale (in places like China) you have essentially corrupt governments where anything goes and you cannot guarantee the safety or authenticity of nearly anything in the food production pipeline.

This problem persists regardless of whether you're talking about restaurant meals or eating at home. There have been numerous food safety related recalls not just of packaged and processed foods (ranging from pre-made meals to peanut butter) but also of produce (ranging from spinach to sprouts to zucchini). The problem is an overly centralized system with many faults in regard to the prevention side of things and an over reliance on chemical cleansers to prevent the spread of pathogens.

In short, in the US we have breeding grounds for these high impact pathogenic bacteria coupled with systems that could hardly be more suited to spreading disease rapidly and broadly while at the same time our protections are not nearly up to the task.

>Maybe the problem with the US is the number of people who buy meals from restaurants, as opposed to cooking at home. If there's a problem in your own kitchen the only people who are going to get sick are members of your family; if there's a problem in a restaurant, or a restaurant chain, you have an outbreak.

The problems come from contaminated ingredients. Modern, industrialized food supply chains are long, whether they terminate in a commercial kitchen or a residential one.

Okay, but wouldn't that be the case in all modern economies?