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.