[sshine]

Your statement is different in that it contains a "should":

The reason food safety regulations exist and are much stricter than what you need to apply at home is partly because it affects people at scale, and partly because individuals have no control of it.

So exactly because dining out can be unsafe, food safety should be strictly regulated ("guaranteed").

It seems that the disagreement is mostly how many expectations someone can put into a "guarantee".

> We've accomplished an pretty astonishing modicum of safety and thereby trust in food service.

I completely agree. But I also want to add that it's an unstable equilibrium:

Some years apart you get some scandal where someone kept meat mostly frozen for 30 years.

[mckn1ght]

Some people don’t understand that there are the letter and spirit of the law, and then there are the application and enforcement, and there is some flux in the middle of it all. People are imperfect, and people are the ones washing dishes, preparing food, and enforcing the health code. Things slip through the cracks at a nonzero rate.

If that bothers you, you just have to remember the old adage: “if you want something done right, diy.”