That sounds like a belief. Laws are obviously incomplete, circumvented and broken all the time. There is no substitute for common sense when it comes to not getting food poisoning. Some data:
There is the show "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern" in which he ate weird stuff around the globe. He mentioned across several interviews that he never got sick on one of his trips by mostly just staying away from stuff like known bad tap water.
At the same time he had gotten food poisoning 4 times in the last decade in the US. Including
>Worst case was in Portland, Maine eating mussels at a crappy restaurant that I shouldn't have been eating in in the first place. On the road, in the third and fourth world I have not gotten sick.
If i recall his rule of thumb is that if the local grandmas eat there and they dont use stuff you have to be exposed to for a while to tolerate it (rotten food / tap water in India) you are good to go.
> Laws are obviously incomplete, circumvented and broken all the time.
If they were, we'd have rates of food poisoning close to Nepal's. But we don't. Obviously laws have to be enforced, with checks and all, but they largely work.
Same for tap water: when it's handled following expert-based rules, you don't need to stay away from it. Sure, some can build resistance by repeated exposure, but not everyone; and anyway we don't need to, if we employ the scientific knowledge we built over centuries. It's like saying that births will happen even without expert assistance: sure, but chances that stuff will go horribly wrong are dramatically higher.
"They largely work" doesnt run counter to my argument. I am saying there is no way around common sense to prevent food poisoning in an individual. Being able to lower the overall risk doesnt change that.
You can get food poisoning in the first world by over relying on regulation when you should have known better and you can avoid getting food poisoning in the third world by applying common sense. As long as you can afford to which most people there cant. If tainted water is all you got, you will get sick.
We are making different types of arguments, being able to lower the overall risk doesnt mean common sense / "rule of look" is worthless. Nor does it become worthless in an unregulated environment.
