I think there are some misconceptions about food borne illness out there. While it's true that bad practices can lead to outbreaks, you can no more assume a return trip will make you sick than you could expect better odds in the Lotto by buying your ticket where the last winner bought his. Most of the large chains have pretty decent food safety standards, and a great many have HACCP systems in place. While a system is only as good as the employees, the bulk of the outbreaks I've heard of recently were traced to vendors that supplied the restaurants.
Think about it- peanut butter contaminated with Salmonella. Lettuce tainted with E-Coli. Mellons are often similarly tainted. You can blame the restaurant, but since there are far fewer bulk purveyors than restaurants, in many cases their number just came up. For instance, Taco Johns had a bunch of customers fall ill from lettuce in their tacos, but the contamination originated in the product well before it was purchased by TJ's. You could just as easily have eaten that lettuce at another restaurant or bought it at the grocery store.
Furthermore, statistics show that about 90% of foodborne illness originates at your home! Consider this: Are you Serve-Safe certified? Have you implemented a HACCP system? Is everything in your refridgerator labels and dated? How old is too old? Is there a thermometer in your fridge? Do you use a thermometer to verify that the food you cook or reheat is brought up to a safe temp fast enough to minimize time spend in the Temp Danger Zone? Do you
sanitize all work surfaces and scrupulously avoid cross-contamination? Yeah, that's what I thought!
People just assume their own food is fine and their $hit doesn't stink.
So when they get sick they mentally go over all the restaurant food they've eaten recently- no matter than a great percentage of the common illnesses have incubation periods from 8 hours to several days. No, it must have been the burrito you ate ten minutes ago that gave you E-Coli, even though that's physically impossible.
The last thing I would want to do would be to stick up for shoddy food safety in the industry. But more and more I see problems originating well ahead of this point with the vendor, or more disturbingly, with the growers. The infamous Spinach Debacle this summer was caused by fecal matter in the water contaminating plants in the field. Aside from cooking it, which really doesn't do much for the texture of your salad, the only thing you can do is wash it. If I took a dump on your salad, would you consider washing it enough?
