I am not trying to be snarky but I could see it coming across that way... How have we kept humanity fed for most of human history without the corporations to keep us safe?
Food born illnesses (e.coli, salmonella, norovirus) have ravaged societies for hundreds of years.
only very recently in the west have we been able to say "this food sucks" because of our opinion of the taste, look. It used to be "I will eat this food that sucks" because even though it tasted sour that's all there was.
I balk at people throwing bread in the trash, that was near sacrilegious lol.
Anyway, people lived. There was struggle, yes. Perhaps it was better than the meaningless waste of life millions have today.
An experiment that isn't reasonable: Go to a Gastroenterologist, tell them you regularly or have no issue eating molded food/expired, and see if you carry the same heath insurance provider within a week.
You would balk at the realization that those eating habits you mentioned aren't thought of as "healthy" by those analyzing healthy eating habits and adjusting insurance rates off of it.
For example, as recently as a century or two ago, milk routinely killed people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness
The problems the UK dealt with in the 1800s sound horrifying. https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulterat...
And adulturated food in general was a serious problem in the US, in times still within living memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regula...
In some ways, it still is. A lot of people advocate avoiding processed food entirely, as a way to dodge these sorts of bullets.
You know the "slug in the bottle" case?
Historically, people were not well protected, and traders took advantage of this. We survived because we're tough enough to ride out most food poisoning, but some childhood mortality probably comes down to this, as would some other shorter lifespan on the tables of mortality.
So yes, for most of human history we didn't have either corporations or laws about food hygiene. Except I think you'll find some of the earliest laws are in fact, about food hygene: market regulation was about markets in the literal, tables of goods in the square sense. The right to run a market came with the requirement to run it properly for the common good. Burghers prohibited butchers from dumping waste meat.
If the FDA wants to audit kytch to ensure their software and hardware is compliant, by all means. I am however not going to trust mcdonalds or taylor to do that.
In fact I would argue it is against corporations best interest in ancient time to ensure food safety, because it would increase waste
There's a reason I go to McDonald's more than, say, burger King, KFC, or wendy's for my junk food fix.
https://www.who.int/activities/estimating-the-burden-of-food...