You're outright admitting you can't understand the post, or the point of the post, as you want to steadfastly hold to the original premise
If the reply post talked about the petroleum and other natural resources used to extract and transport the sodium hydroxide et al to your home, would that placate you?
This unbounded liability in US law is the cause of a lot of bad things...
> If you or a loved one gets sick after eating at a restaurant, contact OFT Food Safety & Injury Lawyers.
> To successfully sue a restaurant for food poisoning, you must prove that they had a duty, failed to meet that duty with negligent action or inaction. As a result, you became ill, and you suffered financial damages.
https://www.oftlaw.com/blog/can-you-sue-a-restaurant-for-foo...
> If the food is prepared with unclean cooking utensils
https://www.findlaw.com/injury/product-liability/food-poison...
That said, it's a poorly phrased scenario. Anyone can sue for any amount.
Like Jason Scott's talk "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars" - https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.html...
Even having a maximum doesn't mean that someone can't file a suit asking for more.
So, who has won a case similar to what you described, and with a $5 million settlement?
And, why was that gratuitously high?
That's important, because we know there are decades of propaganda for why business owners need protection against excessive lawsuits, where the actual details show it was not excessive, most famously, Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants. That last one shows how the jury awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages, which was reduced to $480,000 by the judge - and was still higher than what Liebeck sued for.
That said, you should also address why there are lawyers with that business model, which might be less common elsewhere.
1) The US system prefers a more caveat emptor approach, where issues are resolved though civil lawsuits (or, alas, binding arbitration) than through government organization which can investigate cases of food poisoning.
2) The US's private health-care system means the poisoned person is by default obligated to pay for care, unless someone else can be forced to pay. If the food poisoning requires hospital care, this can be quite expensive.
3) The US does not have strong job security laws nor a strong social safety net. If someone get food poisoning which keeps them from working for a couple of days, they may easily be fired, and find themself in economically precarious circumstances.
Because the US prefers lawsuits to resolve these things, there are lawyers who specialize in this area.
Change the laws - have strong food inspections, switch to single-payer health care, improve job security, and strengthen the social safety net for unemployed people - and there will be significantly less call for this business model.
Why is that a bad thing?
It sounds like the company doesn't have management in place to tell if an employee is lazy and doing a bad job, nor is willing to pay well enough to hire good employees.
Surely that's not a good thing.
It's turtles all the way down. That's the point.
See, its eco-theatre our generation will be remembered for. Fiddling around with plastic recycle while the planet burns.
[1] Right now, with cheap oil, that is.
It's more sustainable to throw away a plastic spoon that wash it. That's pretty plain - an individual has not optimized their process for cost and resource usage - they're just squirting randomly like 100X the soap it would take in a large industrial washer to get that spoon clean.
Efficiencies of scale are massive and irresistible. You cannot grow vegetables in your back yard at the same level of efficiency that big ag can, not even close.
You can't drive your individual car at anywhere the efficiency of a bus or train - we should all get on board that one, it makes sense to people. While somehow the other efficiencies don't. They just get mad when you point that out.
I think of it as a spaceship. We can argue about how expensive maintenance of the food recyclers, water purifiers and oxygen systems are, but that's really moot: we maintain those things or die.
We'd have to make the decision to stop the oil industry etc. before it matters though. Until then the marginal cost of 1 spoon is vanishing small, and fussing over it is spending time and effort on foolishness.
I'm not sure what planet you live on, but I live on one with a finite amount of oil. It also happens to be a planet with beaches where I've picked up hundreds, if not thousands of these "sustainable" plastic spoons, and forks and knives and bottle caps and bottles, toothbrushes, straws, bags, and one-use containers of all kinds.
So when people talk about it being "sustainable", I admit, I fantasize about dumping a few hundred bags of this junk right on their front lawn and seeing how much they enjoy it.
In contrast, I have not once--not once--picked up a metal spoon off a beach.