Comment by tripletao

> As far as I can tell, these claims are made without any actual experiment, and it is simply enough that the environments before and after processing are good for harboring the bug.

Correct--processes are unsafe until proven safe. Would you stand under a bridge designed by an engineer who believed otherwise?

And the effort to prove that a process step actually kills all pathogens (including those that survive at temperatures well above 100 C) across all possible input material is big. So the return on that investment usually isn't there, especially when the safe alternative is trivial--heat gently to infuse, then refrigerate, or acidify or pressure-can for a commercial product.

The principles that you're rejecting are the reason why Americans now rarely suffer from foodborne illnesses that used to be a routine, unpleasant, and occasionally lethal part of life (and still are in many developing countries). As with many public health measures, they seem to be victims of their own success, delivering extraordinary improvements in safety that then deliver public complacency.