"Bad food" isn't the issue. Lethal food poisoning is the issue - a single instance of contamination can kill a number of people and make a larger number very unwell.
This idea that small businesses are somehow exemplars of food hygiene is nonsense.
Some of the oldest laws made relate to food safety.
The FDA did not exist until the early 20th century and laws relating specifically to food were scant before then. They've been quick to pile them on like crazy since then, but they don't actually have much of an effect when you look at comparative rates. According to the CDC [1], in the US each year 48 million people get sick from bad food, and 3,000 die. Worldwide rates according to the WHO [2] are 600 million ill, and 420k deaths. The US has 4.37% of the world's populations, so our normal expected value would be 26.3 million ill and 18,381 deaths.
So in terms of getting sick from food, we actually score substantially worse than the entire rest of the world. Our death rates are 6x lower than expected which sounds very good, but I think that's unlikely to be attributable to the FDA. Our relatively large rate of foodborn illness is more of an annoyance than anything. But an annoyance for us us is something that kills people in rural areas with less knowledge and less access to resources. In particular the way people die from food poisoning is not some crazy hyper virulent strain of some hyper dangerous ailment or whatever. It's just plain old diarrhea from bad food -- something that's practically unheard of in the developed world. A couple of bottles of gatorade, lots of water, and some pepto turns diarrhea into a mild annoyance for at most a few days for those in developed areas. But for those without access to resources or the knowledge of how dangerous plain old dehydration actually can be, it can kill quite quickly.
And in any case this is primarily going to be people cooking their own food at home and making themselves sick. I'd strongly recommending traveling to the developing world. I certainly never would have taken anything I've said at face value before. But living life in a different way makes you appreciate both the things we do right, and the things we do wrong. And having a million regulations on food for the sake of safety that doesn't even really materialize is something I think we are doing very wrong.
This idea that small businesses are somehow exemplars of food hygiene is nonsense.
Some of the oldest laws made relate to food safety.