Quote:
Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate
If it is a matter of people cooking the meat wrong, then why have the recall at all? Just tell people what the proper way to prepare their meat is and avoid the costly recall.
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Politics, Public Perception and Risk.
If a politician does nothing and one child dies they will never get re-elected so they push for a recall.
A Majority of the public will not think rationally about the risk and therefore refuse to buy the tainted meat and in future refuse to buy from that company. The public is really poor about risk assessment as each year only a handful of people contract or die from ecoli and around 2000 die in car accididents but which risk are people more concerned about. So you have to do the recall because people panic
And finally risk. Cost of the recall vs paying out lawsuits when people get sick. Even if you publicized the outbreak and told people to cook meat properly you would always have a small percentage of outbreaks. Cross contamination from knives, cutting boards, dish clothes, countertops etc would lead to some infections so the simple assessment would be Cost of Lawsuit x number of deaths + cost of damge to reputation = x. If x is greather than the cost of a recall you do the recall.