Are you nuts? Did you ever buy food in a country without any enforced food standards? Do you know about the state of the food industry, especially meat packing and processing, just before standards were established?
In many other countries food is routinely spoiled or made with stuff that you would never want to know about. No labels, no expiration dates. Whatever the shopkeeper or streetpeddler writes on his sign or tells you is all you know. In some countries, the only place to get untainted food is to grow your own or go to overpriced tourist restaurants.
It's a dilemma for me because I'm for very small government and less corrupt blood-sucking alphabet agencies. You can see it in your example of how certain percentages of garbage are permitted to be pushed on us by arbitrary USDA standards.
However, because of the massive growth of cities and much greater travel, many people cannot rely on growing their own food or knowing the farmer personally to take complete personal responsibility for it. Those people depend on commercial farmers for their survival. The same thing with standards for commercial water: everyone can't have their own well anymore. If you don't mandate any standards for safety and monitoring origins of food, you get many injured and dead people through no choice of their own. A misplaced drop of peanut oil can kill some people. I almost died once by drinking a tainted soda in Ukraine.
I think some kind of standards have to be there unless you consider cities and long-term travel to be bad because you can't take full personal responsibility. That's a whole other debate...
In the past sixty years, we've regulated the heck out of just about every phase of the food stream - from farming to transport to storage and preparation. There are certification courses for food handlers, in person health inspection visits, etc, and yet, with all this regulation, the overall risk has remained unchanged. It's still a one in six chance.
Literally trillions of dollars down the drain for zero net change.
Isn't it a bit insane to continue to try the same methods, year after year after year and end up with the same results, yet somehow expect something different?
I understand what you're saying - if it wasn't for the USDA and their regulations, there would be more risk in the system. The flip side of that is that people would be less trusting of their food, and would treat it differently, and the overall risk wouldn't change, as it hasn't changed, even with all these strict regulations.
Instead, people trust expiration dates even if they see food stored or handled improperly, and not so shockingly, they get sick from it. They see servers and cooks with poor sanitary methods, but there's an inspection sign out front, so it'll be just fine - then they get sick. The regulation has served to only prevent people from exercising their own common sense, and has resulted in the same net effect.