One of the dumbest food safety quotes ever, but characteristic of food safety failures.

Or any failure within an organization.

Those who study engineering failures – like the BP oil well in the Gulf, the space shuttle Challenger, Bhopal – say the same thing: human behavior can mess things up.

In most cases, an attitude prevails that is, “things didn’t go bad yesterday, so the chances are things won’t go bad today.”

And those in charge begin to ignore the safety systems.

Listeria counts go up in a processing plant, no worries, we’ll get to it tomorrow.

News out of Japan on food safety outbreaks is often difficult to come by because of a prevailing culture of patriotism. But some gems do leak out.

Daily Yomiuri Online reported yesterday the operator of a yakiniku barbecue restaurant chain linked to four deaths and 70 illnesses from E. coli O111 in raw beef admitted it had not tested raw meat served at its outlets for bacteria, as required by the health ministry, since 2009.

Yasuhiro Kanzaka, president of Foods Forus Co., which runs the Yakiniku-zakaya Ebisu chain, said during a press conference Monday at the firm’s headquarters in Kanazawa, "We’re not strict enough [about food safety]."

The company said it had not conducted such tests at any of its outlets since July 2009. "We’d never had a positive result [from a bacteria test], not once. So we assumed our meat would always be bacteria-free," Kanzaka said.

Kanzaka said no restaurant would be able to satisfy the ministry’s current standard for uncooked beef.

"The government should make it actually illegal to serve raw meat that doesn’t meet the standards as yukhoe or in other dishes," he said.

I have no idea what the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry testing requirements are for restaurants serving raw meat, but I do know restaurants can’t test their way to safe food.

This is how four people die and 70 are sickened by E. coli O111.