The way food manufacturing works these days — with multiple ingredients coming from multiple sources and processors such that the company producing the final product might not know where all the ingredients in a product came from — makes it difficult both to ensure food safety and to track the source of any pathogens that are found.

As more outbreaks are happening more often and on a larger scale, some big food companies and industry groups like the Grocery Manufacturers Association are becoming more receptive to the idea of better tracking policies, such as a “passport” system for ingredients that would show where they had been during each step of the manufacturing process.

In the meantime the federal government has asked companies to provide customers with more detailed food safety instructions. But these notes are sometimes difficult to read and follow and in some cases wouldn’t ensure safety, anyway. Hungry-Man pot pies suggest cooking to a temperature 11 degrees below what’s considered safe for killing pathogens (the company says it was using an old industry standard that will be corrected).

But even when consumers want to do things right, it isn’t always easy. Trying to get a Banquet pot pie to 165 degrees proved impossible, with some parts registering at 140 while the crust was beginning to burn. After 18 minutes in an oven the pudding in a kids’ meal was still only 142 degrees.

And some food safety experts say it’s not fair to put the responsibility for food safety onto the customer at all, given that many are confused about the level of cooking meals need and don’t have the equipment needed to test the internal temperature of a meal.