If you’ve ever fallen ill with a case of food poisoning, Big Food would like you to know that it’s probably your fault.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued new safety compliance guidelines for the poultry industry. They’re notable for several reasons: they drastically reduce the allowable levels of salmonella present and, for the first time, they address the issue of campylobacter, the second leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States after salmonella.

Current standards, for example, allow for up to 20 percent of poultry carcasses to carry salmonella. If adopted, the new guidelines — they’re in the public comment phase right now — will reduce that figure to 7.5 percent, or no more than 5 positive sample tests out of 51.

Want to hear some more encouraging news? The country’s poultry producers are, for the most part, beating those standards by coming in with an average contamination rate of 7.1 percent — according to the industry’s leading trade and advocacy group, at any rate.

Organizations such as the National Chicken Council and the American Meat Institute are adamant that little more can be done to reduce the levels of pathogen infection in animals because bugs such as salmonella and E. coli 0157:H7 are “naturally occurring.” When they suggest it’s up to consumers to reduce the risk of becoming ill by avoiding cross-contamination or cooking to specific temperatures, they’re performing a very delicate balancing act.

Yes, one should avoid cross-contamination of raw meats with other foods, particularly those that are meant to be served raw or are cooked already, but they’re deftly avoiding the deeper issue. Cross-contamination and lower cooking temperatures wouldn’t be such issues if the foods we were buying weren’t so contaminated already. The chances of pathogen-free food becoming contaminated in consumers’ kitchens, assuming consumers follow basic hygiene rules, are virtually nil. Chicken and ground beef don’t have to be crapshoots.

Last year, Consumers Union published its now-notorious study of contamination levels in commercially produced poultry carcasses. What they found was as startling as it was encouraging. While most of the conventionally produced poultry sold in the United States was infected with salmonella, one large-scale producer — Perdue — managed significantly lower levels of contamination than competitors Tyson and Foster Farms. And several organic producers were selling chickens free of both salmonella and campylobacter.

In other words, it is possible to raise chicken free of these pathogens.