>"When you do less testing, you're going to find less problems," Custard said. "When you find less problems, you end up with fewer recalls."

This isn't necessarily true though. Issues found by inspection only occasionally lead to recalls. Most of the time, it's minor corrective action (called a noncompliance record) like "An employee wasn't following sanitation rule X, show us that you are properly training your employees to follow sanitation rule X".

This recall is not driven by a food safety concern! It's mildly punitive, and is done to encourage trust. Just like that time costco had to throw away a truck full of butter over a labeling issue, the American food system works very hard to ensure that certain labels on food mean something, so that consumers can make informed decisions in the supermarket and therefore have a semi-functional free market experience.

Recalls happen from positive evidence of a pathogen, from reported illness, or from noncompliant product. If you have no inspections, then companies may normalization of deviance their way to less safe products, which can cause more illness, which would cause more recalls.

Fewer inspections could only lead to fewer recalls if the majority of recalls are labeling issues or otherwise never would have caused illness.