I'm likely to just rinse off an apple or lettuce, which may or may not successfully clean the food.
Unfortunately that's not enough, because cooking temperatures don't always denature the toxins that the bugs produce, which is what the real problems come from.
Isn't the problem that the "bugs" produce the toxins while thriving inside your body? If you kill them through cooking, they won't be producing anything while inside you when dead.
Cooking the rice doesn't kiil the bugs. Not chilling the rice quickly enough allows the bugs to produce toxins. Reheating the rice doesn't destroy the toxin.
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can...
That action may bring it up to a safe temperature. The fact that people die from e. coli poisoning from undercooked meat all the time shows that this is not foolproof.
>I'm likely to just rinse off an apple or lettuce, which may or may not successfully clean the food.
Which is an absolute non-issue if that food hasn't been sprayed with feces in the first place, as the parent poster pointed out. You can't get e. coli from unwashed vegetables unless someone has sprayed animal (including human) feces on it first.
Apples are far less likely to ever carry pathogens because they're harvested from a tree, off the ground and tree farms are not fertilized with feces. And even if they are in proximity you're failing to understand that if a tree has a contaminated water source the entire tree acts as a filter prior to the fruit - a lettuce does not.
Again, misinformation and misunderstanding of the root cause showcase highly in your comment which was my criticism of the original disclosure by the CDC.