You could make Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" cause a huge scare about the meat packing industry and have people swear off it?
Except it did make a huge scare about meat-packing... and the result was inspections.
If anything, I wonder if having The Jungle fail to make an impact might work better for the goal - that way, you have occasional food poisoning incidents from meat, possibly giving meat an 'unsafe' reputation.
Modelcitizen - technically, it would be the USDA that needs to be abolished for your scenario to work. FDA (despite being the 'food and drug administration') does medicine; USDA does inspections on food.