All of what you said pretty much sums up my views on the whole "food is so gross issue" and when it comes to the additives and "horrifying" chemicals being used, I try to be a little more informed about the amounts and effects before I wet myself in a panic. Lots of(maybe even most) substances are harmless or even beneficial in small doses but lethally poisonous in large, yet the public mentality seems to be that if it can have deleterious effects in large doses, than ANY amount is bad, and zero is the only acceptable quantity. So we get Bill Clinton lowering the federal standard of acceptable quantity of some substance or other (arsenic, I believe, but I don't remember for certain) in drinking water to an unattainable low as one of his last-days-in-office actions, forcing Bush to return it to the old amount upon taking office, because the alternative would be to suddenly render all drinking water in the country unsafe, and take a beating in the press and from watchdog groups for lowering health standards. Because we have a black and white perspective on these things, and think that if it's harmful in some way, it can never be acceptable, and thus only zero tolerance can be safe.

We have a borderline-luddite attitude toward radiation as well, for the same reason, when the lowest birth defect rates in Japan following WW2 were the areas closest to Hiroshima & Nagasakai!