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!
The discussion of all this in "Modernist Cuisine" blames the poor scientific education and politicians caring more about "opinion control" than safety on the other.
In many ways the FDA regulations set an example, in quite a few other places it's got a whole lot of scientifically unsound rules that it passes to Americans as rules or regulations based on scientific facts. Very often the truth is "the studies we have suggest, and many more studies over long periods would be needed to really make this scientific facts but there's no money for this).
The media don't much help, as journalists often don't understand the science either, or don't do their job. With the internet it just reached an insane level of disinformation. Information gets contradicted all the time, which is normal since it's all a process of proving things that's being wrongly presented as "new proven facts". There's tons of examples, like fibers. All that's proven about them is related to intestinal transit. Their other benefits (heart related etc.) have been demonstrated in studies (conducted by an American, in Africa, long ago) the methodology of which is now considered to have been wholly defective, the conclusions premature. But by then the Food industry had ran with the ball and this new "added value" in marketing high fiber products. They don't have much interest in financing scientists to demonstrate the early conclusions were indeed wrong about those benefits.
Another good example is MSG. That's basically a food fright. In its synthetic form it's ingested daily in all of Asia, and in its natural form for over a thousand years. The same "flavor enhancing" elements are found naturally in a lot of food. We don't hear much about chronic headaches crisis in Asia... All it took is one western woman who blamed her chronic headaches and "palpitations" on eating a lot at Chinese restaurants, the media listening to her and it snowballed, with others suddenly complaining about the same side effects, and studies being sponsored.. Studies never managed to prove the link and seriously considered it might have been psychosomatic, or coincidental, or a rare allergy (that it might be caused by the high sodium content and coupled with other products with a diuretic effect (like tea) is another hypothesis) . But the harm was done. It's widely considered proven through N.-Am. and Europe that MSG is very harmful, disgusting "chemical" and Asian restaurants advertise they don't use it (which is often false as it's present in some of the products they use for cooking, without knowing), and for people who have friends of Asian descent, watch them being embarrassed if they offer you food they put MSG in. Then people realized the same elements are found in a seaweed (Kombu) touted all over the place for its health benefits (quite real) and invented the legend the "natural form" has no side effects, only the synthetic one, which twists the results of the extensive Japanese studies about it (the Jap. government recommends using kombu over MSG for the fact kombu traditionally provided a large percentage of the minerals required, some of which are rare in other Japanese products used regularly, beside other proven effects lowering risks of diabetes and coronary diseases that kombu extracts and MSG don't have.). But here MSG is the posterboy for "chemical", horrible food, forcing companies to disguise its presence on labels of western food using it, a whole trend of marketing "no MSG" on labels of western made "Asian" products, and it's now solidly ingrained.
It's nothing new. Humans have fairly shabby instincts when it comes to identifying what's toxic and not and it's never taken long for false beliefs to spread (blaming this and that for what came from drinking bad water, from bad sanitory conditions and what not), and we've long trusted "tradition" and "common knowledge" way too far and still do, blind to the fact the next door neighbor traditionally eats our "poisons" and consider poisonous stuff we commonly eat (there's a ton of funny or baffling examples between the French's and English's beliefs, or even the Catholics and Protestants in either nations in food history - mushrooms for e.g. and a counterpart in the supposed "unwholesome" English cheese), and all the widespread food frights... poisonous tomatoes, demonic potatoes and what not). We haven't changed much, I find, we're just keener to rely on supposed or incomplete science as our triggers for food frights. Americans have grown accustomed to eat overcooked chicken and pork to appease public worries after a few isolated incidents of appalling sanitation.
They also treat people like children, as if we wouldn't understand the real facts and have to be told oversimplified stories. Instead of telling us we need to keep apart meat and veggies on universal principle as we prepare them because there's an actually really small risk the surface of the meat might be minimally contaminated with salmonella that heat will safely destroy but that would harm us from what we'll eat raw, they make it appear that such cross-contamination is universal or automatic or close. If the meat is not contaminated, there will be nothing to cross-contaminate anything. That's not reason not to follow the sanitary princples - the risk is there - but they used inflated risks to have us do that, and of course they won't tell you it's absolutely pointless to disinfect a knife and use a different cutting board to chop a clove of garlic that goes in a dish cooking for two hours if you forgot to do it before cutting raw meat. If people understood better what could be contaminated, and how it spread and how fast, they'd realize for themselves it's not a good idea either to let farm bought eggs in the shell come in contact with any food to be eaten raw, for e.g.
They also don't tell you the risk is actually slightly higher you might get sick from salmonella from eating raw lettuce from a small scale "bio" farm that used a contaminated batch of manure that got in contact with the veggies than from eating chicken raw or beef for which the modern slaughtering sanitation rules are stringent and more heavily controlled, that just discarding the outer leaves reduces the risk, and that buying pre-cut, pre-shred stuff multiply the risks.
