Food today is safer than it has ever been, but reporting is also better than it has ever been. Now every little problem is broadcast across the world before the body is even cold.

One issue that has increased is the scope of food related medical incidents - For instance, spinach has such a high rate of dispersion that the illness occurs in a much wider distribution than it would have 30 years ago. On the up side of things, we have far fewer food-related illness cases these days because the food is safer to begin with.

The composition of food today can be really scary though, with preservatives, additives, and flavorings that are obviously bad ideas - for instance, the use of several types of MSG in a food product.

A little MSG is a good thing, it opens up the taste buds and stimulates the sense of taste, improving food without changing the flavor. A lot of MSG is typically not good, because it IS toxic in high doses and causes the taste buds to become comatose. Some people have problems with it because it is a (very) mild stimulant and vasoconstrictor.

Normally you wouldn't ingest a critical amount of MSG in a meal, because a light sprinkling would be the dosage that would make sense to a consumer using it as a condiment. Now that MSG must be labeled on the food package, companies have found other methods of creating glutimates, the excitotoxins that make MSG what it is. Watch out for those autolyzed and hydrolyzed products in your food - it's possible that you are getting three or four seperate sources of "msg" even if MSG isn't in the product! Poison is in the dose.

Salt and sugar are scary like that too, but most people these days can recognise sugars (sucrose, corn syrup, glucose, sugar, cane juice, fruit juice, etc) and salts (anything with sodium in the name). They become problematic in hidden forms too - the human body can (usually) handle an unlimited amount of salt, you wouldn't want to eat something that was too salty for a person to process. Hide the salt in five or six different forms, and even weak cases of sodium induced hypertension can become dangerous.

Truth be told, I'm much more scared of that stuff than contamination in the supply chain, or even in environmental contamination. A few PCBs probably aren't going to hurt you - hell, they don't even KNOW if they are dangerous - PCBs are assumed to be dangerous because they are molecularly similar to dioxins, and the amount a person gets in his fish annually is as much as 15 times less than one would get from beef. Nobody worries about PCBs in beef, because the lobby makes sure of that. And because the levels are extremely low.

And mercury in fish is bunk science - there is not one shred of credible evidence that mercury contamination in fish is a result of mankind (although honestly some of it most definately is) or that the mercury found in fish is dangerous to man - in fact, the credible studies discount the mercury scare altogether. Not any more dangerous than it was 30 years ago, we just know how to scare you better.

Sorry for the rant, I've been in the food industry since I was 14, so it hits a little close to home. Don't fear the food, fear the companies that are producing the microwave meals that you have for lunch and the cheeseburger you got on the fly from mickey d's - they are the ones producing the scariest, most dangerous food; even if it is prepared correctly it is dangerous.
But hey, that mcgriddle is pretty dang good!