Is beet juice magically safer in cured meat just because the nitrate comes from beets instead of from chemistry?
Without additives, your bread is hard and stale 24 hours from now. Are you willing and able to go buy bread every single day?
The base problem is, as with so many bad modern things, monopoly. There is no alternative I can choose. Without external forces, the system will converge to a single, optimized, industrial scale supplier who will converge to lots of additives.
If you don't want that, you have to break monopolies. And you probably have to be very aggressive doing so.
I don't see how a monopoly or not changes this much if the additive makes the product more profitable and people aren't generally aware of its existence or potential harm. Why is manipulating a rube goldberg machine of market economics - that will, by definition, still lead to a significant number of people consuming a harmful substance if it even 'works' at all - better than simply banning additives outright?
> I don't see how a monopoly or not changes this much if the additive makes the product more profitable
If there is robust competition, I can vote with my wallet. At that point, compromising quality for a fraction of a penny isn't worthwhile to a smaller manufacturer.
I would very much like to buy France-level bread every day in the US. I, however, cannot because that tiny producer cannot compete with the monopolies--they can't get volume discounts; they can't automate with industrial processes to the same degree; they have to have retail space; they can't get into supermarkets (which are also monopolies), etc.
The US used to have very nice, local bakeries. They have been all wiped out by consolidation.
Without additives, your bread is hard and stale 24 hours from now. Are you willing and able to go buy bread every single day?
The base problem is, as with so many bad modern things, monopoly. There is no alternative I can choose. Without external forces, the system will converge to a single, optimized, industrial scale supplier who will converge to lots of additives.
If you don't want that, you have to break monopolies. And you probably have to be very aggressive doing so.