It's not lead now, it's other stuff. It's worse now, or soon will be. PFAS alone is an unimagineable nightmare.

They combine industrial waste with sewage and spread it on fields for ffertilizer. They stopped enforcing the runoff laws that prevented algae blooms from like back 50 years back. To say nothing of the extra round-up.

For instance, in the last 30 years, insect populations worldwide are down 90%. That is new, and even though we don't have rivers catching fire at the moment, or lead in the air, it's worse in many ways.

I take your point though, but the progresses made are being reversed as we speak.

I used to think so too but then there was a study that any kind of stress (heating, mechanical, cooling) makes any kind of plastic release microplastics into the food. With heating being the worst, cooling "the best"

Of course I can't find it now, I guess it might have been after the pandemic (meaning - two eternities for the way my memory works, there's no chance I can remember what were the noticeable words in the title). But here's something similar https://pubs.acs.org/esthag/article-abstract/57/26/9782/316425/Assessing-the-Release-of-Microplastics-and