Surely you could've come up with a better example.
Chalk is just calcium carbonate. Modern medicine uses calcium carbonate to as a calcium supplement.
We are still adding things to milk. Any milk that's "calcium fortified" or "extra calcium", and a lot of nut-milks, have calcium carbonate as an ingredient to this day.
I mean, I get your point...honestly, I do...but it's coming across nearly as the same sort of anti-science drivel you'd expect from the counterargument.
Yeah. I get that...but the way it was phrased by OOP it was as of "chalk" was used by an example as if that makes it somehow worse. We still put "chalk" in milk, though.
Better example is like those people who say "eww" to hotdogs because there's a regulation limiting how many bug parts are allowed in them...not even considering the alternative of "no limit on how many bug parts".
Or my wife, who refuses to eat a cherry tomato if it fell on the ground.
In your examples you know those things are being added to the milk because it's in the ingredients, the case OP mentioned you didn't know. Are you able to see the difference?
And there were many other things added to food besides chalk
Because people are dumb. Chalk is in milk, now, right on the label...even marketed as a feature. I've got two bottles of alt-milk in my fridge now, store-brand Almondmilk and Planet Oat. Both list chalk as the second ingredient.
But if you tell that to any random schmuck they either won't believe you or they'll be disgusted. And then probably keep drinking it anyway.
And that's with the information right there on the label.
I'm not trying to downplay the example, but there were far worse atrocities fixed by regulations.
Plus I can't imagine that a company who is adulterating their milk with chalk dust is going to stop to find and choose a food-safe chalk dust and supplier. They'd just scoop a bunch from whoever's cheapest, and if they adulterate their chalk dust with bleach or something, that'll be going straight into the milk.
we've become complacent for so long due to good regulations keeping us safe invisibly, that your average voter seems to think we never needed them to begin with.