I really must disagree with that, though. While a lot of things seem to have worsened, there are a lot of other things that got better by a million times. My favourite proof of how shitty and unsafe it was “back then” is this:
This man made the truth about the food industry in the 19th century public.
An extremely terse summary of what happened:
The food industry was literally poisoning the general public with highly toxic chemicals in their food products, just to save a couple of pennies when selling their products. This guy made this public and proved, that the chemicals in question are indeed highly toxic to the human body.
Companies, as bad as they are today, would never do this in our time, ever. If they would even go into that direction, heads would roll.
Now, we just get ingredients that might possible worsen our health a bit when we consume that particular product incorporating such ingredients over decades or way too much. It’s still not perfect, but way better than it was 120 years ago and still better than 60 years ago or even 40 years ago, when we stay on the topic of industrial food, which is necessary for a growing and already big society.