If I couldn't grow it or raise it 100 years ago, I don't want to eat it. Open to being convinced otherwise.
"Humans used oil palms as far back as 5,000 years. In the late 1800s, archaeologists discovered a substance that they concluded was originally palm oil in a tomb at Abydos dating back to 3,000 BCE.[4] It is believed that traders brought oil palm to Egypt"
Humans have been barbecuing meat for millennia. Possibly even before Homo Sapiens Sapiens was around. And yet, it has carcinogenic properties, specially if charred.
What's so special about 100 years ago anyway? 1000 might make a difference - but then again, life expectancy wasn't that great back then.
It's only because we are living so much that cancer is such a large problem. Also because, due to modern medicine, we can often diagnose the person before they just get sick and die from 'unknown' reasons.
Your best bet is to eat food from as many different sources as you can and not eat too much of any single specific thing (which is a modern thing btw, 100 years ago, it wouldn't be as easy to do) and let averages do the rest.
You are also skipping out a lot of newer stuff that wasn't possible back then, but after serious study seems safe. Most of what was done 200 years ago is accepted as safe, but there is no actual evidence for it, and in many cases we know it wasn't. (the obvious example of using lead in finishes for food contact items)
In all seriousness, things like pasteurization and refrigeration make our food supply a lot safer than it used to be.
It seems a lot more people today are taking a critical look at what they eat, though often excluding broad categories based on feeling rather than hard science. At first this looks reactionary, but on closer inspection one realizes that the science involved is typically biased or just lacking. We've invested comparatively little into understanding the downsides of modern food products like vegetable oil, but the little windows we have indicate they may be causing whole hosts of human maladies from dementia to type 2 diabetes [1]. Nutrition constitutes the inputs to the complex biological system, and large changes (eg disease) can end up being the result of nonlinear processes started by changing these inputs. Another example is a lack of magnesium in the western diet, through both soil depletion and food processing, leading to large scale deficiencies [2].
What's really dizzying, though, is that this information isn't widely known, and is typically found through either self-directed study or through listening to podcasts. When the average person makes decisions regarding their nutrition, they're relying on outdated and probably harmful advice, despite intending to make "healthy" choices. Maybe we need an app to scan a barcode or read a list of ingredients and respond with the known potential for harm and confidence. All I know is I'll never look at fried chicken the same way again (unless it's fried in lard, of course).
[0] https://livestock.extension.wisc.edu/articles/the-chicken-of... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190303234503id_/http://pdfs.se... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11104-013-1781-2