To drive home those fears, she regularly compared the danger of industrial chemicals to the risks of radiation.
The film takes its title from Frank Capra and its starting point is President Eisenhower's prescient warning when he left office in 1961 about the "military-industrial complex" and the danger of it turning into a "permanent defence industry of vast proportions".
The dangers of industrial espionage, however, are minimal, and far outweighed by the public safety benefit of inspections.
More than its predecessor, "Reloaded" is about the virtues of the industrial world versus the dangers of new technology: old-fashioned phones with rotary dials still figure in this world.
Many of its underlying ideas first came together in 1962, when Rachel Carson published the groundbreaking book Silent Spring, highlighting the dangers of industrial malpractice and emphasising the inherent fragility of the natural world.
The dangers of industrial city life lurked here as in any other city of the time.
By the late 1970s, counterculture food gurus saw part of their dreams fulfilled: more Americans knew about the dangers of industrial eating than at any other time in the past century.
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, counterculture food rebels believed that if people only knew about the dangers of industrial food and the goodness of healthy eating, they would change their diets.
The tragedy seemed to reawaken in President Obama a determination to improve safety and security at America's industrial chemical facilities, whose dangers, from catastrophic accident or terrorist attack, led him, as a Senator, to call them "stationary weapons of mass destruction spread all across the country".
Designed by Renzo Piano, the new Whitney Museum of American Art stands in an area that used to be synonymous with sleaze, danger and the industrial butchers that gave the area its name.
