It's fascinating watching someone whose world-view is dominated by a specialized discipline try to come to terms with how most other people see things. It'd be even more interesting if they ever got it right. Of course, since they're determined to see anyone who thinks differently from them as ignorant fools, they're bound to mess it up.

For most people "chemical" doesn't mean "toxic," it means "synthetic chemical." And the reason most people are suspicious of synthetic chemicals isn't because they regard "nature as good" and "artifact as evil," it's because they recognize that we have millennia's worth of shared experience which tells us how to cope with the things already found in nature, but we have very little experience telling us how to cope with something someone just cooked up in the lab.

It's really pretty simple to understand, and it's not as ignorant or foolish as chemists would like to believe.