What it is
Synthetic plastics in food — PVP clarifies beer and wine by stripping tannins; PVA is a plastic-like film coating on supplements and candy.
Why your biology objects
Petroleum-derived synthetic polymers with no ancestral reference whatsoever — quite literally food-grade plastics. The clarifier form is mostly filtered back out, and toxicity is low, but these are textbook industrially novel molecules doing a clarity or coating job food never required.