Sous vide is a fancy shmancy cooking method but it can make some damn good moist white-meat chicken.
I'm pretty sure it's healthier to eat McDonald's than it is to eat food that was heated in plastic. I won't even eat cold food from plastic. No way in hell am I touching shit that was heated in plastic.
I think you can also produce good results using a pressure cooker (insta-pots and their clones are just fancy pressure cookers).
How do you do it without water, though? Boiling meat ruins it.
The temperatures involved in sous vide, typically not going higher than 145F, aren't enough to denature the plastic and release carcinogens. And that may seem like a really low temperature to cook meat at, but that's what you'd be aiming for in the middle of the cut if you used a meat thermometer.
As for pressure cooking, note that the point is to raise the boiling point of water to speed up cooking for recipes that require water. (Beans is a great example, you can make great beans in a half hour instead of six.) And there are steaming racks that go inside the newer pressure cookers so you don't have to submerge the meat.
The temperatures involved in sous vide, typically not going higher than 145F, aren't enough to denature the plastic and release carcinogens.
Plastics are always releasing plasticizers and other compounds, even at room temperature. Why do you think the inside of the windows in your car get hazy? That's all residue from plastic off-gassing. I don't eat from plastic. Yes, it's a pain in the ass because so much stuff is packaged in plastic. Buying tomato sauce/paste is one of the most difficult. That shit is hard to find in glass.
You're not wrong, but there are limits. Just cooking food involves denaturing organic compounds and produces toxins and carcinogens, and we've only been cooking foods for the last hundred thousand years or so, not long enough to evolve more than cursory resistance. Many of the compounds produced are identical to the solvents and plasticizers you're worried about. But cooked food has more available nutrients than raw food, and the act of cooking also kills off micro-organisms. So going to a "raw-food diet" is possible but not really desirable. Further, plastics used in the food industry (are supposed to) have a minimum of plasticizers and solvents and present minimal risk to food.
Regarding haze on your car windows - much of that is caused by exposure of those plastics to high frequency photons, blue and UV light. These photons are pretty high temperature and tend to knock molecules apart. They're much higher energy than the thermal energy produced by most ovens, much less sous vide cooking.
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