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My family has been in the restaurant business for years, and the point I'm trying to make is consumer ignorance.

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What do you think is the source of "consumer ignorance"?

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It's impossible for a customer to be aware of all the conditions regarding the products they purchase whether it be ingredients in food, materials used in making their shoes, location and wages of the workers the factories hire..

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That is correct. Insofar as any particular consumer demands that their product not contain something, it is the responsibility of the consumer to be informed, not the responsibility of the rest of the consumers to bear the burden.

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So if it were legal for someone to run a filthy unsanitry restaurant, then wouldn't you be afraid that every restaurant you visit would fit that mold? Would you go to the backroom and check?

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This is a good question, because thinking it through actually exposes the entire fallacy with your argument. If there was no "law" demanding "sanitary" (subjective term by the way) conditions, but sanitary conditions would benefit consumers, what do you think would happen? Do you think all of these consumers, who apparently would benefit from "sanitary" conditions, would all throw up their hands and say, "Well, if the government won't forbid unsanitary conditions I'll just have to eat my spagetti off the floor!"?

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I know you know where I'm coming from, and these laws are great because they protect the consumer in areas where the consumer can't always protect themselves.

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False dichotomy. The government is not the only agent that the consumer can delegate responsibility to keep them informed.

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I open a large restaurant chain tomorrow and I put arsenic in the lasagna, yet don't advertise it.

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Stop right there. Why on earth would someone do this? Is the law against putting arsenic in food the only thing stopping all restranteurs from doing this? Until you can provide any reasonable explanation for why one needs to worry about this, it's a totally irrelevant comparison.