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People have had so much trouble getting over words we use to describe food. Clearly, when a normal person says "real" or "natural" or "doesn't have chemicals",

People have had so much trouble getting over words we use to describe food. Clearly, when a normal person says "real" or "natural" or "doesn't have chemicals", they mean foods that are (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. This seems reasonable to me! That's why it's okay to eat beef that someone used a machine to separate, but it's not okay to eat beef treated with ammonia. Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia! This is reminiscent of the MSG scare. It was never about MSG as an underlying ingredient or racism (everyone loves Chinese food). As Wikipedia says, it's been a component of flavors "as early as 5,500 BCE." What changed is that it was manufactured industrially with "hydrolysis of vegetable proteins with hydrochloric acid to disrupt peptide bonds (1909–1962); direct chemical synthesis with acrylonitrile (1962–1973), and bacterial fermentation (the current method)." Its acceptance and rejection over time follows pretty much precisely how non-endogenous-to-nature the manufacturing process is. I'm not making a value judgement if non-endogenous-to-nature foods are good or bad. I'm just saying I agree with you, and that it's actually really clear and easy to define scientifically what people mean when they say "natural" versus "fake." It's just that science pedants are really stubborn. They parrot their "dihydrogen monoxide" and "chemicals" jokes and they don't really get that there's a long history of industrial, non-endogenous-to-nature manufacturing betraying consumers with nasty side effects, pollution and disease. It's really unempathetic to people and it's not good for real scientific goals, like reducing our impact on the environment and improving trust in science.

jdietrich 8y ago
>Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia! We are the only thing in nature that "produces" food - every other species photosynthesises, hunts or grazes. We're the only species that can cook. Is cooking unnatural? >made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention Where do you draw the line? Is wheat flour "unnatural" because we winnow off the chaff and grind the grains? Does a chicken leg become "unnatural" if you pluck it and skin it? Does milk become unnatural if you churn it into butter? Does butter become unnatural if you clarify it into ghee? The whole distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" is meaningless in any practical sense. Either everything we do is "natural" because we're animals, or everything that we do that apes can't is "unnatural". Either only a raw food diet is natural, or everything is natural. There's no logical distinction between the complex chemistry we perform in our kitchens every day and the complex chemistry that occurs in industrial food production, just a vague squeamishness.
- gregcrv 8y ago
  No, your are not the only thing in nature that « produces » food. Here is on example but they are many more. https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-ants/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-...
- doctorpangloss 8y ago
  When people complain about non endogenous to nature processed foods, they don't bring up stupid as shit examples. It's a painful conversation, yes, because everyone has a hard time having a dialogue with moronic levels of pedantry. Maybe if you weren't calling cooking unnatural, and rather just talked about the merits of what people were really objecting too, it would be easier to communicate. This isn't Science of Cooking. When you make food in your kitchen, you don't add ammonia to your foods. That's not vague squeamishness. People don't wash their vegetables in a chlorine bath. When they want to ripen their fruit, they put them in a closed container; they don't gas the fruit with a synthetically-derived hormone. Even if these things are reconstructed exactly by an industrial process, you're not conceding that our definition of equality is enumerative. And funny enough, the reason poisons enter our food supply is that we say, "Well three ways these processes are equivalent are enough ways." "This complies with the regulation, so it must be safe." "We paid an auditor, who checked these boxes." Which in my opinion is the dumbest form of thinking of all. Sometimes, the slow and shitty way, for some intrinsic reason, doesn't harm you! Obviously nobody is calling cooking unnatural, but if you see things so reductively, so pedantically, you're going to look back at the backflips you were writing years ago and really wonder how you missed the mark there.
  - parasubvert 8y ago
    You have no idea what you're talking about, and have the audacity to refer to the parent poster as shit examples? Your response is a disgrace to HN posting standards. How isn't this science of cooking? Ammonia was a primary leavening agent for baked goods for centuries. Baking soda mostly replaced it but some old recipes still call for it. It's also commonly found in cheeses like Brie. It's in abundance in some fish considered a delicacy in Korea. IOW, it's been a thing for a long time. You are arbitrarily placing a line between "cooking" and "industrial process" out of ignorance and bias. When I seek a Maillard reaction in my food (baking bread, searing meat) and potentially generate acrylamide (a carcinogen), how is that exogenously induced chemical process, somehow "better" from another one like an ammonia puff that is intended to improve food quality?
kbutler 8y ago
> (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. Well, there goes cooked food.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Or you know, you can always apply the "principle of charity" to a discussion, instead of pedantry.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kbutler 8y ago
    A gentle nudge to point out the excessive narrowness of that definition of "natural", hoping to broaden the perspective a bit. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

jdietrich 8y ago

>Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia! We are the only thing in nature that "produces" food - every other species photosynthesises, hunts or grazes. We're the only species that can cook. Is cooking unnatural? >made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention Where do you draw the line? Is wheat flour "unnatural" because we winnow off the chaff and grind the grains? Does a chicken leg become "unnatural" if you pluck it and skin it? Does milk become unnatural if you churn it into butter? Does butter become unnatural if you clarify it into ghee? The whole distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" is meaningless in any practical sense. Either everything we do is "natural" because we're animals, or everything that we do that apes can't is "unnatural". Either only a raw food diet is natural, or everything is natural. There's no logical distinction between the complex chemistry we perform in our kitchens every day and the complex chemistry that occurs in industrial food production, just a vague squeamishness.

gregcrv 8y ago
No, your are not the only thing in nature that « produces » food. Here is on example but they are many more. https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-ants/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-...
doctorpangloss 8y ago
When people complain about non endogenous to nature processed foods, they don't bring up stupid as shit examples. It's a painful conversation, yes, because everyone has a hard time having a dialogue with moronic levels of pedantry. Maybe if you weren't calling cooking unnatural, and rather just talked about the merits of what people were really objecting too, it would be easier to communicate. This isn't Science of Cooking. When you make food in your kitchen, you don't add ammonia to your foods. That's not vague squeamishness. People don't wash their vegetables in a chlorine bath. When they want to ripen their fruit, they put them in a closed container; they don't gas the fruit with a synthetically-derived hormone. Even if these things are reconstructed exactly by an industrial process, you're not conceding that our definition of equality is enumerative. And funny enough, the reason poisons enter our food supply is that we say, "Well three ways these processes are equivalent are enough ways." "This complies with the regulation, so it must be safe." "We paid an auditor, who checked these boxes." Which in my opinion is the dumbest form of thinking of all. Sometimes, the slow and shitty way, for some intrinsic reason, doesn't harm you! Obviously nobody is calling cooking unnatural, but if you see things so reductively, so pedantically, you're going to look back at the backflips you were writing years ago and really wonder how you missed the mark there.
- parasubvert 8y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about, and have the audacity to refer to the parent poster as shit examples? Your response is a disgrace to HN posting standards. How isn't this science of cooking? Ammonia was a primary leavening agent for baked goods for centuries. Baking soda mostly replaced it but some old recipes still call for it. It's also commonly found in cheeses like Brie. It's in abundance in some fish considered a delicacy in Korea. IOW, it's been a thing for a long time. You are arbitrarily placing a line between "cooking" and "industrial process" out of ignorance and bias. When I seek a Maillard reaction in my food (baking bread, searing meat) and potentially generate acrylamide (a carcinogen), how is that exogenously induced chemical process, somehow "better" from another one like an ammonia puff that is intended to improve food quality?

kbutler 8y ago

> (1) made only with ingredients or processes endogenous to living organisms without human intervention or (2) when harvested industrially, the harvest is only mechanical. Well, there goes cooked food.

coldtea 8y ago
Or you know, you can always apply the "principle of charity" to a discussion, instead of pedantry.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kbutler 8y ago
  A gentle nudge to point out the excessive narrowness of that definition of "natural", hoping to broaden the perspective a bit. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.