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>Nothing in nature produces food by treating in with ammonia! We are the only thing in nature that "produces" food - every other species photosynthesises, hunt

>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?
  - doctorpangloss 8y ago
    > Ammonia was a primary leavening agent for baked goods for centuries. Listen, I obviously didn't know that ammonia bicarbonate was used as a leavening agent for centuries, or that it was made from deer horns, or whatever. :) Obviously, I also imagined that when a news article says they use ammonia on the beef, they mean ammonia gas (NH3). I don't fault anyone for thinking that either, like gentle John Oliver. Isn't that what they're saying? I guess those are two different things, ammonia bicarbonate (the leavening agent) and ammonia gas (the thing they do with deer horns), and ammonia in fish (which is something complicated), or brie or something. Again, I don't know if they're using ammonia gas on the beef trimmings, but assuming that they are, then you've managed to conflate two different chemicals, which is the exact thing you were passionately trying to avoid. It really speaks to my point that these things are really difficult to communicate about, and full of traps, so forgive me for the audacity. It's not ignorance and bliss, there are a tremendous amount of people who can talk to each other about the line between cooking and industrial process in intuitive ways that are not at all poorly informed. Maybe not me personally.
    - nate_meurer 8y ago
      > Again, I don't know if they're using ammonia gas on the beef trimmings, but assuming that they are, then you've managed to conflate two different chemicals No, they are the same chemical for the purposes of this discussion. Any form of ammonia you eat -- whether ammonium bicarbonate or ammonium sulfate in bread, or ammonia residues in meat -- will be found as ammonium hydroxide in your blood. It's the same stuff. And the consequences of that extra ammonia in your body are precisely nothing. A ten ounce serving of pure pink slime (you know you want it) might give you a whopping hundred milligram boost of ammonia. That's 10 to 20 times less ammonia (nitrogen equivalent) than a typical adult pisses out every day.
s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
None of your examples involve adding a chemical to the food that does not occur naturally already in food. Most of your examples just involve preparation, which would not make it unnatural.
- kbutler 8y ago
  Human breast milk naturally contains ammonia, so it does naturally occur in food: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3934511/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3934511/ (More when the breast is inflamed, which can affect willingness to suckle, indicating there are levels which affect at least palatability)
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Cooking. Frying or roasting produce diacetyl, acrylamide and all sorts of other potentially toxic substances that don't naturally occur in the food being cooked. What about fermentation? The production of cheese or bread produces all sorts of chemicals that don't naturally occur in milk or wheat - are those chemicals "natural"? Does your opinion change if I told you that most monosodium glutamate is produced through industrial fermentation?
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
    I'm not against adding chemicals to food. I was just pointing out flaws in the examples. We should test foods to the best of our ability to make sure they are safe, but I don't think there should be many restrictions otherwise.

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?
- doctorpangloss 8y ago
  > Ammonia was a primary leavening agent for baked goods for centuries. Listen, I obviously didn't know that ammonia bicarbonate was used as a leavening agent for centuries, or that it was made from deer horns, or whatever. :) Obviously, I also imagined that when a news article says they use ammonia on the beef, they mean ammonia gas (NH3). I don't fault anyone for thinking that either, like gentle John Oliver. Isn't that what they're saying? I guess those are two different things, ammonia bicarbonate (the leavening agent) and ammonia gas (the thing they do with deer horns), and ammonia in fish (which is something complicated), or brie or something. Again, I don't know if they're using ammonia gas on the beef trimmings, but assuming that they are, then you've managed to conflate two different chemicals, which is the exact thing you were passionately trying to avoid. It really speaks to my point that these things are really difficult to communicate about, and full of traps, so forgive me for the audacity. It's not ignorance and bliss, there are a tremendous amount of people who can talk to each other about the line between cooking and industrial process in intuitive ways that are not at all poorly informed. Maybe not me personally.
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    > Again, I don't know if they're using ammonia gas on the beef trimmings, but assuming that they are, then you've managed to conflate two different chemicals No, they are the same chemical for the purposes of this discussion. Any form of ammonia you eat -- whether ammonium bicarbonate or ammonium sulfate in bread, or ammonia residues in meat -- will be found as ammonium hydroxide in your blood. It's the same stuff. And the consequences of that extra ammonia in your body are precisely nothing. A ten ounce serving of pure pink slime (you know you want it) might give you a whopping hundred milligram boost of ammonia. That's 10 to 20 times less ammonia (nitrogen equivalent) than a typical adult pisses out every day.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago

None of your examples involve adding a chemical to the food that does not occur naturally already in food. Most of your examples just involve preparation, which would not make it unnatural.

kbutler 8y ago
Human breast milk naturally contains ammonia, so it does naturally occur in food: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3934511/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3934511/ (More when the breast is inflamed, which can affect willingness to suckle, indicating there are levels which affect at least palatability)
jdietrich 8y ago
Cooking. Frying or roasting produce diacetyl, acrylamide and all sorts of other potentially toxic substances that don't naturally occur in the food being cooked. What about fermentation? The production of cheese or bread produces all sorts of chemicals that don't naturally occur in milk or wheat - are those chemicals "natural"? Does your opinion change if I told you that most monosodium glutamate is produced through industrial fermentation?
- s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
  I'm not against adding chemicals to food. I was just pointing out flaws in the examples. We should test foods to the best of our ability to make sure they are safe, but I don't think there should be many restrictions otherwise.