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Comment by StanislavPetrov | Hacker News Reader

That's completely false.

While the label "organic" may have been hijacked and rendered largely meaningless by government agencies like the FDA and their corporate masters, there is indeed a difference between food produced using chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones (among other things), and food that is produced naturally without these drugs, poisons and other additives. That some people dispute the fact that there is a measurable difference in health outcomes when consuming food produced "naturally" vs food produced with a host of drugs, chemicals and poisons is irrelevant to the fact that the word "organic" actually has a meaning, and people who choose to consume food produced without drugs, chemicals and poisons should be free to do so (even if this is considered silly by those who believe that the drugs, chemicals and poisons used to produce their food have no measurable effects).

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It is impossible to produce food without chemicals.

I'm sure if they were still around today those who produced food for thousands of years without chemicals would beg to differ.

His point was they are/were using chemicals regardless of if they understood the chemistry at a low level or not. When ancient people/(or modern) used dung to fertilize crops they are using chemicals. With that being said I think when the power of modern chemistry / genetic engineering and modern economic agricultureraly forces collide caution is warranted.

>His point was they are/were using chemicals regardless of if they understood the chemistry at a low level or not.

Even if that was his point, it is still completely wrong.

>It is impossible to produce food without chemicals.

If you live in the northern hemisphere, it is only June. Go plant a handful of pumpkin and watermelon seeds in a patch of fertile earth. Add no "chemicals" of any kind - man made or otherwise. Return in 4 months and you will very likely see food that has been grown with absolutely no chemicals at all.

Fertile earth is composed of chemicals. Water is a chemical. Air is composed of chemicals. The seed is composed of chemicals.

It is impossible to grow food without chemicals.

Hint: water is a chemical.

That’s not what was meant and you know it. You’re being intellectually dishonest.

And the person saying "chemical" is being intellectually lazy.

What word would you suggest to use, then?

Discussing individual chemicals by name is inefficient, confusing and almost certainly requires scientific citations to be remotely worthy of discussion.

Going by groups of chemicals is a bit better, but then citations are largely not applicable.

There are no synonyms or near synonyms. The dictionary definition of ”chemical” (noun), however, is explicitly clear:

1 : a substance obtained by a chemical process or producing a chemical effect

2 : a drug

I posit that the person saying ”chemical” is not being lazy, they are being scientifically accurate while enabling rational discussion.

It’s anyone saying ”but EVERYTHING is chemicals” that needs to check the dictionary.

Your definition "1" describes just about anything. Water, for example, produces a chemical effect. So do amino acids. Your entire metabolism is a chemical process, as is the growth of plants. What I think that people mean when they talk about "chemicals" in their food is artificially synthesized chemicals and that's easy enough to say.

I point that out in conversations similar to ours because (in my experience) so many people who make the chemical-free argument do so because they've fallen for the Appeal-To-Nature fallacy, e.g. "naturally grown food must be better for you." The reality is that Nature only finds local maxima for some variables relevant to the organism's survival, and those variables aren't necessarily relevant to what is best for human health.

In this particular thread, my first contribution was too flippant to be constructive, so I deserved the down-vote. But I wasn't being intellectually dishonest.

You're being pedantic but not actually using a common definition of chemical. Perhaps "chemical substance" might apply.

AOED definition of chemical: a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, especially artificially: _never mix disinfectant with other chemicals | controversy arose over treatment of apples with this chemical._

Sri-Lanka decided to only produce food "without drugs, chemicals and poisons". Now they're starving. You're lucky 99% of the organic labeled food you consume were in fact produced using the same things all of the vegetables in the world use, but anyways, if you prefer to pay double the price for smaller carrots, who am I to stop you.

That is not in fact what they decided.

What they decided was to ignore every detail of well understood methods to manage transition from one system to another. Their failure is wholly a product of that choice.

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