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Comment by ExoticPearTree | Hacker News Reader

Chemicals. That’s what they mean by real ingredients: no chemicals.

Like orange juice: can be from a chemical powder or real oranges.

This is a good example of how easy it is to fool people if they don’t have their own understanding of how things work.

Highlighting this has been a priority in my parenting. My child is having a great time trying to scare friends about the dangers of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide, which is found in a surprisingly large number of manufactured foods.

Right. And wonder bread is awesome for your health.

Wonder Bread is horrible for your health, but it’s not because of “chemicals.”

Orange juice is also bad for your health BTW!

Asbestos is all natural.

Don't forget poison ivy, amanita mushrooms, and box jellyfish.

Nobody said it was. But it's not bad because of chemicals, because all bread is created with chemicals.

As for natural versus artificial - that's also bullshit. There's many natural ingredients that are poison, and many artificial ones that are good for you.

I mean, if I eat home made fried chicken everyday, you can bet your ass I'm not gonna live very long.

But that's total nonsense. Everything in our physical world (including water, air, food, and human bodies) is made of chemicals. They can be naturally occurring or artificially manufactured.

You can nitpick and be pedantic about the wording I used, but if you equate artificial flavors or ingredients with natural ones…

Is it really pedantic? Everything is ultimately a chemical compound. H2O is a chemical. Where do you draw the line between "chemicals" and "not chemicals"? Is it more about what you can find in nature? You can find acetone in nature.

yeah, this is kind of a definitional example of pedantry. you probably understand what people are trying to say when they talk about "chemicals" but instead of engaging with the actual conversation, you spin off a metanarrative to pick apart the word choice as if that's directly relevant to the point they're trying to discuss.

not trying to pick on you specifically, because sure everything's a chemical, and i don't really care to fight about that, but you asked :)

"Chemical" is just a really, really vague and poor word choice. I honestly don't understand what people are trying to say when they use it. Food and chemistry are inextricably intertwined. You can't even talk about food without talking about all of the various components food is made up of. Not a single food item out there isn't made up of chemicals. Some found in nature, some created in a lab or factory process. Some healthy, some not. Some with long names, some with short names. Some have effects on food taste, longevity, appearance. Some are inert. It's really a meaningless word to use in the context of one's food.

>I honestly don't understand what people are trying to say when they use it

Like, banana-flavoured milk product vs banana yogurt - seed oil and potato starch compound with artificial flavorings vs REAL milk yoghurt with REAL banana.

It tastes different, it has different nutritional value and overall "chemical" product feels scammy because it tries to mimic proper one.

This is all about words, like, why do we use "Artificial" in Artificial Intelligence?

What is real banana? How much processing is allowed for it to be still real? Considering the selective breeding of banana, is banana even still real?

Chemical is just a bad word choice. Artificial, or ultra processed get closer to the issue. They still are vague with a lot of grey area. If you cook at home, you're also highly processing your food. The fruit in winter is likely also artificial, in some sense: Grown against the will of god/nature with pesticides, in a tent, in a climate that doesn't naturally feature them, devoid of flavour because they were artificially bred for yield, color and size, etc.

>What is real banana? How much processing is allowed for it to be still real? Considering the selective breeding of banana, is banana even still real?

This is arbitrary subjective qualifier, goes somewhere between "isoamyl acetate" flavoring chemical and organic wild forest bananas. I would subjectively say that any grown bananas is REAL while isoamyl acetate made by rectification of amyl acetate is not REAL banana.

Is Baking Powder considered a “chemical”? How about sodium bicarbonate and monocalcium phosphate?

Maybe people are simply reacting to chemical-sounding words.

Add some artificial bacon flavouring, starch and you will get "beef flavoured product" which most people would call "chemical".

> you probably understand what people are trying to say when they talk about "chemicals"

My understanding is that when someone complains about "chemicals" in their food, it's because they've seen something they don't understand on the ingredient list and are scared of it.

I think it's actually a great example of very very important non-pedantry. The entire crux of their argument/issue is dependent on their definition of "chemicals". I would even go so far as to say it's just the nature fallacy in disguise.

With the nature fallacy, the definition (or more like the lack of) of what is natural is the entire crux of it. In both cases (natural and "non-chemical") it's the very non-defined-ness that reveals the problem with it: You cannot create a sensible definition.

For nature, what's the definition that puts "rape" and "artificial insulin" on the morally correct side?

For chemical, what's the definition that puts "fortification with iodine, flouride, or whatevers in flour" and "arsenic" on the right side?

Could you describe the difference between the artificial flavour vanilin made in a lab, and the natural flavour vanilin extracted from a vanilla bean?

OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.

For some of them, like cherry or coconuts, the artificial flavor tastes nothing like the natural flavor.

To my knowledge benzaldehyde is the most common cherry flavor, and I agree it doesn't taste much like cherries. It's also a naturally occurring compound we produce from cassia oil, and it's naturally contained in almonds, apricots, apples and cherries.

As for coconut there's Lactones, which - you guessed it - occur naturally.

> OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.

Care to provide a source?

Cooking is chemistry anyway.

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