It makes sense, for example, if you use turmeric in a rice dish, would you say it is artificially colored? In a sense rice isn’t yellow, but it is a natural dye.
That's basically what's done for vegetable oils so should vegetable oils be called "artificial" as well? Is there a principled way of defining what amount of scary chemical involvement is needed for something natural to lose its "natural" designation? Are pretzels at risk because they're dipped in lye (ie. drain cleaners)?
Lye is typically not artificial if it’s made from sea shells and wood ash like it has been traditionally. Even the industrial chlor-alkali process just uses salt (NaCl) and water so it’s not artificial.
Likewise if you use steel balls to tumble-crush shells into calcium carbonate powder (don't know if they do, or if it's even a product, but neither are the point here).
"We are required to inform this table that your naturally wild-caught salmon had, briefly, at one time, a small hook inserted into its mouth. It was otherwise wholly without artificial feed nor other additives."
How do you write a law that slices between those ideas and hexane, clearly?
You can probably begin by broadly calling petroleum and petroleum products artificial.
Where does salt fall here?
Why isn't petroleum natural, when it is plant-based?
What makes petroleum artificial compared to any other substance found on (or in) earth?
It seems you are proposing that "any food that has had a petroleum product added to it at any stage is artificial", which is an oddly narrow focus.
For that matter, does this definition of "artificial" extend to the range of substances that can be synthesized with bio-feedstock?
To expand on our discussion, would this mean that ethanol made other feedstock is natural, but made from petroleum is artificial?
There's approximately 0% chance that the typical pretzel you bought is made with dye derived from wood ash.
By that standard is anything artificial? Oil comes out of the ground, after all. At least with "natural" colors you can argue the actual molecule was synthesized by a plant and we're just purifying it, whereas for industrially produced lye it's entirely man made.
Your body cannot tell the difference between a chemical that is "naturally" sourced vs one that is "artificially" sourced. We are at a point in industrial chemistry that the sole difference is "Did the feedstock come from a petrochemical company"
That's exactly my point, because I'm arguing there's no difference between natural colors and vegetable oil, when they're both refined from natural sources using industrial processes.
At the same time, you shouldn't be able to lie to consumers (even if what those consumers care about is wrong and dumb)! You shouldn't be able to label with "This milk from cows not treated with rBST" if you did in fact treat the cows with rBST, even though rBST is not a health risk. Likewise, you shouldn't be able to say "my product is completely natural" when it is in fact produced through chemical synthesis.
Your scenario holds for any part of any food processing, not just food colours. The issue is that the definition of "natural" when applied to food is impossible to pin down. Can we process using solvents? What if those solvents were brewed? At what point does heat and pressure treatment become "unnatural"? Can I use an acid for processing? Can I use vinegar?
The various vegetable, seed and nut oils that form the basis for so many food products are very problematic if you want "natural" food.
1. add turmeric not color extracted from turmeric
2. you don't add the turmeric just to get the color
What this is about is if a company things their rice + turmeric isn't "popping" enough in color they can extract colors from other food or even non eatable plants and then say "no artificial colors" while the color of the end product is very well artificial/not natural.
Add in that "natural sourced" doesn't mean healthy but many people think it does this is pretty deceptive. (E.g. one of the worst pesticides, banned decades ago, was neurotoxin extracted from plants, _and then highly concentrated_. But 100% natural sourced so the FDA would treat it as not "artificial" even if the concentration of it and separation from the plant is not natural at all.)
Also: that's a completely different issue to "describing its presence as 'artificial'". Needs a new thread.