the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say “chemicals”
I honestly don’t understand what that thing is, actually.
To use an example from a Facebook post I saw this week:
Is P-Menthane-3,8-diol (PMD) a chemical? What about oil from the lemon eucalyptus tree? Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus is typically refined until it’s 70% PMD instead of 2%; does that turn it into a chemical? What if we were to refine it all the way to 100%? What if, now that we’ve got 100% PMD, we just start using PMD synthesized at a chemical plant instead?
I do like the idea from another comment here that
the motte is “technically, everything is a chemical,” and the bailey is “No need to worry about the content of the food you buy.”
But even that can be inverted. People buy “no nitrites added” bacon to try to avoid a dangerous chemical, and they end up getting the result of (all natural! organic!) celery-juice and celery-powder processes. At best, the nitrates in the celery still end up getting converted to nitrites during curing, except that now there’s another loose variable in the production so a balance between “cardiac/cancer risk from high nitrite levels” versus “botulism risk from low nitrite levels” is even harder to achieve. At worst, the consumer falsely believes they’ve no further need to worry about the content of the food they buy, and so they don’t moderate consumption of it they way they would have moderated consumption of “chemicals”.
I honestly don’t understand what that thing is, actually.
This was also my first response when reading the article, but on second glance I don’t think that is entirely fair. The argument I want to convey with “Everything is chemicals!” is something along the lines of “The concept that you use the word chemicals for is ill-defined and possibly incoherent and I suspect that the negative connotations you associate with it are largely undeserved.”, but that is not what I’m actually communicating.
Suppose I successfully convince people that everything is, in fact, chemicals, people start using the word chemicals in a strictly technical sense and use the word blorps for what is currently the common sense definition of chemicals. In this situation “Everything is chemicals!” stops being a valid counterargument, but blorps is still just as ill-defined and incoherent a concept as it was before. People correctly addressed the concern I raised, but not the concern I had, which suggest that I did not properly communicate my concern in the first place.
Perceived chemical-ness is a very rough heuristic for the degree of optimization a food has undergone for being sold in a modern economy (see http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/ for why this might be something you want to avoid). Very, very rough—you could no doubt list examples of ‘non-chemicals’ that are more optimized than ‘chemicals’ all day, as well as optimizations that are almost certainly not harmful. And yet I’d wager the correlation is there.
It’s actually an implicit two-place predicate. Part of what’s meant by “chemical” is that it’s suspicious, and whether something’s suspicious or not depends on what you know about it. How things are labelled on food packages is related to their safety in such a way that treating “P-Menthane-3,8-diol” as more suspicious than “lemon eucalyptus extract” is actually correct.
I honestly don’t understand what that thing is, actually.
To use an example from a Facebook post I saw this week:
Is P-Menthane-3,8-diol (PMD) a chemical? What about oil from the lemon eucalyptus tree? Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus is typically refined until it’s 70% PMD instead of 2%; does that turn it into a chemical? What if we were to refine it all the way to 100%? What if, now that we’ve got 100% PMD, we just start using PMD synthesized at a chemical plant instead?
I do like the idea from another comment here that
But even that can be inverted. People buy “no nitrites added” bacon to try to avoid a dangerous chemical, and they end up getting the result of (all natural! organic!) celery-juice and celery-powder processes. At best, the nitrates in the celery still end up getting converted to nitrites during curing, except that now there’s another loose variable in the production so a balance between “cardiac/cancer risk from high nitrite levels” versus “botulism risk from low nitrite levels” is even harder to achieve. At worst, the consumer falsely believes they’ve no further need to worry about the content of the food they buy, and so they don’t moderate consumption of it they way they would have moderated consumption of “chemicals”.
This was also my first response when reading the article, but on second glance I don’t think that is entirely fair. The argument I want to convey with “Everything is chemicals!” is something along the lines of “The concept that you use the word chemicals for is ill-defined and possibly incoherent and I suspect that the negative connotations you associate with it are largely undeserved.”, but that is not what I’m actually communicating.
Suppose I successfully convince people that everything is, in fact, chemicals, people start using the word chemicals in a strictly technical sense and use the word blorps for what is currently the common sense definition of chemicals. In this situation “Everything is chemicals!” stops being a valid counterargument, but blorps is still just as ill-defined and incoherent a concept as it was before. People correctly addressed the concern I raised, but not the concern I had, which suggest that I did not properly communicate my concern in the first place.
Perceived chemical-ness is a very rough heuristic for the degree of optimization a food has undergone for being sold in a modern economy (see http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/ for why this might be something you want to avoid). Very, very rough—you could no doubt list examples of ‘non-chemicals’ that are more optimized than ‘chemicals’ all day, as well as optimizations that are almost certainly not harmful. And yet I’d wager the correlation is there.
It’s actually an implicit two-place predicate. Part of what’s meant by “chemical” is that it’s suspicious, and whether something’s suspicious or not depends on what you know about it. How things are labelled on food packages is related to their safety in such a way that treating “P-Menthane-3,8-diol” as more suspicious than “lemon eucalyptus extract” is actually correct.