Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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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, 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.

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-...

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.

Human breast milk naturally contains ammonia, so it does naturally occur in food:

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)

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?

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.

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.

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