They put chemicals in everything now. I heard they even put dihydrogen monoxide in the water!
"Chemical" is now used with the meaning of "ultra-processed ingredient with either unknown origin or unknow effect on your body". It is not the first meaning of the term but I guess it is a meaning now and we have to deal with it.
...in the context of processed foods, i've always considered 'chemicals' synonymous with industrially synthesised ingredients, by contrast to naturally-occurring foodstuffs...
The problem with that is that it is a completely meaningless distinction. Some of the worst chemicals we often put in our foods are certain kinds of nitrates that are used as preservatives, but those same nitrates occur naturally in celery. If you just eat celery the concentration is low enough to be harmless, but it can be concentrated naturally. If you've ever seen celery juice or celery powder on the list of ingredients for a food it is the exact same thing, and just as bad for you.
Naturally occurring isn't the same as healthy. Most plants are some degree of poisonous. They don't want to be eaten, and can't run away. That's just how they defend themselves. We farm the ones we are well adapted to eat, but even with that and millennia of selective breeding it's still not perfect. Ultra processed foods are bad for you because your health is not a priority for the people doing the processing, not because there is something inherently worse about industrially synthesized ingredients. They can be anything we want, and they are currently mostly addictive and only satisfying for a very short amount of time, but that is a decision, not an inherent flaw.
...i'm not speaking to health, only the vernacular meaning of 'chemical' ingredients...
A better question is “is this ultra processed”
Like, is this a product comprised mostly highly refined and modified ingredients? And thus is it likely to have had important nutritional components removed?
In all likelihood, none of the actual ingredients are actively bad for you in moderation, but, it’ll be nutritionally lacking.
Everything is made of chemicals
Chemicals can also be non vegan. Side note: for a long time (might still be) camera film wasn't vegan, since it used bovine gelatin. Kodak Eastman even had their own cow ranch to supply all the bones. (Goes to show chemicals don't have to be vegan)
Goes to show chemicals don’t have to be vegan
There is a lot of them. In the EU classification of food additif, anything under the E47 categorie can either be animal or vegetal. E471 for example could be either pork skin, beef bones, fish bones, palm or coconut oil derivative. Nicely wrapped and served in so many bread and brioche product to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, vegetarians and vegans.
And there is so many more that are straight up animal products but presented in a latin name. In France, industrials even started to used Canadian french terms to confuse people when the insect additives for colours and textures started to gross out to many people.
Literally everything is made out of chemicals. Naturaphiles are loonyburgers.
Also: botulinum toxin, ricin, lead, uranium, ebola, rabies, the fucking sun... The list of completely natural things that can kill us in the most horrific ways imaginable is almost endless.
Me, crushing up blood-cruelty cocaine in a tiny one-cent plastic baggie: “I really hope this baggie doesn’t have PFAS in it…”
Dear vegan 2, that is true for everything.
Dihydrogen monoxide
Get thee behind me, Satan, I shan't drink your hellish brew!
I'm confused. I thought veganism was about animal welfare, what does it have to do with food being made out of chemicals?
Hi Vegan 1!
The same exact compounds found in food and other products can either originate from an animal or a non-animal source. Veganism is about avoiding the animal sources. The compound itself is mostly irrelevant.
People don't seem to understand that even chemicals are made of something. They're not synthesized out of thin air. It is not stupid to ask what they're made of. The resources can be very diverse.
The "something" in question is elements. Barring the very inadvisable edge case where you're ingesting some kind of pure metal or degenerate matter there is not anything you can eat that does not contain chemicals.
Complaining about a food containing "chemicals" makes about as much sense as calling out the software you use for being compiled from "code".
Yes, but what I meant was, for example, artificial vanilla flavour is a chemical, which used to be made from cloves oil, now is made from wood compounds. The processes and ingrediences needed to produce it are also diverse and interesting.
So I'm a vegan. The 2 types of vegans I see are these:
The terror vegan: "Everyone who isn't 100% vegan is a genocidal nazi and I'll make sure to tell them constantly." aka the ones that give veganism a bad name.
The normal vegan: "When it comes to pollution, the mega corps are at failt. But when it comes to animal product consumption, the consumer is the driving factor. I can't expect everyone to become a vegan, but it would already help a lot if everyone would start to consume a bit less. Like once or twice a week no meat. But if you won't I wouldn't hold it against you, we're still friends after all." aka the vegan I'd like to be.
Sadly there's extremism in every field.
I don't think I've met #1 in real life, besides knowing more than a few of #2. The first one just gets really loud on the Internet.
I actually had a super chill vegan patient the other day who was aging remarkably gracefully into trailer-trash (my own cultural roots), complete with 40 pack-year smoker's voice and skin that belongs in a cancer PSA. They told me they aren't completely married to the idea but that they do their best and would like to be able to read the labels on what they get if possible. They pointed out that their breakfast tray arrived with biscuits and sugar and commented that the biscuits were almost certainly made with eggs and butter, and that the sugar was probably bleached using animal products (not sure about that one). I definitely didn't have anything decent to say about the biscuit thing. For them it was definitely more about the animal welfare thing than the chemical thing. They were pretty frank about not being too fussy about the chemicals that went into their body.
I'm a meat eater. I like meat. I consider myself someone who eats meat regularly. That means I eat, like, one slice of ham and 5 köttbular in a month. And I might treat myself to a salad with chicken breast in a restaurant when I manage to quiet down the voice in my head complaining about the chicken most likely not being farmed very well. Whenever I read a sentiment like "try to not eat meat 1 or 2 days in a week" I am reminded that there are really people out there who just, like, buy meat every single time they are in the grocery store and cook it daily. That seems so nuts to me.
All kinds of weird shit you’d think would be vegan aren’t… like some brands of white sugar (bone char) and some beers (isinglass [fish swim bladders]). And there’s always our good friend with a million names, cochineal/carmine/crimson lake/natural red 4/E120, aka bugs that make your food red.
tell me one food that isn't made of chemicals
What, you aren't on the dark matter diet yet?
Okay, look. Atoms, in all their wonder make up pretty much everything known to exist in the universe. Chemistry, the science of chemicals, is just taking that understanding we have of atoms and applying it to how the atoms interact based on what atoms are there, their charges, bonds, etc.
Thus unless it's on the periodic table, where it would be an element, then it's a chemical.
Even assuming that instead of "chemicals", people mean synthetic chemicals.... To that I say... Who cares?
Synthetic chemicals come in two forms: a synthesized version of a chemical that is naturally occurring, where synthesis is a more commercially viable way to obtain that chemical, or a chemical that isn't found naturally, which undergoes significant scrutiny before anyone is allowed to put it in your food and sell it to you.
We generally give "natural" chemicals less scrutiny than synthetic chemicals. And I'll remind everyone that cyanide is a naturally occurring chemical. Though it's natural, we don't general add that to our food. Some food contains cyanide naturally, like cherry pits, but that's usually a part we don't eat.
The WHO has a whole article about toxins in food... https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/natural-toxins-in-food
So yeah, it might be made of synthetic chemicals, which have been researched, scrutinized, and peer reviewed before being approved for consumption and being put in my food. I can't say the same for literally anything "natural". We just ate that shit and if you died from eating a thing, nobody else ate that thing. And that was the way of things before modern science and chemicals...
So fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.
I live with two junkfood vegans and oh my god dude. I'm literally broke and eating from food banks and my diet is less bad than theirs.
Junk vegans are truly majestic creatures
The whole 'duh, everything is made of chemicals' argument is a corporate attempt at downplaying the prevalence of unnecessary and even harmful additives in US foods that have long been banned in the EU.
Next time you see a meme about a woman asking 'is this ham processed?' with a response ridiculing her about it, look up Ractopmine.
This terminology people use without knowing anything about anything is actually corporate thing. It might originated from uneducated scared hippies, but it became popular and prevalent after corpos discovered that this kind of language allows them to greenwash the shit out of their products for free. "Other ham is made of chemicals, but ours is organic!" is technically correct phrase that is insidiously lying right to your chemistry-101-failed-face.
All this bullshit just stops the conversation about corporate accountability, or about actual implications of a specific diet, this conversations are impossible to have when your starting point is "chemicals bad".
Next time you ask "if this ham processed", remember that the only correct answer to this is yes, otherwise the ham os oinking and tries to run away when you're trying to bite it.
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