cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
What are natural foods? - AEON
The glass of orange juice at the breakfast table tells a tale about what’s natural, what’s whole and what’s healthy for us
What is a ‘natural’ food product? One common suggestion is that ‘natural’ things are not made of chemicals. But the whole biological world is chemicals! Another suggestion: natural products are not genetically modified (that is, a GMO). Alas, that won’t work either. While GMO designers do mix and match genes artificially, the bacteria at work in you and your food do the same thing and have always done so. How about not made in a lab? No, the vitamin C from a lab is the same chemical as the vitamin C from an orange.
So it isn’t easy to say what a natural product comes to. Understandably, many commentators have thrown up their hands in despair. Even the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given up on enshrining a formal definition of ‘natural’. But giving up is an overreaction. Outside the clean world of mathematics, nearly all concepts are in want of clarification, and natural is a useful enough notion for us to attempt to clarify. In spite of its trendy appearance, the core idea behind ‘natural’ has been around at least since Aristotle.
The glass of orange juice at the breakfast table tells a tale about what’s natural, what’s whole and what’s healthy for us
What is a ‘natural’ food product? One common suggestion is that ‘natural’ things are not made of chemicals. But the whole biological world is chemicals! Another suggestion: natural products are not genetically modified (that is, a GMO). Alas, that won’t work either. While GMO designers do mix and match genes artificially, the bacteria at work in you and your food do the same thing and have always done so. How about not made in a lab? No, the vitamin C from a lab is the same chemical as the vitamin C from an orange.
So it isn’t easy to say what a natural product comes to. Understandably, many commentators have thrown up their hands in despair. Even the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given up on enshrining a formal definition of ‘natural’. But giving up is an overreaction. Outside the clean world of mathematics, nearly all concepts are in want of clarification, and natural is a useful enough notion for us to attempt to clarify. In spite of its trendy appearance, the core idea behind ‘natural’ has been around at least since Aristotle.