Comment by wmeredith
1 day ago
But that's total nonsense. Everything in our physical world (including water, air, food, and human bodies) is made of chemicals. They can be naturally occurring or artificially manufactured.
1 day ago
But that's total nonsense. Everything in our physical world (including water, air, food, and human bodies) is made of chemicals. They can be naturally occurring or artificially manufactured.
You can nitpick and be pedantic about the wording I used, but if you equate artificial flavors or ingredients with natural ones…
Could you describe the difference between the artificial flavour vanilin made in a lab, and the natural flavour vanilin extracted from a vanilla bean?
OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.
For some of them, like cherry or coconuts, the artificial flavor tastes nothing like the natural flavor.
Is it really pedantic? Everything is ultimately a chemical compound. H2O is a chemical. Where do you draw the line between "chemicals" and "not chemicals"? Is it more about what you can find in nature? You can find acetone in nature.
yeah, this is kind of a definitional example of pedantry. you probably understand what people are trying to say when they talk about "chemicals" but instead of engaging with the actual conversation, you spin off a metanarrative to pick apart the word choice as if that's directly relevant to the point they're trying to discuss.
not trying to pick on you specifically, because sure everything's a chemical, and i don't really care to fight about that, but you asked :)
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