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I saw a bumper sticker that said "Do you eat GMO food?" me being smart ass and liking history said yes. Damned near all food humans eat at scale has been modified through artificial selection, at least if it's in a lab we are less likely to inbred the plant so badly that they are effectively a clone species. Also I thought of cows when I read that sticker a notable downgrade from the might aurochs.
They put chemicals in everything now. I heard they even put dihydrogen monoxide in the water!
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)
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.
As someone wholly uneducated on these kinds of things, I just choose to use the heuristic of defaulting to using/ingesting natural substances, as much as practical, because we evolved with them and it would seem more likely our bodies (and the ecosystem) know how to deal with them. I also don't trust the government to be discerning/uncorruptible enough to not allow stuff to pass that shouldn't, especially now. Peer review is more trustworthy though, and gets more trustworthy the longer something has been around and studied more.
I feel you're mixing stuff up here, don't eat processed food, buy "bio"/"ecological" if you'd like less bad stuff in your food.
Belladonna is natural and saves lives, take too much and you die. This whole "natural" thing is so infested with scammers, it's just not "the government".
Literally everything is made out of chemicals. Naturaphiles are loonyburgers.
Also: botulinum toxin, ricin, lead, uranium, ebola, the fucking sun... The list of completely natural things that can kill us in the most horrific ways imaginable is almost endless.
No thanks. I only eat photons.
Me, crushing up blood-cruelty cocaine in a tiny one-cent plastic baggie: “I really hope this baggie doesn’t have PFAS in it…”
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
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.
I'm confused. I thought veganism was about animal welfare, what does it have to do with food being made out of chemicals?
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.
it is but it's also hitched to "crunchy" culture, which has some weird braindead threads running through it about body purity and "nature = good".
Hi Vegan 1!
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 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.
To me it's 3 things why I'm vegan (although I do eat cheese sometimes, there's no proper substitute and I'm a Dutch cheese head).
So I prefer to substitute meat with beans for example, instead of heavily processed fake meat. Although sometimes a proper vegan burger, like the BeyondBurger, is nice (unhealthy) comfort food. Also on holiday to Cambodia I did eat some meat as I wanted to experience the original Cambodian cuisine. That was the first time in 12 years I ate meat and it got me food poisoning which resulted in a heavy stomach infection. Worth it though, the Cambodians know how to cook!
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.
Depending on the location, I'm pretty sure the norm is meat every day. In the Midwest, it's not just meat every day. It's meat every meal.
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.
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.