Unnatural Things (Part III)

It was back in January and, before that, December, that I last pondered the odd divide between what humans think of as 'natural' and 'unnatural'. This round was triggered by a brief conversation yesterday about 'organic' food.

I think humans are bonkers about food. We're the only species that routinely subjects food to unnatural thermal processing. No other animal species boils, roasts, bakes or chars their food except by accident. There must be something wrong with that. It's terribly unnatural.

The same thing goes for mechanical processing. We beat our food, churn it, mash it, blend it, slice it up with precision-designed metal tools, mix it up and stretch it out, dice and slice it, roll it up, arrange it for display.

We apply odd chemical and biological processes to our food: we salt, emulsify, combine, agglutinate, caramelize (as in subject to Maillard browning deliberately, in order to produce what some of us call carcinogens), hydrolyse, ferment. We do things of awkward and toxic nature, such as deliberately getting bacteria to infect our dairy products, and call it 'natural'.

I think that foodwise, we are the most unnatural species on the planet. And if people are talking about 'organic' food, that's seriously wrong. What foods are 'inorganic'? Only common salt, water, and other mineral substances like ferrous sulphate. What foods are natural? Maybe only stuff that grows in remote regions where human manipulation has not directly occurred.

Yes, humans are an unnatural lot, who have this daft yearning for a 'natural' that they can never possess.