âbut EVERYTHING is chemicals!!â
thatâs not what it means and you fucking know it. stop putting weird shit in food.
Except it is, and believing you can tell the difference between âbad chemicalsâ and âgood chemicalsâ from the label is exactly how marketers trick you into thinking something is healthier than it is just because they say âderived from natural sourcesâ instead of the chemical name, which is not necessarily true.
Further, that âweird shitâ serves a purpose. Potassium sorbate, also called E202, for instance, inhibits microbial growth in food and beauty products and stops unwanted additional fermentation in wine and cider. So unless you want sour wine, contaminated cosmetics, and things going mouldy in your cupboard in three days, itâs good for potassium sorbate to be in there. And if you were brewing your own beer/wine/cider at home, you would use it too. Various acids are used to lower pH in preserved fruits and vegetables in order to prevent botulism. Potassium metabisulphite/pyrosulphite is also used to prevent microbial growth in wine.
Some things are unhealthy, absolutely. Look at what happened with trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils, which serve no purpose except to cut costs. Itâs good to know about those things. But I have also seen so many products intentionally marketing themselves to appeal to the ânaturalâ consumer that are the same exact things as the âscary chemicalâ stuff theyâre just called something different. Like Iâve seen a lot of soap labels where they call the ingredients ânatural cold-pressed extract of Helianthus anuumâ to make it sound healthier and less processed than if theyâd said âtriglyceridesâ or âsunflower oil,â which is what it is. It works the other way, too, where labels will intentionally play up scientific jargon the average consumer doesnât know the meaning of so that their product sounds like itâs different and worth paying twice as much for, like, for instance, âmicellarâ soaps, which is just regular soap.
Other stuff serves an aesthetic purpose that does not have a negative health effect and is also not strictly necessary, but which if it was not there, people would think the product was worse, like the lecithin emulsifiers that keep your mayonnaise and yoghurt and peanut butter from separating unpleasantly, the sulphates added to shampoo to make it lather, or the carrageenan or alginate added to toothpaste and ice cream to make it smoother (lecithin and carrageenan both come from natural sources, actually â lecithin often comes from from soy, and carrageenan and alginate come from seaweed â but they arenât always listed that way, so they sound like âscary chemicalsâ to skittish people). Alum is used in pickling to keep pickles crunchy; itâs not necessary, some people pickling at home prefer not to use it, but if you got a mushy pickle at the supermarket youâd be turned off by it. Sodium citrate is a salt of citric acid, which can be ânaturalâ from citrus fruits or artificially-produced but which is identical in either case. It helps emulsify melting cheese to keep it from getting a gross oily layer separating out and to regulate pH in things like gelatine products, which would not hold their structure if the pH got outside of those bounds. These things are there for a reason.
As I said, not everything is benign or good for the customer, and thatâs important to be aware of, but âah this is a chemical I canât pronounce so therefore itâs Unnatural and Badâ is NOT the same as being an informed consumer, and it actually makes you way easier to manipulate through marketing. Deciding that something is good or bad for you based on how it sounds when you donât actually know what it is or why itâs there is not âdoing your researchâ or whatever the granola hippies in the Facebook mommy group say.
Iâve been around long enough to expect that no one on this post will even read any of this, but in the interest of promoting actual consumer health literacy, I have to say it for those people who do.
The most buckwild thing to me, is seeing those types of âI should be able to pronounce all the ingredientsâ folks get very up-in-arms on the subject of food waste. I cannot imagine how many safe preservatives they canât pronounce, but i DO know how much more food waste there would be if said âchemicalsâ werenât in use.
