What does “all-natural” mean? It’s a phrase that finds it self on nearly every foodstuff label in most grocery stores, but at its heart, it is without an established meaning. There is no organization that stamps certain foods that meet certain qualification with this label; the Food and Drug Administration does not have “all-natural” in its regulatory lexicon at all. It is simply a thing that advertisers somewhere along the road realized would cater to consumers in a world were food seem more and more synthetic.
If you ever encounter something that does not derive from nature in your food, please immediately inform the closest biologist, theoretic physicist, or maybe even theologian. The word nature obviously does not mean “the green stuff.” I know it's a silly thing for me to note, but nature is a word describing everything that exists, including humans and what has come to be from them. Saying that a product comes from nature is a redundancy, and only really helps an idealistic buyer believe that the product was hand-made by good-spirited ethnic people of the food’s respective culture rather than in a factory’s assembly line as most of the product inevitably was.
Of course, as they do, many have redefined the word to a more restricted use, delegating which chemicals are natural or not. In these various contexts, we must remember that “natural” is a rough approximate of “healthy” and thus anything synthetic is thereby unhealthy. This is obviously the implication of putting “all-natural” in the first place; people nearly automatically operate on a naturalist fallacy, and feel more comfortable around products that are marked thusly.
As an example of novel uses of “natural,” let’s look at an article published on Naturalnews.com back in 2005 by Mike Adams. Adams decries the use of “all-natural” as well, but only due to its use in products he does not conceive of as matching his definition. Towards the end of the article, he alludes to his implicit ideas of what is a natural food ingredient:
“When you chemically or structurally alter food ingredients into a form that no longer appears anywhere in nature, it's no longer natural, folks.”
If that is so, it still does not indicate that said ingredient would be less beneficial to the consumer. Whether or not a chemical appears on Earth uninfluenced by humans is ultimately irrelevant to buyer. Not only that, but considering that “unnatural” chemicals are stable, there is no reason to think that they could not appear in nature just as well. None of the chemical compounds that we digest existed on Earth before life arose, nor on any other known planet (if know contrary to this, please again inform your local astrophysicist and prepare your Nobel acceptance speech); it wouldn’t be unreasonable to call them unnatural in different times and places. Most importantly, when these “unnatural” chemicals are catabolized and converted into simple monosaccharides or fatty acids, it shouldn’t matter if they were originally synthetically constructed on a moon of Jupiter; they all attain the same chemical composition in digestion, and thus “become natural” in Adams’ definition.
If crops, foods, or flavors that have been modified in a lab are not-natural, what about those produced hybridization, or by artificial selection? It’d be nigh impossible if not naïve to find and consume crops without historical human cross-evolution.
Best of all, the topic of Adams’ article was not on an additive that was actually synthetic, but over monosodium glutamate (MSG), a naturally occurring chemical which, despite its recent public paranoia, is on a fair-scale harmless to the mainstream population in edible doses according to the FDA and a stable scientific consensus. It’s seemingly evident that his preliminary assumption is that MSG is assumed to be unhealthy, and therefore cannot be natural. Apparently his idea that MSG is unnatural stems from the fact that in occurs (naturally) in glutamic acid, but not alone. He says:
“Claiming MSG is natural because free glutamic acid appears in tomatoes is sort of like saying cocaine is natural because it's derived from ingredients found in the coca leaf.”
He’s absolutely right. Both statements are entirely correct. And Plato would be flattered that so many people still operate on thought patterns as primitive as Platonic forms. Adams seems to this glutamic acid is essentially glutamic acid, and extracting MSG from it means that we are creating a compound of a new form. It’s equivalent to saying that someone “creates” water by pouring it out of a glass. But the fact is that the water, and the MSG, have always been there. The comparison with cocaine solidifies the obvious naturalistic fallacy: (1) All natural things are healthy. (2) Cocaine is not healthy. (3) Therefore, cocaine cannot be natural. The same flawed logic goes for MSG. Adams says:
“Of course, it's all quite ridiculous. By that definition, anything derived from plants, animals or elements found on planet Earth could earn the "all natural" label. The key is in understanding that it's the process that's unnatural, not the source.”
Not so ridiculous when the definition of “natural” is rightly understood, rather than constructing a personal definition. So apparently altering the composition of food products makes them unnatural to Adams. The fact of the matter is that this definition renders nigh every food unnatural. Because we do not live in the world of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs¸ food has to be processed, cut, burnt, simmered, cleaned, and prepared in manners that render it in an entirely different its “natural” state, many methods of preparing food altering it chemically. Unless Mike Adams lives at the Big Rock Candy Mountain where stew can be found in lakes, alcohol comes from natural springs, and cigarettes grow on trees, he and all others have to realize that their food and other supplies are not going to be untouched by human effects, and more importantly, that there is no reason to fear that they will. Their assumed definition of “natural” is not only technically incorrect, but functionally useless as a label for food in the first place; saying that a product is more natural does not confer on it nutritional superiority; most of the time “unnatural” ingredients serve as augments to taste or nutrition. And let’s all remember that, even if this bizarre definition of natural were employed, there would be no reason that producers of rat poisons could not properly label their products “all-natural” as well.
People like to believe that they are immune to the temptations of “corporate food,” but fall to their knees when a product is labeled with “all-natural” or “organic” simply by the virtue of the label. Not everything that a product “brags about” on its label is something at all time beneficial (e.g. low calorie) and not everything on a label is something unique: I may place stickers on the bananas I sell saying “Will not make you sick and kill you,” but the intention there is the same of the “all-natural” label, to advertise a product by producing the desire for naturalness in the buyers. People who buy into the "all-natural" craze are far more impressionable consumers than people who can resist labels.