Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.

Particularly pointless pedantry. We all know what they mean, and are to assume the best reading of what they're saying.

Bread, the example they used, is a particularly stark example where Americans are subjected to stuff that is rightly banned in most of the rest of the world.

It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals.

When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria.

Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?

> It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals.

That wasn't the point they were making. They made a purely pedantic point about the meaning of the word 'chemicals' in this context.

> Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?

I never said they are.

Besides which, I pay a premium for organic for that very reason. Glyphosate residue is a serious problem. And then there's all the agricultural runoff, biosphere contamination, chemical interactions, etc.

Less 'chemicals' is generally better; safer and healthier. It's super weird that people take issue with this simple statement, whether for pedantic reasons or through false equivalancies.

> When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides.

And didn't they teach you at school to soak all vegetables for a couple hours in water after buying them and before storing/using them? As for injected hormones, in my part of the world (Asia and Europe), we reject such produce if we're trying to eat healthy. My family literally grows pineapples in our backyard (which I bring to Europe) because industrial pineapples are injected with ripening stimulators.

> When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria.

In most of the civilized world, we typically ensure humane conditions as much as possible even in industrial farming, so that chicken need not be drugged and bleach washed. Like basic hygiene and humanity such as animals not being made to live in their own shit.

> Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?

Again, in most of the civilized world, we don't take issue with preserving minced garlic with citric acid. In fact, I regularly preserve a lot of veggies and sometimes even fruit this way. But I do have an issue when some industrial company decides to add sodium benzoate to their pickle to preserve it for months on end.

Actually, no, we don’t know what they mean. This is the foundation of the great motte and bailey that so much nutrition nonsense is based on. People say “chemicals”, and then they can gesture at a food label with a few obscure sounding ingredients and say “ooh, look how scary”. But for the vast majority of these “chemicals”, there is absolutely no reason to think that consuming them is a problem.

Anyway, since “we all know”, why don’t you go check out the ingredients for beyond burgers, and report back which “chemicals” you think are so disastrous.

Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general.

European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory.

Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.

“Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements.

For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns.

Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.

And there are a handful of chemicals banned in the US for health concerns that the EU is fine with.

Individual cases are interesting. For example, Wikipedia says this of E122:

> In the US, this color was listed in 1939 as Ext. D&C Red No. 10 for use in externally applied drugs and cosmetics. It was delisted in 1963 because no party was interested in supporting the studies needed to establish safety. It was not used in food in the US.

> Azorubine has shown no evidence of mutagenic or carcinogenic properties and an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0–4 mg/kg was established in 1983 by the WHO.

Wikipedia's article on E180 is a stub. Wikipedia's article on E105 says it's now banned in both the US and EU, but it doesn't say when it was banned: did the US ever approve it?

I hear they even process it with dihydrogen monoxide!

I'd rather apply hot dihydrogen monoxide to my dry lentils than use compound prepared by Beyond Meat.

I don’t understand the downvotes. Replacing foods that have been prepared in the same way for hundreds of years with foods treated with processes that have not yet been considered harmful is inherently risky. There are plenty of examples of unknown byproducts, isomers, and side effects that take years to flesh out.

I have noticed that Americans get wildly defensive about their bread, which is mostly objectively inferior, by far, to any decent European bread.

I don't know if it's reciting the pledge every day or the lack of experience on what good bread actually feels like; or if the health effects of eating US bread are just taken for granted because it's eaten daily, but American bread is bloody scary and should be recognized as such.

The 70s/80s want their insult back. You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it.

But we still have to listen to complaints that the only choices available are Wonder, Lipton, and Budweiser. Not true—literally for decades now.

> You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it.

I didn't say you can't buy quality bread though. I know it's possible to find nice bread.

I said it's mostly inferior, and it is. The vast majority of bread in America is stuff that I would rather go hungry than eat.

... Thanks for proving my point about getting weirdly defensive.

And thanks to whoever flagged my initial comment for proving it even more, lol.

If you don’t like styles of corporate bread, don’t buy them. But they work for those of limited means.

It's bread.

Decent, non-toxic bread ought to be available even to people of "limited means". Even, I would assert, to people of no means at all. The US is the wealthiest nation of all time, and there is no excuse for there to be so many people hungry, much less poisoned. It's so wild that this needs to be said.

And, products that toxic shouldn't be sold at all; at least not without large warning labels in multiple languages.