For food additives

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Have you ever heard the name of Butlerov? There is a street named after him in Moscow. Anyone who studied well at school and did not get all the chemistry lessons should remember that there was such a theory - Butlerova. You can go to Wikipedia (where else), but the story that happened to this outstanding Russian chemist, which I want to tell, is not written there.

Butlerov came to the famous economist Dmitry Ivanovich Medeleev. Yes, Mendeleev never considered himself a chemist. And he considered him an economist. But I came with a question about chemistry. Just at that time there was a problem with understanding: why the same substances in chemical composition behave differently. This means that the total number of atoms is the same, but the behavior is different. Now we already know that a molecule has a structure, isomers and more, but then it was just discovered. So, Butlerov suggested that atoms have bonds with each other. To which Mendelev killed him and trolled him. Yes, he was indignant at the completely "unnecessary" idea. What kind of connections can there be ???

What to do? The power of authority.

I must say that the case in science is far from the only one. For example, Pauli, who lived later and is still remembered alive, shouted (in the literal sense of the word) at young Brillouin when he proposed the idea of a spin in the atom: “How did you give someone a diploma of education ?!”. Much later, admitting that he was wrong, Pauli remarked that: "we had to stand our ground."

All of these would be very funny stories if there was not a bit of sadness in it.

The authority of science has become the talk of the town. But I want to talk about something else.

Everyone saw a joke about the fact that a natural banana consists of harmful components with the E- marking? Well, in fact, a flavor enhancer is found in most fruits. It was discovered that way. It seems they found it in the plums. Its essence is that the sensitive papillae of the tongue expand, and the taste is perceived more saturated.

And the joke about E-supplements seems ridiculous, and the phrase "identical to natural" on the label seems natural.

I have a question for chemists and other scientists, for those who, on duty, stigmatize retrogrades and pseudoscientific views. For food workers with a chemical education, creating new additives, and blockers of other (unnecessary) tastes.

It did not occur to you that you, like our D. I. Mendelev, do not you know everything about nature, especially about living? Have you thought that the repetition of the chemical composition (of course with the same structure, concentration and other known things) is not exhaustive for the organism? Could it be that a gas chromatograph, which comprehensively demonstrates the composition from the point of view of chemistry, loses the nature of living things? Suddenly, there is still an entity describing the nature of matter still unknown to science?

We do not eat gasoline. Good, healthy, tasty, natural food is so far from chemistry!

Personally, I do not have an answer to the question - what kind of entity separates the living from the dead. Note that I am not talking about God, the soul and other prejudices. I'm talking about food.

Live, fresh food is healthy. The dead, lying in the refrigerator "bush's legs" since the time of the pharaoh, are harmful. Apples from the supermarket with the taste of sawdust, pears that are not inferior in hardness to carrots, odorless winter parsley - all these are chemical products. Not that the benefits are questionable, the harm is obvious.

So, in spite of the lack of an answer as to what it is still there, I am protesting against considering cooked food made from reagents to be equivalent to natural food. You, gentlemen, chemists and champions of the omniscience of science, have no reason to consider them equal and equally useful. There is no scientific justification, no moral right to add "useful additives" and minerals to products.

Have you conducted experiments? And supposedly nothing terrible was found?

I can argue. A very famous film ("Double portion"), where a man ate at McDonald's for several weeks, and grew fat and weakened.

Well, it's the same McDonald's … But from your point of view, count and measure everything, calories, carbohydrates, proteins, and other dregs, it turned out that all this was enough at McDonald's. Where is the logic?

Stop lying to people that the chemical composition completely replaces the benefits in food. You came up with it.

Stop adding nasty things to food. Find the courage to admit, at least to yourself, that scientific knowledge is very limited, and you can't transfer knowledge about dead nature: coal, oil, water and other things to living things - what we eat.

For millions of years, our ancestors ate only what they found or caught. Even the refrigerator is less than a hundred years old, and so far no improvement in health has been seen.

This craving for the natural, you call mocking fashion, vitalism and the like.

From the fact that you do not know something, dear chemists, it does not follow that wildlife has something supernatural. It's your omniscience that lets you down. You have become like one front, an unquestionable authority. This authority is beneficial to you, you can sneak in any filth with a clever look. You yourself probably love fresh juice instead of diluting the dry concentrate with water.

I will repeat it again for those. There is no evidence that we know everything about the difference between living and nonliving nature. The repetition of the chemical composition does not give grounds to consider the substance to be identical to the natural one. This difference is not in the supernatural, but in an as yet undiscovered factor.

What exactly? Let the scientists who are paid for this and are looking for. And I will eat what chemists did not climb.