Chemical Free, Veggies

I have been asked to leave one store in my life, and that was a Victoria market that bore a sign titled "Organic Salt". My rather loud protestations inquiring how what is essentially a rock be considered "organic" by any stretch of the imagination, or whether the term was an oxymoron (emphasis on moron), resulted in my being asked to leave. By my wife. Before I embarrassed her any further.

There's a lot of woo involved in the marketing term 'organic', but it does seem to come from a fear of chemicals in general.

The antivaxxers use scaremongering tactics that work through people's fear of mercury. Even more recently, our own government fell for a chemical scare with BPA by banning baby bottles containing it, although their own report suggests that there is little risk. Further assessment found baby bottles with PBA to be perfectly safe, but I doubt it will make much difference. The urban legend has started and, like aspartame, I expect people to be confused about it for some time to come. (If you follow that last link the webmaster equates Adolf Hitler with NutraSweet. Enough said.)

At the local country fair my fair wife once again sought some fresh produce. Above the squash and beans there was a sign proclaiming "Chemical Free, Veggies". Not just "pesticide free", or "grown without fertilizer", but free of all chemicals (one assumes) at all. No dihydrogen monoxide, no nucleotides (in deoxyribonucleic acid), polysaccharides (such as cellulose or starch), and no vitamins or minerals.

Now I don't blame the author of this sign, but it annoyed me nonetheless as another indicator of how poorly people understand chemistry. Listeria bacteria are entirely natural, but we would rather it wasn't in our food (leaving aside for a moment the woo involved in defining 'natural').

So a reminder, to all my students, of what contains chemicals. If you can shove something, and it shoves back, it's matter. And all matter is made of chemicals. And all chemicals are made of elements. And chemicals are either dangerous or safe based on their dose and their properties, not simply because they are chemicals.



But do be careful about dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO), an extremely dangerous chemical that some of our Olympic athletes have been caught using. Using complicated analytical methods I detected the presence of DHMO in the vegetables, and have decided that eating veggies is obviously too dangerous.

Cheers,

Ron Neufeld
Canada's Best Boarding School