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Natural and Unnatural:
My life, like everyone else's, has been kind of disrupted. Before
the destruction of the world Trade Center, I was just beginning
an e-mail correspondence with a nice young woman in Texas. She
had read my essay called Gaffer's Wishes. In that I wished for
a lot of good things for everyone and she wrote to me about it,
adding a wish of her own.
Unfortunately, I forgot that correspondence along with many other things when the evil ones struck. Now I am getting back to normal again. That's Normal for me, which may seem weird to you. For me it simply means that I can give some attention and thought to other issues. One of the issues, which came up in our correspondence, was the concept of natural, as in natural food or natural ingredient, etcetera.
Almost my entire background is as a member of the scientific community. I am also a student of the English language. Thus, I tend to be very rigorous concerning the meanings of words. In fact, Mrs. Gaffer calls my attitude picky, especially when I get foolish and correct her.
When I went to the dictionary, I found so many different uses of the word natural that It didn't help much. It was like the Alice in Wonderland character where "A word means what I mean it to mean..." Assuming I understand the subculture which canonized the concept of natural, I have extracted two meanings which seem to apply.
Natural:
Present in or produced by nature.
Not altered treated or disguised.
I also found the corresponding definition for unnatural.
Unnatural:
Contrived or constrained; artificial.
This all came up because my correspondent expressed an intention to make natural candles from soy wax. Until then, I was not aware that there was a product called soy wax. It seems that soy wax is made from soy oil. I'm not sure how. From the internet however, I found that there are two methods for manufacturing soy oil. One is by squeezing oil from hot soybeans. That seems natural enough by our definition. It is similar to how we get olive oil.
The other method seems not natural at all. It is the commercial process which uses a solvent called hexane to leach the oil from the beans. Of course, I had to look up hexane. Here it is.
Hexane:
A colorless, flammable liquid, C6H14, derived from the fractional
distillation of
petroleum and used as a solvent and as a working fluid in low-temperature
thermometers.
I wonder if, when we buy a bottle of soy oil from the supermarket, the commercial leached oil is what we are buying. If it is, I doubt that the label would tell us. Is that really something that we would want to use in our stir fry? I think I'll stick with olive oil.
I wanted to learn more about this soy wax and oil from someone who is conversant with the ideas, so I sent a few questions to my correspondent. Sadly enough, I had neglected her too long. Her e-mail address is no longer valid, so I learned from the mail daemon. This seems to happen quite often on the web. Someone is there, then they disappear. Whatever, I am left with trying to answer my own questions.
One question was, how do you get soy wax? I wondered if this person made it herself or if she purchased it? Along with that I wanted to learn about how soy wax is made from oil. I did assume it is made from oil. Perhaps she will read this and tell me. I speculated about using evaporation to make the oil into a solid. I'm not sure that would work. I think one would get a sticky goo instead.
Then I though of the chemical process used to turn vegetable oil into shortening and, so called, peanut butter. I think it's also how Wendy's father makes that stuff called frosty. It is called hydrogenation. This is a process whereby hydrogen is combined with unsaturated fat to produce a solid saturated fat. My problem is that this seems to be diverging quite a bit from our definition of what is natural.
Thinking of that, lead me to another question. Namely, what would be an unnatural wax and why? I think the real question is, what is the property of a thing which determines if it is natural or unnatural? As I pointed out, the dictionary was not much help to me in that. For now, I will stick with the meanings I have surmised. If so, hydrogenated anything is not natural, by definition.
Herein is the problem for this subculture which canonized natural. Natural is a very soft word. That is just my way of saying it. In English, we have hard words and soft words and, of course, tweener words. Yes and no are hard words. They have very narrow meanings. There is no room for misunderstanding, though some people will pretend there is.
Natural, on the other hand is very soft. Check your dictionary. There is a range of meaning and this give a broad doorway to Madison Avenue. It leaves an opening for all of their hype and dishonesty. In one way of seeing it, only miracles are unnatural. Everything else is natural simply because it occurs. Thus paraffin is a natural product derived from crude oil which occurs in nature.
I think that is why everything we find in the supermarket has the word natural on the package somewhere; usually in very loud type. One of the favorite phrases is, "made from all natural ingredients." Think about that. That statement is true of everything in the world, even an automobile. The fact is, since natural is a soft word, Madison Avenue was able to hijack it. The final result is that natural has lost whatever meaning it once had. That is the normal result when those unconscionable jerks go to work. Ultimately, the English language suffers.
I can sympathize with the folks who yearn for a return to nature even though they get silly ofttimes. Mrs. Gaffer and I also tend toward what we consider natural, especially in foods. That is why we garden and Mrs. Gaffer still cans her own tomatoes. That is also why we do not use much in the way of processed and packaged foods.
On the positive side, I have noticed a trend by the marketing
and retail people to realize that people are not that easily fooled.
I notice more and more, an effort to satisfy our desire for less
processing and packaging. That is a good outcome. Let us hope
it continues.
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