Is Natural Food Really Natural?

You hear a lot these days about eating natural food while avoiding artificial foods such as genetically modified organisms or GMOs. I am not sure that this is a meaningful dichotomy and would argue that there is no such thing as "natural" food.

I made the distinction in a previous post between natural and artificial saying that something is natural if it is a product of nature while we can think of it as artificial if it is caused or created by humans. Is the food we eat today, a product of nature? Honestly, I don't see how anyone can claim that anything we eat today is natural.

Around 10,000 years ago humans gave up their hunting and gathering lifestyle in order to settle down and stay in one place. In order to feed themselves they had to start farming and raising animals for food. I realize that I have hazed over the complexity of this transition. But the transition is not part of the argument I am making. The argument I am making is that humans have not eaten any natural food for over ten thousand years.

As people settled down, they began planting seeds in specific locations rather than gathering the grains from where ever they naturally grew. Over time they began selecting seeds from more desirable plants. Eventually, they started getting scientific about crop production and eventually got down to the DNA level with GMOs. The point here is that GMOs are not a different kind of thing from natural plants. They are merely the latest human innovation in attempting to improve the food supply. If you really want natural food, you need to go out to a pristine field somewhere and gather it in its natural state hoping that there are no human finger prints on it.

A similar argument can be made for animals which were fed and bred to produce more desirable results. The animals, as well as the plants, were not only selectively bred but they were protected against diseases by antibiotics and any number of other interventions. So, if you want a natural steak, you would have to go out to that pristine field and hope to find a woolly mammoth, hoping further that it hasn't eaten all your natural grain.

Natural vs. artificial is not the distinction we are looking for. But, if it isn't, what are we concerned about?