Phrases That Need to Be Retired: "All Natural"

Today The Wag tackles one of the dumbest phrases of all time, "All Natural".

Hippies and Takoma Park residents with fragile constitutions may want to avert their eyes.

Actually, on second thought, stick around. You probably need this more than anyone. Your fragile constitutions are no doubt due to a lack of preservatives in your diet.

The phrase "All Natural" is meaningless on two levels, one philosophical, and the other practical. Let's start with the philosophical one:

There's no such thing as "natural".

Or, rather, there's no such thing as "not natural", which makes it a meaningless distinction.

Webster's relevant definition of "nature" is: "the external world in its entirety", which is to say, "everything but you". The only things that are not in "nature" and are therefore "natural" are:

a) You.

b) Stuff that doesn't exist.

We call anything in the "b" category "supernatural", which is another way of saying "pretend".

Therefore, to say that something is "all-natural" is to say that it exists entirely. Since I've never seen anything that only existed a little bit, that's a really dumb thing to say.

But let's say we take the more common usage of the word, that is to say "that which was not made by a human being from component parts", or "that which is not synthetic".

There's a problem with this, of course, in that synthesizing things is what humans do. Naturally. Plenty of other animals do it to, of course. Chimps fashion tools to get at termites and to brain each other with. Elephants do crazy-cool things with bark. Bower birds... make bowers.

Rare picture of the rapacious Bower Bird making nature his bitch.

We are, of course, better at it, by an order of magnitude or six. So we can make a distinction there, but it's really more quantitative than qualitative. We change our environment - and ourselves - because doing so has been very good to us in evolutionary terms. Put a human in any natural environment, and he'll start making tools and building stuff. Naturally. So in that sense, anything that human beings make is natural. Which leaves us with a meaningless distinction again.

But let's set philosophy aside, and go with the commonly accepted notion of what "natural" means, because what the heck, I'm feeling generous. We're still left with a practical issue, which is that the connotative definition of "natural" is jut flat-out wrong. This is because we usually equate "natural" with "good".

Which it most decidedly is not.

A couple brief lists:

Stuff That Is Natural

Hurricanes
Typhoid
Mental Illness
Pooping in the Woods
Deadly Nightshade
Big Things With Claws That Eat You, Like Bears
Dying In Childbirth
Dying From A Minor, But Infected, Laceration
Dying a Lot More Than We Generally Do Today
Being Very, Very Bored

Stuff That Is Not Natural

Houses
Vaccines
Wellbutrin
Indoor Plumbing
Not Eating Poisonous Flowers
Not Having To Live In The Woods With Big Things With Claws That Eat You, Like Bears
Cesarian Sections. Also, Pain Meds
Neosporin
Retirement Homes
Mad Men

Look, I understand the value of respecting and learning from complex natural systems, but there's nothing more inherently moral about that which is "natural". Sure, we screw up the synthetic all the time, but I'll take it over rampant dysentery any day of the week.

Of course, despite all this, people slap the "all-natural" label on just about anything. Because people keep buying it.

Don't believe me? Do a Google search for "all natural salt". Then marvel at the fact that you come up with ANY GODDAMN RESULTS AT ALL, never mind the twelve million or so I got.

Here's what all-natural salt looks like:


Now here's evil, corporate-controlled, genetically modified salt looks like:


Here's pure salt:


And here's plain old salt:


Notice anything? Oh, yeah: they're all exactly the same. BECAUSE IT'S ALL SALT. It's sodium chloride, maybe with a little dirt thrown in. You cannot improve on it. There is no way in which you can make salt fundamentally saltier. SALT DOES NOT CARE IF IT WAS GROWN ORGANICALLY.

Okay, you can make it Kosher by leaving the iodide out. But then you've still got the sodium ferrocyanide. And if you take THAT out, you're missing out on valuable, all-natural iodide and sodium ferrocyanide.

Now Google "all natural water" and take a gander at the hundred and twenty-six million results you get.

Don't worry. I'll still be here when you get done banging your head against the keyboard.

-- The Prolix Wag
If anyone manages to find an All-Supernatural breakfast cereal, I'm there with bells on.