So was hissing my Mom when I was a kid - she was tired of Nature-banging, bearded, sandal-wearing Philippulus-like characters (do you remember Hergé's "L'étoile mystérieuse"?), and this was in the 1920's (she was born when "Ce siècle avait deux ans", a century after Victor Hugo's birth). Well, she was a bit ahead of her time, and I was really happy to read this lately:
"Natural Synthetic biologist Terry Johnson is really, really tired of people misunderstanding what this word means: "Natural" is a word that has been used in so many contexts with so many different meanings that it's become almost impossible to parse. Its most basic usage, to distinguish phenomena that exist only because of humankind from phenomena that don't, presumes that humans are somehow separate from nature, and our works are un- or non-natural when compared to, say, beavers or honeybees. When speaking of food, "natural" is even slipperier. It has different meanings in different countries, and in the US, the FDA has given up on a meaningful definition of natural food (largely in favor of "organic", another nebulous term). In Canada, I could market corn as "natural" if I avoid adding or subtracting various things before selling it, but the corn itself is the result of thousands of years of selection by humans, from a plant that wouldn't exist without human intervention. "
Read it and the rest of the piece, it makes for a good laugh. Instructive, too...
I also had a kick reading on a honey pot I bought yesterday at Delhaize's "100% Natural". Is it really? No human intervention at all?...
