Anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock somewhere in the barren wastelands of nowhere will probably at some point heard about dangerous “chemicals” in our food and water supply. It’s an amazingly common trope that isn’t just limited to food-bloggers and woo-merchants, and invades common parlance all the time. These nasty chemicals are everywhere, and they’re not good for us. So eat organic, avoid chemicals, or you will die!
The average skeptic and pro-science response to this lunacy usually goes thusly:
Silly peon! Don’t you know everything is a chemical? Water is a chemical. Air is a chemical. You like drinking water and breathing, don’t you? But you’re an idiot! You don’t get it, you don’t understand what a chemical really is! What about (R)-3,4-dihydroxy-5-((S)- 1,2-dihydroxyethyl)furan-2(5H)-one? That sounds scary doesn’t it! But that’s vitamin C! You’re such an idiot. This is nothing but chemophobia!
And fair point. Chemophobia – nominally the “fear of chemicals” but is really just the “fear of chemicals whose names you can’t pronounce” – is a serious problem that interferes with scientific literacy and keeps a lot of really stupid people (*cough*Vani Hari*cough*) financially solvent with ActualMoney.
But… because there’s always a “but”… “everything is a chemical” doesn’t actually refute what our hypothetical woo-merchant is saying.
We know from observation that this hypothetical woo-merchant probably isn’t against breathing an admixture of O2, N2, Ar, and CO2 and H2O in their gaseous state. Similarly, we can presume they’re not against drinking dihydrogen monoxide oxidane nor the concept of vitamin C being generally a good thing. So, quite clearly, these things are not in the category they are talking about when they say “we should avoid this”. Their use of the word “chemical” might be ill-defined and non-technical (see below), but simply re-defining what they mean by “chemical” on only our side of the conversation does nothing to refute their claim nor their fundamental errors. They are clearly using “chemical” to refer to a sub-set of chemicals; they know that, and we also know that. Refuting a claim based on operating an argument over a completely different set of Things isn’t technicality, it isn’t nitpicking nor pedantry, it’s just plain fallacy. It would be as if Person A said “look at those 99 red baloons go by!” and Person B declared “FALSE! There are only 45 red baloons, the remaining 54 are pink!”
In fact, calling everything “a chemical” isn’t even a technical definition as used by actual chemists. If it were, we’d have no use for the term at all. The water running through a reflux condenser would be a “chemical”. The nitrogen running through the Schlenk lines would be a “chemical”. Our lunch would be a “chemical”. Hell, our bodies are a god-damned dangerous chemical refinery of unfathomably complexity that chemical the chemicals with the chemical chemicals. And so an instruction like “put all the chemicals back in the chemical cupboard” – an instruction barked at undergraduates with steadily increasing profanity as time wears on – would be literally meaningless. The only way to satisfy such an instruction would be to cram the entire universe into a losely-defined cupboard. And then put the cupboard itself inside it, too.
So yes, professional chemists use “chemical” to mean just a sub-set of all chemicals in the world. We use it to mean just the substances (usually solid) that we intentionally mix together for a reaction. Often, even solvents are excluded from the category “chemical” because they’re not often part of that intentional reaction. I’m speaking in terms of the common parlance, of course, as you’d use it in a daily conversation with another chemist, as we’re more likely to say “reagent” in a more formal setting or something more precise. But that’s the point, even if we held that on an abstract level that everything is a “chemical”, we wouldn’t actually use the word that way.
The “technical” definition of a chemical is far closer to the woo definition than most pro-science skeptics think.
Instead say…
Your definition of “chemical” here is really arbitrarily defined. You seem to put substances you don’t like into it, and ones you do like aren’t included, but you’re never really clear why. This is a problem because you ignore some really important concepts such as the dose-response relationship, where a sufficiently low dose of something that you might consider dangerous (like cyanide or benzene) are harmless, but a sufficiently high dose of something you might consider benign (like water) will definitely cause you harm. It also doesn’t take into account multiple safety studies done on substances that account for this and quantify their relative harms. Perhaps if you were more specific about the precise substances you’re against and the dosage limits you find acceptable or unacceptable, and why, then your arguments might be better accepted by the pro-science community. Because as it stands, your definition and usage of “chemical” is simply vague and ill-defined. You only seem to be using it to import the connotations of the smoke-stacks and refineries of the peterochemical industry, and use them to imply otherwise-benign substances are more dangerous than they really are.
Feel free to copy-paste that. Add the “you’re an idiot” parts back in as you see fit.
