Published on May 6, 2025 5:44 AM GMT
Some people (the “Boubas”) don’t like “chemicals” in their food. But other people (the “Kikis”) are like, “uh, everything is chemicals, what do you even mean?”
The Boubas are using the word “chemical” differently than the Kikis, and the way they’re using it is simultaneously more specific and less precise than the way the Kikis use it. I think most Kikis implicitly know this, but their identities are typically tied up in being the kind of person who “knows what ‘chemical’ means”, and… you’ve gotta use that kind of thing whenever you can, I guess?
There is no single privileged universally-correct answer to the question “what does ‘chemical’ mean?”, because the Boubas exist and are using the word differently than Kikis, and in an internally-consistent (though vague) way.
The Kikis are, generally speaking, much more knowledgeable about the details of chemistry. They might hang out around chemists, whose intellectual ancestors invented the precise definition of the word “chemical”. Or they (we) might just be the kind of person to bank on their knowledge of things-like-chemistry. It’s easy to assume that the Kikis must be right that “avoiding chemicals” is silly, since they seem to know so much more.
But the Boubas are pointing to a real thing that Kikis seem weirdly inclined to assume away: The modern world does intentional large-scale chemical engineering, and this is meaningfully different in its scale and quickly-shifting nature than nearly anything that came before 1661. You can’t necessarily use the same analogical and cultural reasoning you would have used in 1660 to tell you what’s safe and what isn’t, in a world where everything you touch was chemically engineered.
Which is not to say that the Boubas are right to avoid all (Bouba-defined) chemicals in their food! But it is to say that reversed stupidity is not intelligence: You should be less confident in your understanding of the long-term consequences of eating Red Dye Number 40 than in your understanding of the long-term consequences of eating non-GMO wheat. Pretending otherwise is silly. At the same time, risks do not inherently outweigh benefits! Red Dye Number 40 is very pretty! I’d guess that food preservatives have saved or enabled millions of lives! I haven’t looked it up; I’m going to live with the risk that I’m wrong, and so are you.
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