Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple years ago I worked on a market research contract for a food grower that tried to answer the opposite, "what does all natural mean" (or some set of synonyms)? Turns out it's virtually impossible to define it. Here was one of the exercises we went through: 1) Take an orange, grown in the wild without being touched in any way by the hand of man. 2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all na…
"2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all natural"? 3) If you squeeze that orange, and drink its juice, is it still "all natural"?" The In Defense of Food argument is not so much about whether or not the food is still "natural" at that point. The point is you are throwing out much of the orange, and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you. Pollan talks abo…
Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.
You don't just grab a potato out of the ground and eat it whole. Or jump out into a field of cattle with a fork and knife ready to go. You can do that with some foods, not so much with others. If the metric is "you must be able to eat it right out of the wild with 0 processing" you're going to eat a lot of raw tomatoes and peppers and not a whole lot else.
In many cases, you have to process the food source to make it edible. Rhubarb for example has poisonous leaves that will kill you. The green bits of the tomato can surpress cardiac functions. For most animals you can't just start biting chunks out of them. You may have to remove internal organs that are inedible, bones (I don't see many paleo eaters advocating cracking open thigh bones to get at the marrow very often btw), etc.
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-10-poisonous-fruit...
In some cases, edible parts may contain bad stuff, pork meat for example is well known to be unsafe raw. I'm pretty sure cavemen ate pigs (or at least boar). Cow brains may contain prions. etc.
I do agree with you that food manufacture from chemical components on up is likely not complete, but there's not really much of that in the industry. Even highly "processed" foods like hotdogs or McDonald's chicken McNuggets are just ground up and cooked scrap meat and connective tissue (all paleo friendly!). They have all the stuff that's in meat anyways. The process to make imitation cheese doesn't generally fall under that kind of manufacturing process.
Many common and cheap foodstuffs also don't contain much nutrition. Vitamin fortified rice has probably improved the lives of a billion people.
People also get all kinds of scared when the chemical names for common food components are used. Should I use "salt" or "sodium chloride"? Should I avoid all foods with Monosodium Glutamate (good luck with that)?
But like anything it all just comes down to moderation. Nutmeg is great and natural, but if you eat too much of it you'll get have hallucinations and may die. Who knows what's in a clam, perhaps if you eat clams 3 times a day for a year (a completely possible scenario for a caveman) you'll have serious health problems like mercury poisoning or some other issue.
Who knows?
and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you.
You may also be throwing out stuff that's very bad for you. It's all conjecture.