Essay: Little Crimes Against Nature

Folks are dumb where I come from

They ain ‘t had any learnin’

Still they ‘re happy as can be

Do-In What Comes Nat-ur-lly

—Irving Berlin, Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly

Smart Americans as well as dumb ones have always held a special belief in what comes natur’lly. That belief appears to grow stronger as society pulls further away from nature. As ever more synthetic artifacts of Western civilization emerge from laboratories and test tubes, a great many people have developed an outright crush on nature. Indeed, the supposedly natural is so warmly regarded nowadays that the artificial is in danger of getting an unjustly bad name.

There is nothing wrong with loving nature. The trouble is that in the commercial rush to exploit this popular sentiment the notion of what is natural is getting stretched absurdly out of shape. It is even possible these days to see references to colors called natural vinyl and natural nylon. Considering nature’s own glaring penchant for diverse and gaudy colors, it is illogical that any anemic shade should be called (as convention calls it) natural. And it is preposterous to put that label on synthetic stuff. If man-made plastics possess a natural color, then it is fair to ask: What is the natural color of a Buick?

The results of human artifice are one thing, the effects of nature are another. A raccoon’s coat is natural, a raccoon coat is not. Hair grows naturally on the human head, but its naturalness vanishes the instant it is groomed with comb, brush, scissors or curlers. The term natural, in its strictest sense, should not be applied to anything contrived or even changed by man. Some philosophers, to be sure, encourage a soupy sort of reductionism. “Nature who made the mason, made the house,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. That notion is nonsense. It is plain as rain that people invented the house to escape the elements of nature.

Mankind would never have got anywhere without outwitting or overpowering the natural order of things. Early humans invented the arts of agriculture and livestock management to free themselves from dependency on the uncertain bounty of nature. Crucial differences between things devised by humankind and those that issue from Mother Nature often get blurred in the cause of merchandising.

An amazing variety of goods goes to market these days identified either directly or by insinuation as natural, or as nature’s, or as conducive to naturalness. Bloomingdale’s, that barometer of with-itness, features jeans made of “natural stonewashed denim.” Golden Key Creations of Fort Worth urges customers: “Be pure, natural, beautiful with Vitamin E cream!” Breeder’s Choice Pet Foods has launched a new line of “all natural” dog food, which is the regular line bereft of additives, and Weleda, Inc., of Spring Valley, N.Y., sells “an all-natural, non-aerosol spray deodorant.” Bootstrap Press of Glendale, Calif., offers a book that teaches “the deep natural breathing you were born with.”

The national boom in fresh-from-the-factory natural foods shows no signs of abating. There is hardly a department of any supermarket that does not offer some sort of comestible with “nature” or “natural” on the label. Hershey’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips boasts “all natural ingredients.” Snyder’s of Hanover pretzels are said to be natural, as though just plucked off the old pretzel tree. Mrs. Paul’s French Fried Onion Rings? “Only from natural fresh sliced onions.” Ice cream may be a man-made culinary artifact, but here comes Schrafft’s Light “all natural ice milk.” Beer making may entail an intricate legacy of culture and chemistry, but there goes Anheuser-Busch Natural Light beer. Arnold’s now puts out a Nature1 bread, Kraft’s a natural cheddar cheese, Heinz a natural vinegar. Mrs. Smith’s Bake and Serve Pie may contain artificial color and flavor, monoglycerides, diglycerides and the antioxidant BHA, but it also includes, or so the label says, “natural juice” apple. The phrase inevitably provokes a question: Where to find any perfectly natural commercial fruit? The answer, of course, is that almost all agricultural products since the heyday of Luther Burbank are hybrids that were developed or improved by state agricultural departments. An apple today is not necessarily natural just because man has not yet made it square—like the tomato.

These promiscuous claims of naturalness have become something of an embarrassment to people who are supposed to know what they mean. Says Jules Rose, board chairman of Sloan’s Supermarkets: “The term natural foods drives me crazy because no one has come up with the right definition.” The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau has more or less evaded the issue by relying on a definition of naturalness that boils down to “minimally processed”—that is, food unchanged except by cutting, grinding, drying or pulping. This elastic notion may be comfortable for merchandisers but possibly help preserve a clear cannot sense of what is natural.

Nowhere does the idea take a more gratuitous bruising than in the to of cosmetics. Ever since the 1960s, when hostility to technology began turning the so-called natural look into a hot advertising gambit, the cosmetics industry has been overworking its overripe imagination to convince customers that naturalness is to be had only through the use of ointments, lotions, tints and other exotic stuffs. Gillette’s “new FOHO — For Oily Hair Only —system” all but ineluctably boasts “natural ingredients.” Jojoba oil is plugged as “nature’s own deep moisturizing formula from the legendary desert plant.” The epitome of the natural cosmetics notion must be a product called Natural Image by Granny’s Girl: “all-natural, grown-up cosmetics especially for little girls! Blushers, Lip Glosses and Eyeshadows that give gentle hints of color, shine and scent …” What is easily forgotten under the enchantment of such copy is the unadorned fact that cosmetics exist entirely as interventions against natural appearances.

Finally, civilization itself is humanity’s definitive intervention against what is truly natural. No matter how wrong Jean Jacques Rousseau was about the nobility of the natural savage, he correctly saw that social order “does not come from nature.” Neither does much of what goes into society’s consumer goods. Far too often, as Physicians Stephen Barrett and Victor Herbert write in Vitamins & “Health ” Foods: The Great American Hustle, the natural label is nothing but “a magic sales gimmick.” The resulting confusion may not be a mortal danger, but it is hardly innocent. Unchecked, it is bound to make it harder for rising generations to maintain a clear notion of the truly natural to which mankind indeed remains tied. Not long ago, a Chiffon margarine commercial got a lot of mileage out of the line “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” It is even less nice to blame and credit her for things beyond her doing.

— By Frank Trippett