Why exactly is "high fructose corn syrup" not natural? High fructose corn syrup is processed from corn in some way, making it clearly artificial in my opinion. Cane sugar is processed from sugar cane, again making it clearly artificial in my opinion.
I don't think that "artificial" and" natural are mutually exlusive catagories. "Artificial" means, in my opinion, made or processed by man, not "fake" in some vague sense of the word. This makes soda, of any kind, clearly artificial.
"Natural," on the other hand, is much more difficult to define. On one extreme, it could be defined as "at one point, the components were, at some point, part of nature," and by that definition, anything whatsoever is natural. On the other extreme, it could be defined as "exactly as it appears in nature," which makes almost nothing, especially if available in a grocery store, "natural." Where in between these two extremes is a meaningful definition of the term, I have no idea.
REC Orange CharlotteThis is a great dessert for summer meals (it'll be summer in the southern hemisphere in a few months). It makes use of an angel food cake that's gone awry, or you can bake...
If you go to the store and buy something that is unprocessed, such as a potato, banana, whatever, I think that product is artificial. It was probably grown on a farm of some sort, which is an artificially controlled environment. Even if it is "organic," or not "genetically engineered" in some way, it has most likely been selectively bred. Both of these things, in my opinion, make the produce just as artificial as if it had been synthesized in a laboratory. Is it still natural (again, "artificial" and "natural" are not neccessarily mutually exclusive categories in my opinion), that depends on what precisely what definition you wish to use. Even something that is caught, such as perhaps fish, still, I think meets the criterion of "artificial" in some ways. The fish itself is not artificial, but when prepared for consumption, it is cleaned, boned, possibly fileted, or processed in some other way before consumption..
Frankly, I don't think that there is any meaningful definition of the word "natural" that makes something like "Blue Sky soda" soda any more "natural" than Coca-cola or Dr. Pepper. Nor is 7up by its new formulation (whatever it might be) any more "natural" than by its old formulation (whatever it was).
That is just my opinion of the word natural. It has no legal definition. That is for good reason, in my opinion, it does not have any "meanigful" definition to base a legal definition on.
Brian Christiansen
