Chemical: adjective - of or relating to chemistry or the interactions of substances as studied in chemistry; noun - a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, especially artificially.
When I was a graduate student, my supervisor and I used to have long conversations about etymology which is the study of word origins and the way that word usage changes over time.
One of our discussions was about the word "chemical". It was originally used as an adjective. Compounds were "chemical compounds". Processes were "chemical processes".
Over the last century, chemical slowly morphed into a noun. As in "this process is chemical free."
Over the past 10 years, chemical has come to signify "synthetic chemical compounds that are bad for you and will lead to cancer".
Or at least that is the way it is being used in television commercials and advertising. People are being told a whole variety of items and foods - from dish rags to coffee - are "chemical free". It is an advertising campaign intended to assure people that without chemicals these items are "safe".
Unfortunately, it is the wrong message on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin in deconstructing the argument.
Maybe at the very beginning. Every tangible object on Earth is made up of atoms. Those atoms are arranged into groups called "molecules". And all of those molecules are chemical compounds. You can't avoid them.
Indeed, you and I are made up of chemicals. DNA is a chemical. The air we breathe contains chemicals. Molecular oxygen is a chemical if we are going to use the term as a noun.
In particular, water is a chemical compound which is why we can't have chemical free drinks or dishwashing liquids or cleaning products. They all contain water.
This past weekend, I was watching the Brier when a Tim Horton's commercial played extolling their use of the Swiss Water Process for extracting caffeine from coffee beans in order to make decaffeinated coffee.
The commercial makes the point that they do not use chemicals to remove the caffeine and yet they use a WATER based process! Of course they use chemicals.
But even if one was to concede that water is not a "chemical", it is still a little disingenuous to argue that the process is chemical free.
Decaffeinating coffee was first achieved in 1905 by Ludwig Roselius. He soaked coffee beans in warm water to partly dissolve the caffeine and then extracted the compound using benzene. Unfortunately, all of the other compounds in the coffee bean dissolved producing a less flavourful cup of coffee.
This decaffeinated coffee was originally sold in Europe. By the time it was introduced to North America as "Sanka", benzene had been removed from the process and other solvents employed. Dichloromethane or ethyl acetate are the most common compounds used for this process now. As ethyl acetate is a chemical compound found in bananas, apples, wine, and even coffee beans, it is even considered a natural decaffeination process.
The Swiss Water approach has the same starting point as the coffee beans are soaked in warm water but it differs significantly from the direct extraction processes.
In the Swiss Water process, the solvent is water as you might expect. Except it is not just water as the process relies on saturating the water with the soluble compounds from coffee beans.
Coffee, the stuff people drink, consists of upwards of a 1000 different water soluble chemical compounds. Oils, fats, sugars, proteins, and flavour molecules are all extracted from the bean by hot water along with caffeine.
The process extracts all of these compounds from a batch of green coffee beans to saturate a water solution. This solution is then passed through activated charcoal that has been saturated with carbohydrates.
The charcoal is specifically sized to remove the caffeine molecules and leave the remaining compounds in solution. This results in a liquid labeled "green coffee extract".
It is this chemically prepared water that is then used to extract the caffeine from the remaining beans. The fact that the solution is saturated in all of the compounds found in green coffee beans except caffeine means they don't dissolve as readily. Only the caffeine is extracted from the bean leaving the flavour intact.
In essence, the process relies on saturating the water with the chemicals naturally found in coffee.
Maybe it is just a question of semantics but it is still a chemical based process. It is simply not a process based on organic solvents. It does rely on the organic chemical compounds found in coffee, though.
We live in a chemical world. There is no way to avoid it. But maybe a more clear definition of chemical would help.
