the Earthly
Origin of
Commercial Materials Educational Organization |
Why
do we want to
know where
food comes
from? What I
can do to
describe
where food
comes from Whatever happened to the ear of sweet
corn pictured above? |
"People are simple to feed" Humans get oxygen, a macronutrient we require, directly from molecular oxygen in the air, ourselves. The water we require can come either from green plants, or from the earth's surface-water (or water slightly below the surface). Except perhaps for some (not unimportant) micronutrients (but, by definition, required in small quantities) that we get from micro-organisms living in our gastro-intestinal systems (or from eating animals that got these micro-nutrients from micro-organisms living in their gastro-intestinal systems), or from micro-organisms in the soil, when we ingest small amounts of soil clinging to soil-grown plants, or ingest animals that ate small amounts of such soil (see Medical Doctor Michael Klaper's web-site; scroll down the page until you come to the section on vitamin B12, otherwise known as cyanocobalamin), the remainder of the nutrients we require come almost entirely either directly from green plants (metaphytes), or indirectly from green plants when we eat animals that ate green plants, or animals that ate animals that ate green plants, etcetera. We need air, water, and green plants --
"green plants extract nutrients from the soil for us." The 9 macronutrients that green plants require include the three macronutrients they get from the air, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, plus the three that they get from the soil, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. These are the "primary" macronutrients. Nitrogen is the "bottle neck" nutrient, the nutrient that is most often in short supply and that is the key to enabling the greatest growth. While nitrogen is absorbed through the plant's roots, some green plants have a symbiotic relationship with microorganisms that grow in nodules on their roots. The microorganisms in the nodules turn aerial nitrogen into a form that the plant's roots can absorb from the nodules, in addition to any nitrogen that their roots can get from the soil. Calcium, magnesium, and sulfur are the three "secondary" macronutrients. The seven known micronutrients are boron, copper, iron, manganese, zinc, molybdenum, and chlorine. Iodine, iodine, get your fresh iodine But don't eat too much of it Why not volunteer to be deprived? |
Science History But it was not until only about a hundred years ago, that the exact relationships between water, aerial nitrogen, soil micro-organisms, soil ammonia, and soil nitrogen salts, in enabling green plants to grow, was elucidated by investigators. Today the relationship is kind of clear -- to a small class of people with education in life-sciences. But large amounts of these facts-of-life that have been elucidated by experimenters, and communicated with their languages -- via relatively low-tech experiments that can be duplicated, by any individual, without going to great expense -- are nevertheless still poorly appreciated by a large part of the human population -- we have dramatic classism in many cultures, in many societies, including North American "democratic" society. I am trying to put existing information together, for your convenience, in one spot, where perhaps they have not all been together, before. There is nothing new about any of the information I am presenting. |
Technology
History Not only have human beings learned about the natural biological processes of how green plants become available to people, as food, but human beings have learned how to wildly accelerate the process -- by turning aerial nitrogen into bottles and bottles and bags and bags of concentrated nitrogenous materials that people can transport from place to place, and can add to soil ( see Nitrogen ) -- materials that metaphytes (green plants) will convert into the nitrogenous substance of metaphytes. Then humans can have plenty of nitrogenous metaphyte substance, to convert into the nitrogenous substance of humans. Nitrogen in the Biosphere Soup or Chemistry? If you are describing the use of water to make soup, you don't describe the water you use as being a chemical, you describe it as being one of the ingredients you use. However should you decide to use the exact same water as a reactant in a chemical reaction, or if water was produced as a result of a chemical reaction you took an interest in, then you describe the water as being one of the chemicals you used, or a chemical that was produced. That is, one doesn't term a substance as being a chemical, or not being a chemical, in order to communicate a quality of the substance to one's listeners, rather, terming a substance as being a chemical, or not, is done to communicate something about the context in which one is discussing the substance. That is, being a chemical, or not being a chemical, is an ascriptive attribute of a substance (an attribute ascribed to the substance) and not a descriptive attribute of the substance. If someone were to ask is water a natural substance or a chemical, the answer is that any particular quantity of water can correctly have ascribed to it, the attribute of being either one, the other, both, or neither, and that whether any quantity of water should have ascribed to it the attribute of being a natural substance, or have ascribed to it the attribute of being a chemical, or the attribute of being neither, or of being both, depends upon the context in which it is being discussed, the context in which information about it is being communicated, and not upon any quality of the water itself. Water that is being discussed in the context of a beaker of water that is being used in a chemical reaction with other substances, is a chemical (this does not imply that it is not a natural substance); water that is being discussed in the context of a puddle of water that you find on the ground, and wet your foot in, is a natural substance. The same goes for hydrochloric acid. If you are talking about using hydrochloric to clean metal, it is a cleaning agent; if you are talking about hydrochloric acid in a stomach helping to digest food, it is a natural substance; if you are talking about throwing a glassful of concentrated hydrochloric acid in someone's eyes, it is a weapon; if you are talking about electrolytic production of hydrogen gas and chlorine gas, from hydrochloric acid, it is a chemical. Asking whether a substance is chemical or not, is not asking anything about the substance -- rather, it's asking only about what people have been thinking about, at a particular time, when thinking about and discussing the substance, or when deciding what to do with it. If something is described as a chemical, there has been an implication that the substance was intentionally used in a chemical reaction, or that it was known to have been involved in a chemical reaction, or that the substance was produced, intentionally, as result of a chemical reaction, or that it was known to have been produced as a result of a chemical reaction. So far I have been talking about relatively formal language, used correctly. Language can also be used informally, and informal use is often vague. Any further implications about a substance that someone intends, by calling the substance a chemical, informally, are connotations, rather than denotations, that may be applied in informal language, or colloquial language, but do not really tell us anything specific about a substance; rather, they tend to tell us more about the speaker, and how they feel about the substance, or even about how they feel about the people that have been using the substance, or selling it. Of course, not everyone always uses language correctly. Even supposedly educated speakers and writers, with legitimate university degrees, often use words incorrectly. Some do this more frequently than others. Tomatoes It is interesting to note that in the field of biology, or botony, the word fruit is used descriptively. In the field of produce marketing, the word fruit is used ascriptively. Actually, you could say that the term fruit is really at least 2 different words that sound the same, and the meaning of these 2 homonyms depends upon which language it is used in, the language of plant anatomy or the language of produce marketing. What's defined as a fruit, in the language of produce marketing, has little to do with what's defined as a fruit in the language of plant anatomy. Asking whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable is sort of like asking whether a trombone is a musical instrument or metal tubing. If you can make music with it, it is a musical instrument. It is metal tubing, no matter whether you can make music with it or you utilize it as part of a drip irrigation system in your vegetable garden, where one of the vegetables you are growing is tomatoes -- a vegetable variety that produces edible red fruits. |
The Earthly Origin of Commercial Materials Educational Organization |
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