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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
