Why do we eat petroleum-derived products? Why are chemists making our food so often nowadays?
From synthetic food colourants to ultra-processed flavour systems, from emulsifiers to stabilisers and texturisers, modern food increasingly resembles an industrial chemistry project more than an agricultural product. And while chemistry is absolutely fundamental to food science, somewhere along the way the discipline itself escaped its natural boundaries and started acting as if food were merely a molecular puzzle waiting to be solved.
Chemistry is one of the foundational disciplines necessary to understand both food science and culinary arts. So much so that the first two years of most engineering programmes in food technology are centred around it. Perhaps this is why it was assumed that a chemist can easily become a food technologist.
Rookie mistake.
A food scientist is first and foremost an engineer, therefore an empiricist and, ideally, a polymath. Chemistry forms the basis of the profession’s training, yes, but physics, microbiology, biotechnology, botany, agriculture, toxicology, sensory science, nutrition, processing engineering, and even anthropology come together to complete the knowledge of somebody trusted to feed a population.
Food is not a purely chemical system. It has biological, physical, cultural, agricultural, and empirical dimensions.
And therefore, reducing it to chemistry produces flawed outcomes.
The issue is not that chemistry is used in food. Chemistries form the basis of food science. The issue is that chemical reasoning, when applied in isolation and without empirical grounding, allows decisions to be made without full accountability for their biological and societal consequences.
When food is reduced to a chemical problem, the eater disappears. What remains is a system optimised for stability, scalability, cost reduction, and regulatory compliance, but not necessarily for human immediate and long-term well-being. The deeper problem is not chemistry itself, but the rise of chemical thinking as the dominant framework through which food is understood and regulated.
And this did not happen in a vacuum.
The great professional migration
The last decades of the twentieth century saw the rapid deindustrialisation of the former industrial giants: the United States, Western Europe, and later, the former communist bloc. It was not a sudden collapse but a decades-long restructuring accelerated by automation, globalisation, and the offshoring of manufacturing.
What made this process particularly disruptive was not merely the loss of factories, but the displacement of entire professional classes.
Steel, coal, chemicals, metallurgy, heavy manufacturing, defence industries, industrial research institutes – all contracted dramatically or disappeared altogether. Yet universities and technical institutes continued producing chemists, engineers, metallurgists, and process specialists at rates designed for economies that no longer existed. The educational system lagged behind industrial reality.
The result was a surplus of highly educated professionals with nowhere to go. And naturally, many transitioned into industries protected from relocation. Food manufacturing became one of them.
Food production cannot be entirely offshored. People still need bread, dairy, meat, snacks, sauces, beverages, flavourings, preservatives, etc. And they need them fresh. The sector continued expanding precisely while traditional industrial sectors contracted. Especially in Europe.
And so an enormous migration began. Experts in organic chemistry, electrochemistry, metallurgy, industrial process engineering and adjacent disciplines entered food systems, often with little substantive retraining and often under the assumption that technical expertise is universally transferable.
Sometimes this works. However, sometimes it becomes a category error. As displaced professionals do not enter a field empty-handed. They bring with them the epistemological frameworks of their original disciplines. Chemists see molecular composition and reaction kinetics. Metallurgists think in terms of structural behaviour and phase transitions. Process engineers prioritise optimisation and throughput. These are not wrong frameworks, but they are partial frameworks.
And when enough people from one discipline enter another field, those frameworks stop being perspectives and become doctrine. This is where institutional capture begins. Not conspiracy, not malice. Simply disciplinary dominance reproduced at scale.
Regulatory frameworks, ingredient approval systems, standards, research priorities, funding mechanisms, industrial norms gradually begin reflecting the assumptions of the dominant professional cohort.
And chemical thinking has increasingly taken over food systems.
Comparable cases in other fields
This is not unique to food science. The pattern appears across several fields:
Finance. The migration of physicists and mathematicians into financial services from the 1980s onward – the “quants” – produced genuine innovation but also contributed to systemic risk, as frameworks built for physical systems were applied to human behavioural systems without adequate adjustment. The 2008 financial crisis had a significant component of model-driven overconfidence by people trained to believe equations describe reality with precision.
Healthcare management. The entry of MBA-trained administrators into healthcare from the 1980s onward imported efficiency and throughput frameworks from manufacturing. These produced measurable gains in some areas and serious distortions in others, as the metrics of industrial production proved inadequate to the complexity of clinical outcomes.
Environmental consulting. Geologists and civil engineers displaced from extractive industries in the 1980s–90s moved into environmental impact assessment in significant numbers, with predictable effects on how “environmental impact” was defined and measured.
Nutrition science. Biochemists and physiologists have historically dominated nutritional research, producing a heavily molecular and reductionist framework (nutrients, not food) that has been criticised by food scientists, epidemiologists, and anthropologists for missing the systemic and cultural dimensions of diet.
The epistemological consequence and technocratic overconfidence
The consistent deeper problem is not incompetence as the individuals involved are often highly capable, but what could be called disciplinary parochialism at scale. Each profession trains people to see the world in particular ways, to privilege certain kinds of evidence, and to consider certain questions worth asking. When large numbers of professionals from one discipline enter another, they reshape what counts as a legitimate question, what counts as rigorous evidence, and what counts as acceptable risk.
In food science specifically, this has meant that the molecular and chemical dimensions of food have been heavily resourced and theorised, while sensory science, cultural nutrition, long-term epidemiological effect, and the relationship between processing and biological availability have been comparatively under-developed, partly as a consequence of who has been dominant in shaping the field’s research agenda.
The lag problem
Perhaps the most structurally important observation is that deindustrialisation displaces professionals faster than education systems can retrain them or new industries can absorb them appropriately. The result is a permanent cohort of professionals working outside their native domain, applying their native frameworks, for careers spanning decades. The effects on adjacent fields are therefore not temporary but become structurally embedded: in regulations, in ingredient approval norms, in research funding priorities, and in what professional consensus looks like.
The professionals trained after them inherit a field that has already been reshaped.
What began as labour displacement gradually became philosophical transformation. And this transformation altered what questions are considered legitimate, what evidence counts as rigorous, what risks are deemed acceptable, and ultimately what populations are allowed to eat.
The reduction of food into molecules
Modern food science increasingly treats food as a collection of isolated compounds rather than a living biological system embedded in culture, physiology, and long-term ecological relationships.
The molecular dimension became heavily resourced and theorised, while sensory science, empirical nutrition, biological complexity, long-term epidemiological effects, and processing interactions remained comparatively underdeveloped.
We learned how to isolate compounds faster than we learned how they behave inside living systems over generations.
The logic became dangerously simple:
“If there is no proof of toxicity, then it is safe.”
But absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Quite often substances entered the food chain on the basis of theoretical safety assumptions rather than deep empirical understanding. History is full of ingredients once considered harmless and later restricted or banned after evidence accumulated slowly over decades: certain synthetic colourants, brominated vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated fats, potassium bromate, titanium dioxide in some jurisdictions, and countless other examples where industrial utility outpaced biological caution.
And even today the same mentality persists. Random salts proposed to replace traditional ingredients such as sodium chloride…Or simply said table salt. Highly processed protein substitutes disconnected from historical dietary patterns. Mealworm flour presented as a technological inevitability rather than a proposition requiring broad biological, cultural, and nutritional scrutiny. Synthetic replacements for ingredients humans evolved alongside for millennia.
The argument remains the same: “There is no evidence of harm.”
Of course sometimes evidence does not exist because no long-term civilisation-scale experiment has yet fully unfolded. Human metabolism is not a short-term laboratory assay. Food operates across generations.
A food scientist working empirically understands something very important: biological systems are messy, adaptive, interconnected, and frequently non-linear. Real food behaviour often refuses to obey elegant theoretical simplifications. That is precisely why empiricism matters.
The clash of silos
What emerged over time was not merely a disciplinary shift but a clash of professional silos.
Chemists, nutritionists, public health experts, engineers, toxicologists, regulatory scientists.
Each discipline often trapped inside its own internally coherent worldview.
Nutritionists may reduce food to nutrients. Chemists to molecules. Public health experts to population metrics. Engineers to process stability. Nonetheless, food exceeds all of these frameworks simultaneously.
The problem is not cross-disciplinary movement itself. Cross-disciplinary shift can be very beneficial and actually boost innovation, but it must be done with humility and awareness of personal and prior professional limitations. Otherwise, it just becomes institutional capture.
The problem emerges when migration happens without epistemic humility. When theoretical competence in one domain is mistaken for deep understanding of another.
When professionals stop recognising the limits of their own frameworks.
Because food is one of the few domains where biology, culture, psychology, economics, agriculture, chemistry, ecology, and sensory perception all collide directly inside the human body.
And the body always has the final vote.
Food requires humility
A civilisation that forgets food is biological eventually starts treating humans as chemistry sets. This is why food science desperately needs integration again. Not less chemistry, but chemistry placed back into proper proportion alongside agriculture, sensory science, physiology, microbiology, toxicology, anthropology, and empirical observation.
Food requires polymaths. It requires people capable of understanding not only molecules, but systems. Not only reactions, but consequences and relationships. Not only shelf stability and physicochemical understanding, but biological and social coherence.
Cross-disciplinary migration can absolutely enrich a field, but only when accompanied by humility, retraining, and awareness of the limitations carried from prior disciplines.
Otherwise innovation slowly turns into institutional capture dressed up as scientific progress.
And the eater disappears from the equation.