[agileAlligator]

> I'd say many of these terms are way too vaguely defined and used. What exactly counts as "packaged" food? What's "processed" food?

Do you think this is some sort of a smart or incisive observation?

I am sorry if I come off as rude, but I have grown weary of people making such asinine comments, quibbling about terms and their definitions, when they clearly know what the parent comment is talking about.

[tharkun__]

It does come off as rude, yes. We see right here in all the threads the difference in opinion of what constitutes "processed" or "packaged". A lot of misunderstandings in the world stem from people using the same terms to mean slightly different things. So in fact I think it's very important to state this explicitly. It helps in business communication as well, when you're the third party and see that two people are saying the same thing with different words or using the same word to mean different things and they just keep arguing.

[agileAlligator]

I think most people know what processed food is when they see it. Asking what the definition of processed food is, is talking past the point.

[tekla]

This is just a excuse to be intellectually lazy. You just offload the definition to "you just know" and make it impossible to refute since it targets arbitrary definition.

[tharkun__]

Exactly!

And there's a case in point right in one the answers to my reply:

    So Kimchi is considered minimally processed

Minimally processed vs. processed. What does this actually mean to everyone? Who draws the line where?

As with the Sauerkraut example, home made Kimchi is minimally processed I would agree. Commercial Kimchi, like commercial Sauerkraut I would probably count as just "processed", not good for you. But agileAlligator may not see even commercial Kimchi/Sauerkraut as processed and he draws the line at "processed cheese", so that weird vegetable oil with "natural" color in it.

agileAlligator says

    Asking what the definition of processed food is, is talking past the point.

and I bet my other two questions above he'd see the same way. But he's not seeing that I'm not asking a direct question. I am not expecting any answers to those questions. I'm not asking for an actual definition. I'm "asking" so that people may ponder these and think back to previous conversations or look at some of the back and forth in these threads and recognize that people are talking past each other.