1y ago

Apart from water and salt, are there any inorganic foods?

An overwhelming majority of what we eat is made from plants and animals. This means that composition of our almost entire food is chemicals from the realm of organic chemistry (carbon-based large molecules). Water and salt are two prominent examples of non-organic foodstuffs - which come from the realm of inorganic chemistry. Beside some medicines is there any more non-organic foods? Can we eat rocks, salts, metals, oxides... and I just don't know that?

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Calcium carbonate, is the main ingredient in tums, and is the main component of limestone.
- But limes are organic, so shouldn't limestone also count as organic?
  
  Not sure if shitposting or genuine idiot. 👍
- …That's a salt, though, right?
  If you're counting non-NaCl salts as answers, then basically any "mineral" our body needs would probably be delivered at least partly in salt form. Just reading off some multivitamins here:
  Calcium Carbonate
  Chromium Chloride
  Cupric Sulfate
  Potassium Iodide
  Ferrous Fumarate
  Magnesium Oxide
  Manganese Sulfate
  Sodium Molybdate
  Sodium Selenate
  Zinc Oxide
  (I haven't fully checked all of these are salts— But I mean, a lot of of them are blatantly chemical analogues of stuff that definitely is salt (E.G. "Potassium Iodide" vs. "Sodium Chloride"), plus they're metals bonded to ionic groups so they're definitely not alloys or covalent molecules or ceramics.)
  This is probably because in order for our body to absorb stuff, it basically has be water-soluble, which means salts work quite well.
  When eating real food (plants, animals, and fungi), I assume a lot of this won't be in salt form, but rather it will mostly be bound up in proteins and DNA and such. For example, iron should be primarily in hemoglobin instead of ferrous fumarate. But some of it, for example the potassium, will definitely be technically in the form of dissolved salts/minerals in the fluids inside the food.
  You can of course also rearrange the compounds around. For example, this can of Windsor-brand "salt free salt substitute" I have here further lists:
  Potassium Chloride
  Calcium Silicate
  Magnesium Carbonate
  You'll note that these are some of the same components as in the list above, just a different combination. I'm pretty sure any ionic mineral that includes at least one ion that our body needs technically counts as "food", as long as the other half isn't poisonous— They should be basically the same when they dissolve in the water in our stomachs anyway.
  Meats can also be preserved by adding nitrates and nitrites to it, though technically I guess that's more of a likely-carcinogenic additive than part of the "food".
  Fun fact: Your body sorta knows when it's low on minerals, and will want to start eating dirt and rocks in order to make up for it! Over 100 different types of primate do it too. So in that case, you could probably argue that plain rocks and soil literally are food, in that they provide vital nutrients the body needs and that your brain is smart enough to know that. …These days it's apparently considered a mental disorder, but I swear it made much more sense back when the likeliest thing you were going to eat was some mud, rather than lead-contaminated radioactive refrigerants or whatever it is we've surrounded ourselves with.
  Enjoy, also, this lovely video from a chemistry Youtuber and his friends taste-testing which alkaline-chloride salt tastes the best!
  I am not a doctor. Don't go around eating rocks unless you're a bird or some other type of dinosaur.
  
  I am a geologist. I can confirm the majority of rocks are technically edible...
  
  Oh true, the mineral salts from supplements (and broader salts of necessary metals) should count! Thanks for a long answer!
- FWIW, most of our use of it comes from organic sources I believe.

What a fascinating question! I hadn't previously considered this.

Baking soda is also an inorganic compound.

That our diet stems from mostly molecules described in organic chemistry can also be the direct result of the fact that there are vastly more molecules considered "organic": about 19 million are known and the number is growing!
While for anorganic compounds, there are only about 100,000.
The separation into organic and inorganic chemistry is really only done to make it easier to talk about broader subjects in science. We need and use obviously a lot of compounds that aren't carbon based large molecules.

Can we eat rocks, salts, metals, oxides… and I just don’t know that?
You'll die without Iron, Calcium, Potassium, Magnesium, Zinc etc. in your diet. Your body relies on a lot of metals and salts to function.
You can see an example of a food's breakdown here to see all the metals and salts involved in foods: Nutrition data for rice (make sure you scroll to the "Detailed Nutrition Data" section and expand the categories like "Minerals")
Fun fact, calcium supplements are Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) - literally chalk. But for metals which are deliberately added to food, check out the Lucky Iron Fish developed to address anaemia in Cambodia.
- I mean... it seemed like a good idea and all, but it didn't help Cambodia. It's like only a couple paragraphs down in your link. It only addresses iron-deficiency based anemia which was not the main cause of anemia in Cambodia.
  
  Sure, but it still works for actual iron deficiencies, even if that wasn't the anaemia cause Cambodians were dealing with.
  I'm actually considering buying one for myself, I mostly eat vegetarian foods.

It depends on what you mean by "eat." Does being able to survive them traveling through your digestive tract count as "eating" something? Does it have to have nutritional value? If the former, any inorganic substance with a low enough LD50 in a low enough dose would count. If it actually has to have nutritional value, youre limited to minerals like Calcium Carbonate (chalk and this isnt organic despite Carbon being in its composition), Potassium Chloride (no salt), Magnesium Oxide (milk of magnesia), Iron Sulfate etc. and any inorganic derivative that has relatively low toxicity.
- Calcium carbonate is inorganic because it doesn’t contain hydrogen. Organic compound must have both carbon and hydrogen atoms.
  Edit- more specifically the hydrogen and carbon should be covalently bonded and there are still a few exceptions as noted by other comments below.
  
  That’s a false statement. It needs to have carbon-hydrogen non-ionic bonds for it to be organic. Think carbonic acid vs a ketone of some sort.
  
  Organic compounds don't have a strict consensus based definition today. So any matter of fact statement isn't widely held any longer. It's just one school of thought so to speak.
  
  Calcium carbonate is inorganic because it is a simple salt. Containing hydrogen has nothing to do with it. Ca(HCO3)2 is just as inorganic.
  If you think a molecule needs to contain both H and C to be organic, then fully halogenated propane is inorganic, but as soon as one of the 8 halogen atoms is not substituted it suddenly is organic again. This gets even more absurd with larger molecules like oleic acid C18H34O2. 34 chlorine replacing all H? Inorganic. 33? Organic.

Taco Bell.
- Technically, e coli counts as organic.

A number of food additives don't contain any carbon atoms; if you follow the links from the Wikipedia article on food additives you can find a bunch, for example sodium bisulfate which is a color retention agent.
There are also some interesting cases like the antifoaming agent Polydimethylsiloxane (found in trace amounts in, among other things, Chicken McNuggets) which I believe is technically a hybrid organic/inorganic polymer.

Some people with too much money eat gold-plated food. So in a sense, gold is food, and it's not an organic molecule.

If you're asking if you could survive off only non-organic, than no. Your body won't generate energy from those things. Broadly fat, carbs, and proteins are the primary sources (there are others, but they can mostly be shoe-horned into one of those or they're insignificant sources).
You also need a better definition of "food." You can ingest a lot of things that are considered inorganic and not die, but that doesn't make them food. You'll still essentially die of malnutrition though. So your body will still starve, so I guess you could use that as part of the definition of food I suppose. But then salt doesn't count as a food anymore, neither does water (but that makes sense at least... water has never been considered a food really).
I think you're using a lot of words that have ambiguous meanings that folks don't usually think about and that's going to affect a lot of answers.

Edible clay is something that is actually sold as a product for people to eat. It's not metaphoric. It is exactly what it sounds like.
- There's an MLM that just sells mud, then people eat the mud. I don't understand.

I’ve seen gold leaf put in food. It doesn’t hurt your body, apparently, but I guess you take nothing of value from it.
- If you eat enough you will eventually develop gold plated poo 4-12 hours later, and I think that is something!

In recent years, activated charcoal.
(Because many people apparently don't know this: Don't eat activated charcoal if you take any medication, it can render your medication ineffective)
Edit: Wait, I'm dumb, charcoal is very much carbon-based.
- Edit: Wait, I’m dumb, charcoal is very much carbon-based.
  I think that it still fits. People don't usually consider amorphous carbon, diamonds, graphite or fullerene as "organic", even if carbon-based.
  
  Charcoal and activated charcoal are not amorphous carbon compounds because their structures contain other elements than just carbon.
  
  I have to admit, chemistry has been a while and I don't remember the exact definitions of organic vs inorganic chemistry, so I just went off the "carbon-based" in the OP.

Hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide: common food additives to balance its pH. Technically included by the OP, as they're made from water and salt.
Silica: another common food additive (anticaking agent). Arguably "not food" because your body will simply poop it, undigested.
Metallic iron: if you're cooking in a metallic pot, some of the metal leaks into the food. Actually good in this case as iron is an essential mineral.
Metallic lead [historical]: the Romans used lead pots quite a bit, specially to boil either vinegar or barely fermented wine (mustum). The result is extremely sweet due to lead acetate, the first artificial sweetener that I'm aware of ...and extremely toxic. (OK, it's a partially organic salt due to the acetate anion, but still.)
Calcium carbonate: already mentioned by another user. It's essential to nixtamalise maize, but it's also used for stuff like candied pumpkin cubes.

Many minerals that are quite essential are used by other organisms so we get it that way, but that doesn't mean we have to. A good example is iron. Rust isn't a bioavailable form of iron compared to what you'd get from plants and animals, but you could eat rust and make some of the iron in it ferric chloride that you could then use for making hemoglobin. It's just not very efficient. What you can't do is get energy from inorganic molecules. We can only get energy from things on the citric acid cycle(or are made up of components of it), alcohols, sugars, fats, and proteins.

Bicarbonate soda, used heavily in baking. Vinegar (acetic acid as opposed to natural fermentation)
- acetic acid is organic, as in, it is an organic compound
  
  Bicarbonate is also organic.
  Edit: I found a source that says an organic compound must have a carbon-hydrogen bond. I knew CO and CO2 were inorganic, but more as an exception.

Lots of vitamins and additives are fairly simple chemistry. C vitamin for example is ascorbic acid, easy to synthetise. Although it does consist of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, which technically makes it an organic compound, so it depends on your definition of organic. OLED screens aren't called organic because they're grown, but because there are organic compounds in their composition.
And that's really the case for everything. Life at the end uses just chemical processes like burning and dilution, and we can do almost anything in a lab. We're just usually not as effective. Glucose is the simplest sugar and easy to make, but just harvesting it from a plant is still much cheaper.
Anyway, you probably could ingest some tiny particles of iron oxide to get your iron, I guess.
- Modern definition of Organic as it pertains to chemistry is any compound that contains BOTH hydrogen AND carbon.
  Edit: Vitamins in general including absorbed acid are organic compounds because they contain both carbon and hydrogen atoms.
  Edit2- I left out a key piece of information. The carbon and hydrogen need to be covalently bonded as well not just part of the compound.
  
  Seeing that you claim this more than once, here is a simple link to correct this assumption: Wiki: Organic compound
  
  So adding anything to water would there-for make it organic…? I don’t think that definition works…

The word "organic" has a number of different meanings.
organic adjective (OF FOOD PRODUCTION)
not using artificial chemicals in the growing of plants and animals for food and other products:
being or coming from living plants and animals
...(skipping a few others)
organic adjective (IN CHEMISTRY)
(of a chemical substance) containing carbon
So the chemistry definition isn't the relevant one when applied to food. The "Carbon based molecules" definition isn't even the original one and it only applies in the context of science, not food.

Interesting question. I had to look up the definition of food, the story version is it's essential body nutrients.
You can synthetically derive some vitamins and things like that. But generally I can't think of anything other than salt and water that's not organic. You can start breaking down food into vitamins and minerals but that's not really the intent.
I know animals will chew/gnaw on bones to get some calcium, maybe that.
- Synthetic or not has nothing to do with whether something is organic or inorganic. That used to be the distinction 200(?) years ago, it is a bit outdated now.

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