>There's a difference between "meat", and grain-fed, antibiotic treated cow meat.

The meat used in McDonald's hamburgers is the same meat you would buy in the grocery store. Is it a super high quality cut? Of course not, it's likely made from cheap cuts of meat, but that's what you do when you're grinding it up for a burger.

>And last time I made bread, it didn't magically develop high fructose corn syrup or ammonium chloride, and yet, somehow it appears in the "bread" of a McDonalds hamburger.

Fine with the HFCS, but ammonium chloride is a common baking ingredient in baking. It's used as a nutrient for yeast and it's also used in medicine to acidify your urine.

>It goes without saying that the condiments are more or less by definition artificial processed foods. And let's not even get into the amount of sodium in this thing.

Tomato sauce is made from tomatoes, a vegetable. Sure it has a lot of salt and sometimes HFCS in it, but it's not "artificial". Do you consider homemade dill pickles to be "artificial" because of them amount of salt in them?

>You'll also notice there's basically no fiber in this thing (that's why it lasts so long).

The fiber content of something has nothing to do with why food lasts so long, it's the moisture content. Stuff that has no moisture will not support bacterial growth. If you take wheat and make hardtack with it, it won't rot at all, but that's natural isn't it?

I guess I don't understand this point. I completely agree that the meat you get at the store is sometimes as bad as McDonald's meat. McDonald's was just an example I threw out because lots of people eat it, I don't think they represent the evil center of all food or something. So I don't really hold "being available at the store" in very high regards. I personally go out of my way to purchase grass fed and grass finished meat (meat just labeled grass fed is usually grain finished, defeating the purpose). You probably disagree with me as to what constitutes real meat (I don't think antibiotic treated cows injected with hormones that don't eat their natural diet are real, but you may), but at the very least you can hopefully see that my position is consistent.

To bring it full circle, I am as suspicious about meat treated this way as I am of soylent. And when I look at the ingredients in a big mac and the ingredients of soylent, I see a ton of red flags in the former and not the latter. This does not mean I think soylent is amazing and McDonald's is terrible. It means I think neither is real food.

>Tomato sauce is made from tomatoes, a vegetable. Sure it has a lot of salt and sometimes HFCS in it, but it's not "artificial".

It seems the argument is increasingly just "nothing is artificial as long as it can trace part of its makeup to something real". "Meat is real meat as long as it comes from a cow, it doesn't matter what went into the cow". "Ketchup is real because a primary ingredient is tomato". Are strawberries dipped in chocolate with whip cream real food since its still "basically strawberries with some HFCS"?

...Sure I guess, but at that point my counter argument simply becomes "well many of the ingredients of soylent also trace their ingredients to such things, thus I guess it still holds true that they are equally fake/real." Maybe here we simply have to agree to disagree, or at least accept that this has become a largely semantic argument between us. I don't think taking a tomato, adding a ton of salt and HFCS, can be called "real" food with a straight face. Perhaps that is below your "reality" threshold however, which is fine.

> Do you consider homemade dill pickles to be "artificial" because of them amount of salt in them?

Well I certainly don't think someone who eats home made cheesecake is eating real food. In other words, artificiality has nothing to do with whether its home-made or not. Where does a dill pickle fall? I don't know, somewhere in the middle probably.

To sum up, if my doctor said "eat more real food", I would not think I would be following his advice by going to McDonald's.