Yes, it turns out that the English language is full of incoherent distinctions. Words mean radically different things in different contexts, have definitions that are not really self-consistent, and tons of exceptions that we have to memorize. And yet, we must make sense of it to navigate.

If I were a philosopher, or if I wrote dictionary entries, I might decide to spend the time to come up with a rather clever definition for "artificial". Feel free to come up with a definition yourself, if that's your fancy.

I think the underlying bugaboo is "untested", particularly when referring to something considered "fragile".

People trust traditional techniques of preparing food because they have proven successful at their intended goals. When you start messing with people's food, they become suspicious as to whether you know the full repercussions of what you are doing.

So the injection of a novel element is considered "artificial" - despoiling the "natural" -- e.g. time-tested technique, and possibly disturbing something fragile -- e.g. human health.

Similarly, people are quite reactionary when it comes to open spaces and nature because they see a system that appears to be in balance and has survived the test of time. They oppose altering the current state of affairs because they are sure some unintended side effect will screw things up.

On the one hand, it's laudable to have these goals, but if they used the standard language of conservatism, traditionalism, etc, they would be branded as reactionaries, so the spirit of the age is to invent new words like "artificial" and "natural" that are less loaded with politics, even though it is all just conservatism at its roots.