All conversation requires some common ground. If you actually don't know what I meant, there's not much I can do to help you.

(Also, notice that "ordinary sense of" is followed by an explanation? I don't see why you'd need another explanation after that.)

The statements “gives” you information but that doesn’t “count” as you “getting” information.

It's literally true that I got information, but I didn't get information from it in the ordinary sense of "I parsed his words, and his words said something about X, so now I know the thing about X that is described by his words".

There's a difference between the information content of the statement, and the information that may be concluded from the statement in context. For instance, if I ask someone a question and he responds by snoring I may conclude that he is asleep. But I wouldn't describe that (non-figuratively) as "he told me that he is asleep". He didn't tell me that; he told me nothing meaningful, even though I deduced things from it.

Just like I know that snoring people are often asleep, I know that people who complain about "chemicals" often like organic food. That doesn't mean that either snores or statements about chemicals have any meaningful information.

Just the fact this person makes low-information statements about a particular subject gives me information about what he thinks. But I wouldn't count that as getting information from those statements.

I don't think "additive" is acceptable. It has the same problems. The point is that the original statement isn't communicating anything. I pointed out that it is no better than other statements that don't communicate anything.

In practice, the meta is that they are confused and don't have a coherent idea of things they don't want in their food, except for superficial elements like having long names or being something they heard mentioned on Youtube. You could start questoning them about the details of things they don't like, but 1) you'll just end up telling them that long names and Youtube are a bad reason to avoid something and 2) their original statement about chemicals didn't communicate anything useful.

It isn't wrong to ask them for details of what they don't like, but they could have just as well started by saying "I don't like bad food additives" and you could have said exactly the same thing. The OP is pretending that "I don't like chemicals" says more than it actually does.

The title question is a proxy for the thing I mean:

I think Cade Metz fails to qualify for those things. I don't think he is trustworthy, quotes accurately, or is truth seeking. And I certainly wouldn't give him any quotes.

If they're just using the word "chemical" as an arbitrary word for "bad substance", you have the situation I already described: the word isn't communicating anything useful.

But in practice, someone who claims that they don't want chemicals in their food probably doesn't just mean "harmful substances". They probably mean that they have some criteria for what counts as a harmful substance, and that these criteria are based on traits of things that are commonly called chemicals. When you tell them "wait, water and salt are chemicals", what you're really doing is forcing them to state those criteria so you can contest them (and so they can become aware that that's what they're using).

So don’t use the definition if it’s useless.

It's not just the definition that's useless. The phrase itself becomes useless, because if the only way to know what they mean is by asking "do you mean X", the original statement about not wanting chemicals in their food fails to communicate anything useful.

I'm pretty sure that would not disqualify most people.

Note that it's not being upset that's the problem, it's being selectively upset.

Also, as a man, I can't get social status by claiming I've cried myself to sleep anyway.

But that definition becomes useless if it isn't legible. The Boubas don't want chemicals in their food. If "chemical" means "harmful substance that I don't know how to specify", it's useless to say that they don't want chemicals in their food--how are they going to even deetermine that the food contains "chemicals" by their standard?

Also, the fact that they are even using the existing word "chemical" and not some phrase like "harmful chemical" implies that their definition has something to do with the characteristics of things called by the existing word, such as unfamiliar and long names. This is, of course, not a logical necessity, but people in the real world think this way, so it's a good bet.