Gamp's Law and Creating Food

According to Hermione in Book 7, the creation of food out of thin air is one of the five exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration. Perhaps it depends on how thin the air is, and whether one can manipulate the elements in thin air. Oddly enough, supposedly you can multiply food if you have some to begin with. Interestingly water can be conjured via the aguamenti spell. But perhaps even the thinnest air has traces of water vapor and it can be extracted from the surroundings. This presumes that the water conjured via aguamenti is indeed similar to molecules of H₂O.

Food might come in various ways. For example, at the beginning of Book 6, the Muggle prime minister recalls his first visit from Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic at the time. Fudge turns a teacup into a gerbil presumably via Transfiguration. This is an example of turning something inorganic into a living organic creature, which can run around. Presumably the gerbil could be killed and eaten as food – although in this case the prime minister gives the gerbil to his niece as a pet. There are other examples of what we might call inorganic to organic (or vice versa) transformations in the Harry Potter books. So why not just use Transfiguration to convert something into an organic creature, and then kill and eat it?

Here’s a hypothesis: Maybe Transfiguration has certain limitations. Maybe when you transform one object into another, it is only the outer characteristics that get transformed such that the new object is perceived to “behave” in the right ways (at least macroscopically), but that internally it has not changed. One might say that its elemental transfiguration (to use Gamp’s Law) has not truly taken place at least where an organic living object (that can provide nutrition) is concerned. This was my train of thought in a previous post where I postulated that Transfiguration or Conjuring is limited by the ability of the spellcaster to understand the underlying principles of the object being conjured or transfigured.

To continue with this line of thinking, perhaps an understanding of the organic nature of an object can permit the appropriate Elemental Transfiguration. If the physical nature of objects is built upon atomic and molecular theory, rather than Aristotelian alchemical (four elements) principles, then all that is needed is the development of spells that effect organic transformations. If aguamenti has the power to extract oxygen and hydrogen atoms from various sources and recombine them into water, or less dramatically simply siphon off water molecules from some other source, one might argue that there should be related spells that can do the same for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (sometimes called the CHON species).

Since food is simply made up of molecules with these elements, an understanding of organic chemistry should aid the spellcaster in creating such molecules through recombination in some way. Wood is an organic material, mainly containing the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (or CHO) – the same elements you would find in carbohydrates and fats. (Proteins have nitrogen too, and the occasional sulfur.) So let me make the same pitch as in my earlier post: To the wizard or witch reading this, I recommend learning organic chemistry as well as you can. Because when you understand the differences between this panoply of substances at the molecular level, you will be able to create food out of thin air! And if you then go on to learn Biochemistry, you could become one of the greatest healers of all time! You might even be able to live forever (if only Voldemort had bothered learning chemistry) and you would not need to create a philosopher’s stone!