"a food-hygienically acceptable substance": Grammatical syntax?
In a document (written by a native Japanese speaker), I see the following phrase that sets off my acceptability and grammaticality alarms:
a food-hygienically acceptable substance
Google shows only 130 or so hits for:
food-hygienically acceptable
some of which are like for:
keep the food hygienically acceptable
Which is fine.
But the others are all translated from Japanese, which makes me suspicious.
So my questions to other native speakers are:
Is the syntax of "a food-hygienically acceptable substance" grammatical? I can’t seem to extrapolate to other such A+NOUN+HYPHEN+LY ADVERB+NOUN phrases to test it.
Is there any more natural way to express this, such as:
Left-side modification:
a food-hygiene-acceptable substance
More grammatical, but still awkward.
Right-side modification:
a substance acceptable in terms of food hygiene
Solution 1:
"food-hygienically" is a compound adverb, which functions like a regular adverb. Sources say that they can be written as a single word (e.g. "overnight"), hyphenated ("in-house", "self-consciously"), or as multiple words ("early on", "upside down") - (sources: ThoughtCo, Capstone Editing [Australia]). A phrase such as "self-evidently stupid idea" or even "brain-meltingly stupid idea" has a similar structure but would be uncontroversial.
So grammatically it's ok, but elegance and easy comprehensibility are different things. It's fairly unambiguous what is meant, but it's perhaps not instantly comprehensible: the compound adverb "food-hygienically" is not common and requires thought to consider the relation of the two halves. Personally, I'd prefer something more explicit and without the long sequence of words jammed together, such as "a substance acceptable under food hygiene regulations". If the context is unambiguous, you could realistically drop the word "food" and say a "hygienically acceptable substance".