Salad Theory

I’m fine with their first consideration:

> A salad must be a mixture of greens.

The only additional realization you need is that things like “fruit salad” and “chicken salad” are using the word “salad” figuratively. There’s no reason to expect our definition of “salad” to cover figurative usage. After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?

I really love this, it’s what I want to see in HN. But I can’t resist joining the pointless debate:

- A primarily cooked dish, particularly if it is cooked all together or is served warm, is definitely not a salad.

- An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad.

- English speaking people add the term “salad” to a bunch of concoctions that are definitely not salads.

> Mathematics is the study of precisely imagined things. It's about imagining something so precisely that your idea of it is fully defined. There's no space for opinion or interpretation. Two mathematicians thinking about the same mathematical object, defined in the same way, are not thinking about two versions of it. They're actually thinking about the same object.

- Rob Miles

Any time I read something like this post, I can't help but think that it's people mimicking the language of mathematics because they don't understand its purpose. To them, math seems like pedantry, constantly obsessing about minor details that are seemingly irrelevant. When in reality, that obsession with full and complete definitions in math serves a purpose.

This discussion of salads serves no purpose. In fact, it's arguably meant to be confusing.

I love the amount of effort that went into this, and find it very amusing. I've had similar forays into defining sandwiches, ravioli, soups, and so on, but never in such meticulous detail.

But taking it seriously, a word like "salad" is best understood, IMO, as a family resemblance [0]: a group of inconsistently overlapping properties. Or, you could understand it functionally/pragmatically (a salad is what I order when I want a salad), where the meaning is not derived from an internal property but from the social system that produced it.

For salad or sandwich, it's all rather unimportant, naturally. But I do think taking this step back and questioning what it even means for an utterance to have meaning can help dissolve some serious and otherwise contentious philosophical issues. ("Intelligence" seems to be a rather relevant example.)

Mathematical definition is enchanting to those of us with an inclination towards abstraction. But just because it's a noun doesn't mean it's a thing --- or at least, not a thing independently of the speaker and their community of speakers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance

As non-soup eater I am strongly against use of term soup here. Surely soup also should be relatively strongly defined. And not used as adjective for wet. Clearly soups must have some water content level. Otherwise too many things would be soup. And those clearly are not soups.

So I ask first to properly have Soup Theory before using it in relation of describing things like salads.

Nice read!

I was interested in similar thoughts around definitions and scopes long time ago https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/4182/List-vs-Categ...

Something may look obvious to you unless you get into definitions (stage 1), discussions about definitions (stage 2), trying to get alignment on definitions (stage 3), and so on.

This is essentially just Ontology applied to mundane topics like salads:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

It might seem trivial when debating silly topics, but when you get to the actual structure of reality, debating where one thing ends and another begins is really interesting.

Salads are dishes without a fixed structure. You can randomly rearrange the ingredients without changing it into another dish. For example, a pizza is salad on top of dough, a burger is salad between buns, and a burrito is salad wrapped in a tortilla. But as a whole, pizzas, burgers, and burritos each have a strict, defined structure, so they aren't salads, they just contain a salad component. Additionally, anything made mostly of liquid by volume is a soup or beverage, not a salad.

Today I am especially grateful that I work with cool people.

Few human concepts have strict, definable "boundaries". Things might seem obvious at first ("I know it when I see it", as stated by the US supreme court). You can take a concept, move its seemingly obvious properties into the extreme, and observe how the boundaries become blurry.

What is a car? Four wheels? What if you move two of those wheels closer together until they almost merge into one. What is a country? etc.

I enjoy this kind of thing. I definitely take objection to their entropy argument though. A cheeseburger with like 5 ingredients stacked into layers is not in the same entropy universe as a salad with hundreds of little leaves and chunks of food in a big pile. Criticizing the cube model on the basis that eating the food can change the category seems a little silly when even they would admit that a salad eaten down to just a singular crouton is no longer a salad.

Ontological discussions aside, I’ll share out my recipe for one of my favorite variations of a Caesar that embraces its origins. It’s one my friends usually request I make/bring.

It’s composed of four main parts, made in this order: the the meat, the croutons, the dressing, and the leaf.

For the meat we’re making a carne asada. You’ll want a flank or a skirt steak, or anything thinner with good marbling. For the marinade use olive oil as the base. I generally do around 2 cups of olive oil for a larger serving. Don’t sweat the exact amounts for a marinade. Add around 10% Apple cider vinegar, 10% red wine vinegar, and 10% lime juice. Use garlic, cumin, black pepper, salt, smoked chipotle peppers (you can also find them in an adobo sauce which works great - skip the sugar if you use the adobo), two spoonfuls of sugar.

Blend all of it together heavily, then pour it over the steak. I like a smoothie blender for this as they tend to work better for these small batches. IMPORTANT: don’t wash the blender, we’ll use the remains each time to influence the subsequent thing. Marinate the steak for at least 2 hours.

Next we’ll make the croutons. Store bought and homemade croutons are very different. For the marinade add a full clove of garlic into our used blender, black pepper, salt, two spoonfuls of nutritional yeast, a thumb sized portion of Parmesan, and rosemary. Add oil so it fills in the gaps in the blender. The goal is a paste, not a liquid. Blend it up. Cut up the bread into slices, then tear it into chunks. The tearing creates better texture. Put the paste in a bowl, smear it all around, dump the bread into, and toss it so it’s coating all the bread. Put it in the oven on a low broil (grill for those in Australia). Careful as it can burn easily. Check it every minute til browns, toss it, then put it back in. Repeat til the outer shell is dry but the inner part is still squishy. They shouldn’t be wet. Remove and chill for 10min before adding them.

For the dressing, half olive oil, 15% lime juice, 15% white wine vinegar, 10% pepitas, 10% Parmesan. This is your base. Add an egg yolk, black pepper, a squirt of mustard. Blend it up, taste it, adjust as needed. I skip the anchovy for the Mexican vibe this salad has as I don’t think it resonates well, but by all means go for it.

Grill the steak high heat.

For the leaf any salad leaf will do, but add radish slices as well.

Toss the leaf and the dressing, top with crouts, steak, pepitas, and Parmesan. Enjoy. Should take you 60-90min of prep.

Points for “Salads are closed under addition”

I refer to the Spanish definition of "ensalada": La ensalada es, en términos generales, un plato que combina verduras frías - a salad is a plate which combines cold vegetables.

Thus pizza, in Spanish, is not a salad, until about an hour after it comes out of the oven.

You have to be able to toss a salad for it to be a salad, no? They tried too hard to make pizza salad…

Reminds me of the Every pizza place salad.

https://youtu.be/JgJUbmGDc6k?si=CvS6vuBU5R5JwoDg&t=10

Never thought someone would actually spend time applying math to salads and creating theorems out of them. Appreciate the effort put into this.

Yes, pizza, after intense and scrupulous reasoning, is indeed a salad.

This goes to proves that you can reason your way out of everything.

If a salad can become soup depending on how much dressing you add, where do you think the actual boundary is?

Yeah, sometimes a feature-rich salad just turns into a mess. Less is more with ingredients.

Appendix C is blasphemy against cuberule.

If you apply information theory to food and get some interesting results. https://github.com/lucianmarin/fit

The author might not be aware of it but there have been extensive discussions and work about such terms in the philosophy of language in the past two decades (and earlier). I've heard whole lectures about whether fruit salad really is a salad, and the sandwich examples, too.

In my opinion, geometric meaning theories capture the associated problems fairly well, for example Conceptual Spaces. In linguistics, prototype theory and related approaches have dealt with them since the 1970s. That is not to say that the problems are solved but in my opinion many problems come from an artificial focus on logical concept decompositions and the fact that language doesn't work that way.

My 2 cents as a former philosopher who worked in this area.

Gosh, people in comments are so annoying. I find all the efforts put in formulating a salad theory rather amusing, frankly.

I think there's a big problem with including an "untossed salad" in bounds. This is asking for trouble. Is an unbaked cake a cake? Obviously not. "Unbaked" is describing how it DIFFERS from a cake.

An untossed salad is an object which is like a salad, but that is not tossed. This means a salad must be tossed.

I'm surprised to not find the word "salt" anywhere in the page. "Salad" essentially means "salted". Other words like "salsa"/sauce, and sausage share the same root: salt.

With this in mind it's more clear to me what a salad is. First you have to understand that we are talking about food preparations. A salad is not just raw ingredients on a plate. It is explicitly a preparation. Most preparations are cooked, but a salad is merely salted, or sauced, which itself contains salt.

I don't think actual salt is necessarily required, but you do need something to "bring together" the ingredients into a salad. A balsamic glaze is a good option if you are avoiding salt.

An "Italian" from most sub shops definitely qualifies as soup after all the oil and vinegar. I almost drowned once trying to eat a Subway Italian BMT.

By this standard, I could call myself a vegetarian starting today. Haha

pedantry/ˈped(ə)ntrē/

Pedantry is an excessive, boastful, or annoying focus on minor details, formal rules, and trivial points of learning.