Salad Theory
saladtheory.github.io
saladtheory.github.io
> 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”?
My mums German potato salad disagrees
This is covered further down in the article where it's pointed out that one of the Merriam-Webster definitions is
>"A usually incongruous mixture : HODGEPODGE"
The author points out that Merriam-Webster actually has a looser definition of salad than they do, because the article is only considering edible things to count.
Also, I disagree - I don't think "fruit salad", or "chicken salad", or "egg salad" etc are "figurative" (not sure what you even mean by that), I would absolutely consider them legitimate salads.
Not saying I agree with the rest of the claims, but it is funny to think of a bowl of skittles as being a salad, and it's always a mindfuck to think about just how impossible it is to categorize every little thing into a neat little box.
I mean "figurative" in the typical sense: describing a thing using a word for a different thing in order to suggest a similarity between the two things. A fruit salad is fruit arranged similarly to how vegetables are arranged in a salad. A fruit pizza is a dish with a crust that looks similar to a pizza crust, topped with frosting and fruit in a way that evokes how pizza is topped with sauce, cheese, etc.
- 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.
But I do share the frustration regarding pedantry in mathematics, and I hate it when people mistake dictionary entries for attempts at rigorous definition.
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.
Or more likely i’m overthinking it and they’re just a way to have a funny argument with friends.
So I ask first to properly have Soup Theory before using it in relation of describing things like salads.
- 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.
> An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad.
Part of the appeal of the wedge salad is the crispiness of the lettuce. So if you improve it with more thorough mixing, you'd have to consume it immediately before the crisp is lost. I don't think this is incompatible, just a nuance.
This becomes more obvious with a layered salad -- layered salads seem designed to keep ingredients separate in the presentation container, but get mixed together in the transition to the plate or dipper.
- few things are better than a blue cheese wedge salad.
- A wedge salad is right on the edge. It's a traditional salad except that the lettuce leaves are not separated. But if it was anything else in that form factor, like replacing the lettuce wedge with a potato, that's not a salad.
I'm absolutely horrified by the way kids use "literally", but that definition has achieved critical mass and must be included in the dictionary.
The insistence on a single definition is where the silliness of the original article comes into play. There are obviously multiple definitions of salad; you don't have to accept all of them.
If one attempts to have a single definition stretched over all the meanings, then you indeed get a definition that is way too broad that includes soups and sandwiches, which is ludicrous. But it's quite common for a single word to have multiple senses, let's just go with that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
entire melon -> salad -> slush? -> beverage
with decreasing side length of the cut pieces.
So both the fixed structure from your definition (" Salads are dishes without a fixed structure") and solid/liquid definition don't feel really tangible to me. YMMV
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.
An untossed salad is an object which is like a salad, but that is not tossed. This means a salad must be tossed.
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.
Thus pizza, in Spanish, is not a salad, until about an hour after it comes out of the oven.
This goes to proves that you can reason your way out of everything.
When does a soup become a smoothie (or vice versa)?
Maybe we need to also first define smoothie.
You also have soups in cups. Is a gazpacho soup in a cup still a soup? Technically tomato is a fruit, so you got a cold blended fruit sauce in a cup, which to me is a smoothie.
And let’s not get started on cocktails, like the Bloody Mary. That’s just another smoothie.
You can add a bit of kefir to a potato-based salad, and it will remain a salad. But at one point it will actually turn into a cold kefir soup, which is a thing that exists.
Personally, I think it's the floating. As soon as first ingredient becomes buoyant (even partially), it's a soup.
Pedantry is an excessive, boastful, or annoying focus on minor details, formal rules, and trivial points of learning.
Mathematics is an excessive, boastful, or annoying focus on minor details, formal rules, and trivial points of learning.Sufficiently advanced Pedantry is indistinguishable from Mathematics
I think you can imagine a situation where you end up with a table named "Salad" (or "Salads", or maybe even "SALADS" if you're nasty). Perhaps you're building a database application for a restaurant or grocery store, or some sort of meal planner or nutrition tracker.
Salads are obviously Distinctly Different Things than Meats, Dairy, and Drinks, so those are separate tables. Except, invariably, you run into the exact pointless arguments being made in this article: you cannot actually define the boundaries of a salad, because, like almost every noun, "salad" is an address in conceptual space. It's a way of summoning a group of ideas into a conversation so that you can communicate, not a way of Doing Exact Math as CSMastermind eloquently pointed out in another comment. You can start at this address and adjust it with modifiers like "fruit" or "Caesar". You can move arbitrarily far: "I had a fruit salad for dinner, except the fruit was all fermented and smooshed up into a bottle. It was wine. I had wine for dinner."
So you end up with records that are kinda-salads and you don't know what table to put them in, and you also end up with wanting to say a whole bunch of the same things about Salads that you want to say about Pizzas and Sodas too. So you end up with both poor cohesion and high duplication. Your tables mostly share the same 12 columns and you don't know where to look for things.
"But I would never make a 'Salads' table," you say, "that's far too specific!". But you do: you make an Employee table, or a PcrTest table, or an ElectricalSubstation table. Or perhaps those should be more general: "Meal", or "Person", or "Analysis", or "Facility"! But now your SELECT results look like a checkerboard of NULLS and real values as the sub-definitions show up anyway. And even then, you still run into cases that somehow don't fit: we're making a lot of these kinds of Facilities, so we want it in the Facility table, but it's not a real facility, it's a template facility! You've weakened your definitions for not much gain.
And all of this is assuming you already know everything about the domain, but you don't! You're exploring, discovering, iterating, beta testing, pivoting. You make database tables by identifying the nouns that your SMEs use when the SMEs themselves can't fully define them, and then you get annoyed at the inalienable property of language that it is resistant to strict definitions, and briefly wonder whether we'd all be better off speaking Lojban. Then you wonder about abandoning this restrictive idea of "schema" and go NoSQL or key/value, until you realize that you still have a schema, it's just now no longer enforced or supported, and you go back to relational SQL with a few remaining key/value pair systems still jammed in here and there.
So you start from faulty assumptions, make choices you don't need to be making, develop an inflexible design, and end up having pointless arguments like the one in this article -- except instead of being recreational lunchtime arguments, they are ones that determine the failure or success of your business.
Stop defining tables based on the first nouns you encounter. Nouns do not work that way. You will never be able to define them. Instead, define tables based on statements you want to make about your entities. Every time you come across something you want to write down -- a person's name, a place's address, nutritional information, a SKU -- find a table for that. Keep things cohesive: Full Name and Address don't belong together, because many things have one but not the other. Stop trying to decide whether a given entity is a "Person" or an "Employee" or a "Salad" or a "Facility": you don't need to care! All you need to know is what you want to say about it.
This has a ton of design implications that could easily fill a textbook, but it does work. You can actually have a flexible database design that isn't full of NULL checkboards and the same 12 columns in every table. But you do have relegate these pointless Salad Theory-type arguments to the lunch hour, because you'll instead find yourself talking about actual useful things during design meetings.