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How many ingredients does it take to call it a salad? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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My significant other ate cucumbers and onion with some ranch. I called it a cucumber onion salad. She says there aren't enough ingredients to call it a salad, because "it takes multiple ingredients". I pointed out she had three and asked what the minimum is. She refuses to answer so I ask Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it's a salad.

However, I like to think that dishes' ingredients aren't a taxonomic thing, they're a probabilistic thing. In other words, there's no such thing as "not salad" or "salad", only shades of saladness.

Serve it cold? Ok it's saladier
It's made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still
Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish
They're mixed together? Even more salad like
They've got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it's very likely a salad!

... and so on. To me, your SO'a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I think this is one of those words / concepts where one needs to invoke Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" idea. You're not going to find some exact set of criteria that define what people do and don't consider a salad. They instead have a "family resemblance".

Your probably idea is not a bad way of describing how that works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I know, I was being humorous but it is in fact the way most categorization works. Very seldom is it a taxonomy; the way we recognize faces, voices, shapes, etc ... it's all probabilistic.

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