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.

  • @Badass_panda@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • @blackbrook@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • @Badass_panda@lemmy.world
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        11 year 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.